Greetings, esteemed colleagues!
Welcome to the Status Report! As developers, we have big ideas. Big, big ideas. As scientists, you also have big ideas. Sometimes we like to take our big ideas and squish them together with your big ideas, and provide you with a big ol’ pot of idea soup.
To the point, we’re working on another Community Update, to be released sometime between now and the (October) Halloween update. We don’t have a specific date to reveal just yet, but you can kinda do the math here. You are geniuses, after all.
Let’s get into the soup - what kind of stuff are we planning for Community Update #2?
Difficulty Settings
While we won’t cover everything here, we will cover some big stuff. We are adding a system for setting an overall difficulty for scientists who want more punishment, while better balancing the lower end (easier) settings.
Does this mean we’ll finally be balancing Snipers? Hah, we’ll see.
Boom, headshot.
Ahem, we’re adding difficulty options to World Creation, and we’re adding a menu to edit your Sandbox Settings once you’ve already started a game (without having to mess with game files.)
The exact specifics of each difficulty level will be revealed later, but for now, you can assume it will be something along the lines of “harder difficulty means more enemies and faster AI response times.” This will include bringing back some of the more frequent and numerous spawns in areas that some scientists have reported felt a bit barren. We are confident we’ll deliver some pretty decent difficulty changes for those who want a serious challenge, as well as better balance to the Normal difficulty mode for those who don’t.
Scientists who want a challenge will probably want to bump their difficulty up to Hard right when the update drops.
Life In A Fish Tank
We’re working on more artwork for rare fish, as well as adding some aquarium-type items for displaying and preserving your favorite fishy friends. Glub glub.
Storing Your Stuff
Something that we’re also focusing on this update is more storage possibilities. We have heard the need, want, and desire for more ways to transport and store goods. There are a bunch of new things in the works, from Tier 2 Platform Carts to new ways to refrigerate your food. Here’s a look at some of those things - a work in progress, of course. And yes, those are headlights.
Extra Trinket Slot
We’re adding a second trinket slot. Accessory-motivated scientists are sure to be elated.
New Strength Perk
Heavy Weapons will be receiving some new utility. And when we say utility, we mean BIG CLUB ME GO SMASHY SMASHY.
Naturally, this will stop the Vending Machine from ever working, ever again. Therefore maybe only do this as a last resort, or to simply upset your fellow scientists. Either way, the option now exists.
Quality, Life, and Everything in Between
Quite a few additional quality-of-life changes (requested by YOU) are in the works as well. Here's a quick but non-exhaustive list of stuff we’re investigating or actively working on. Some of these may end up in Community Update 2 - some may arrive later. We’ll try our best to get them to you as soon as we can.
- Item/Slot Favoriting so items don’t get auto-stacked or sorted out of your inventory
- Job/Perk re-speccing
- Allowing clients to delete their character on a server to start over
- Fish traps
- More paintable deployables
- Additional respawn points/checkpoints between or at the start of Sectors
- Some new armors and weapons
- Less building/support restrictions
- Updates to a certain friendly trinket…
- FISH COMPENDIUM?
- And a whole bunch more!
Crushing Those Depths?
Goooood… very good… now give us your bugs! Through the in-game bug report form.
Thank you for all your work in the GATE Cascade Research Facility!
Onward -- to science.
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