Distant Star: Revenant Fleet is moving into Beta today, which means our focus will be on performance optimisation and content balancing. We would expect this process to take us through to the end of March – that said, the nature of the work that’s ahead of us may mean that might change!
Alpha was very much about presenting the concept of the game to players, letting you play around with it and listen to what you had to say. It’s been really useful for us and we’re still working through the massive list of feedback and feature requests! That’s a good process because feature requests are very black and white – we can add them or we can’t (and there’s generally a good reason for either option).
Beta will work differently because we’re not dealing with black and white features – we’re dealing with pretty subjective aspects of gameplay which everyone will have an opinion on. To give an example, there are two entries in our current feedback list:
- Missions are too long
- Missions are too short
Both are valid points of view – our job is to find out the thinking behind those opinions and present a solution that works for everyone. We hope you can join us in this process.
What we’re doing in Beta
Combat Balancing – the current update improves the resilience of ships, but there’s more to be done. We are adding a lot of new attachments which will give you more abilities in combat. In addition we’re looking at ideas relating to targeting and target prioritisation and combat in general.
Performance Optimisation – our team are working on improving the general performance of the game.
Mission Flow – we are looking at how missions are being played and how we can improve the experience of each playthrough.
UI & Usability – we’ve added more tooltips with the most recent patch, but we’ll also be looking at ways to improve how the game is played in general.
Rewards / Shops – we’ve had a lot of feedback about how mission rewards and shops work. We expect this to improve as we add more attachments, but we’re still happy to take on board other suggestions.
So what we’re going to do is to open up discussion on key areas of the game so you can let us know what you think (feel free to start your own discussion on our forums or the Steam community as well). We’ve updated the Development Roadmap with link to main discussions and info on what’s already been done.
Many thanks to everyone who was with us throughout Alpha and we hope you enjoy how the game progresses through Beta.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/335830