We’re back! We’ve rolled out a big new update and opened up the servers again. There has been a lot of changes since our last update, definitely too numerous to list them all, but let’s have a look at some of the highlights...
New Classes
This update brings two new classes, the Dagger Knight and Siege Tank. Both of these are dual-stick classes and both bring new ways of playing the game. The Dagger Knight can pop a shield and dive in to do some quick short range damage. The Siege Tank can use its flak cannon to wipe bullets, or change into siege mode to get extra damage and a lot of extra range at the expense of being immobile.
Updated Class Unlock Progression
Since the addition of dual-stick classes, we’ve noticed a lot of players prefer to play these classes, and for many players they offer a more forgiving way to get started playing the game. So we’ve updated the progression of unlocking new classes, putting a focus on the dual-stick classes in the early part of the game. New players will always start with the Quad, but can unlock the plane-control classes as they progress.
Pilot Skills
When we first rolled out the new pilot skill system, we got some good feedback on the new system, but we weren’t able to get in skills for all the classes and equipment at the time. With this update you’ll find that we’ve rolled out almost all the skills, with just a few gaps here and there (sure to be filled in the coming updates).
This brings the total up to 185 skills, ranging from some that fire extra bullets, to others that let you equip weapons you wouldn’t normally be able to. We’ve also added the rank badges and class unlocks to the skill tree, so you can plan ahead a bit easier.
We’ve done our best to balance all of this while keeping it as exciting and fun as possible, but there are undoubtedly some weird and wonderful issues, so please let us know if you find any broken builds. You're also welcome to suggest new skills that you'd like to see; we're not done adding them.
Friends System
We’ve put in a lot of work to bring you a nifty new friends system. You’ll find the friends list has been completely revamped, so now you can see nearby players, friends, and players you’ve recently played with.
It should also be much easier to interact with these players now, teleporting or trading with them as you need. Along with this, we’ve also migrated the friends lists over to be stored on the server; unfortunately your current friends lists will get wiped with this update, but from now on they’ll be much more robust to any issues. Having them server-side means we can do some more exciting stuff with this in the future. Watch this space!
Conversation System
We’ve introduced a new modal conversation system. This is designed to give you a much richer lore experience - discover the story behind Steambirds Alliance as you play! It’s currently just in the tutorial and a few select places in the Rebel City, but it will get rolled out to more places in the coming updates.
Content Polish Galore
There has been oodles of content polish revisions and tweaks across the board. A very large percentage of units in the game were touched up and tweaked. Many of the dungeons also received some significant polish passes. There are way too many changes to list here, but we hope you like exploring the world with fresh eyes again!
Art
Art didn’t miss the polish train, also receiving its fair share of revisions and new visual effects. You’ll find many new visual effect and models in the game - hopefully exciting to discover again and witness. We also trimmed down many needlessly-high-poly models, which should help performance on lower end devices.
Lower Trade Fees
We’re greasing the economic wheels with a big reduction in trading fees across the board. Get busy trading!
Our goal is to eventually make the trading fees dynamic so that they never represent more than a small percentage of the total value of a trade, but we need a lot more users and data to do that, so for now we'll keep making adjustments manually as needed.
Controls
We’ve worked hard to polish the control settings and make them much more usable. We’ve unified many of the controls shared across dual-stick and plane-control classes, added some new defaults we think are slightly better, and give you the ability to bind modifier keys like shift and alt for actions.
Other
- The aiming line now shows your gun range
- Crafting workshop improvements, including categories to make it less overwhelming.
- Radar improvements, including highlighting players that did “rally to me” emote recently, to make teleporting to them easier
- Large bonus damage when a stun bullet hits a stun-immune enemy
- We’ve moved the website hosting
- Many other smaller changes, too numerous to all mention here
- Also probably a bunch of new bugs to join all the new stuff, but hopefully none that stop you having a great time!