Welcome Back Champions!
A month ago we launched Warped Universe into Early Access, and it's been a hell of a ride since. We’ve always had a vision for this universe but a game like this only truly comes alive when players step into the servers. The response and feedback, both positive and negative, has really helped guide us and inspire us on what needed to be fixed and improved, and what was connecting most with players. The Warped Universe is a meta-driven game that reacts and moves based on players, and seeing it finally breathe is an amazing feeling for the whole team.
Throughout this month, we’ve hit over 100 reviews, and we’ve read and digested every single one of them. Some people put massive amounts of detail and effort into them to point out what they liked and didn’t, and it’s been incredibly helpful for us in getting these patches out. We have a huge list of things to do, but sorting the list is always the hardest part. Thanks for your honesty and giving the game your time.
Our entire goal this month was to take feedback and update based on it. Thanks to your feedback and bug reports, we pushed out 5 major patches in 30 days. The community's active presence in our forums and Discord has been the driving force behind the game's positive momentum.
Month 1: What we built together
We squashed a lot of bugs; but we also actively reshaped and implemented features based on your direct input:
True Control: We completely rebuilt the keybinding system to offer fully customizable controls for both real-time and turn-based modes.
Visual Comfort: Added customizable FOV settings for both ground and space gameplay to combat motion sickness and improve awareness in both real-time ground and space.
Expanded Universe Mechanics: Introduced Graviton and Lumen systems, allowing you to earn powerful new Psionic skills and specialized Echo Suits through faction missions.
Progression Overhaul: Fine-tuned the progression of the season map based on player feedback, introduced high-stakes Void Sieges, and streamlined reward loops (like the 5-for-1 Spark and Core upgrades).
QOL Polish: Completely overhauled sorting systems for inventory sparks, added drop-down UI selectors, and re-balanced early-game turn-based combat to make it less brutal for new players.
Balance: Lots of iterations here in difficulty modes, rewards and weapon damage (both player and AI).
Content: New asteroid ground maps and dynamic location based skyboxes added to Residuum missions.
Note: You can read up on the granular details of everything we've shipped in our patchnotes here:
https://www.warped.games/change-log/warped-universe-patch-notes
But now that the critical fires are out and the game is much more stable, it’s time to level up. There are two clear areas that have been pointed out for making the game a much better experience that have aligned clearly with our longer term vision.
1. A Total Character Animation Overhaul
A lot of you have been honest: the movement feels clunky. Running, jumping, interacting feel dated. The animation system is what we started out with in our very early concepts, and we had a game to build. So we never went back to updating it. But the longer we went, and the more the game itself grew, the more the animation system stood out as what most needed an update. We have had something in the works on the side for a while, some people have been lucky enough to see demos in the past, but now we are fully engaged in bringing it forwards.
We are well into a massive, ground-up overhaul of character animation systems. There are thousands of combinations of animations that have been implemented and replaced. This is the kind of work that stays quiet in the patch notes for a while, and then suddenly makes the whole game feel better to play.
I have to say… low-gravity maps look AWESOME with the new movement. Jumping between asteroids has never been so fun until now. We can’t wait to show this off.(-Adam)
2. The Big One: Co-Op Multiplayer
Warped Universe was always envisioned as a shared experience, from the evolving solar system, shared progress and buffs, and also co-op missions. Holding the line against a Void Siege or exploring the Season System Map is simply better with a crew. Co-op is our next major milestone.
This however takes a lot of time and testing.. It brings a TON of new stuff to fix and sort out. It completely changes game direction, mission pacing, networking loads, and balance. If we rush it, we will break things that already work. We are doing the heavy lifting now to roll it out safely in phases, starting with real-time modes first.
3. Fighting Repetition: More Maps, Missions, and Variety
A lot of you have also said the game can start to feel repetitive after a while. Addressing this is more content work rather than deep engineering, so we can continue working on this as we also implement the above engineering work.
We’ve already added new maps this month to address the feedback. We created new low-gravity asteroid maps for Residuum missions, along with making the skybox and lighting reflect where you are playing on the solar system map, so now no matter where you play on the map, it will look different, and the closer you are to the sun, the larger it is in the map. And our Pylon ground maps now actually show the build state of the Pylon, so you can see what’s still missing, like a roof that hasn’t gone up yet. The world reflects the work everyone is putting into it.
We also made planets more dynamic while they are being printed and evolving. Now, facilities on locations of the planets that are being built by Residuum collection will be dynamic. If the facility is on an area that is not printed yet, it will be in a “birthing” state, where it is in the early stages of planet creation with rocky terrain. Facilities located on sections that are printed will have the environment reflect the final state of the planet. It used to only change once the planet is 100% completed, but players didn’t want to wait until then to see it, and now players can experience the planet evolving as they jump into various missions.
Along with new maps and environments, more mission types and a ton of new NPC dialog and lines are being recorded right now to guide you in new missions. We want it to feel different and varied as you play.
Another addition we’re especially excited about: we’re bringing ground missions to our explore maps. Right now, Explore maps are all space flight, but ground is where most of the players spend their time besides the hardcore pilots, so exploring progressed slower than other mission types. Putting ground missions on the explore maps brings discovery back to where you actually are, and more low gravity ground missions are always fun.
What This Means For You
Because our team is heavily invested in these two massive engineering upgrades, you will see fewer "new feature" drops over the next few weeks. Quite frankly, putting out 5 patches in 4 weeks was a lot, and included a ton of testing time as well. We want to spend the time working on these big new features. However, our daily commitment to hotfixes, crash resolution, and balance tuning remains exactly the same as day one.
Thanks again for jumping into the Warped Universe with us. We've loved every second of it.
Please keep the feedback coming as you play. Let's continue to expand this system and crush the ever-relentless Void!
-The Warped Games Team