Time for another update!
We're proud to announce that the feature development for the Alliances update has finished! This means that we'll go into testing soon, after we did some internal testing as well.
The reason why this update took so long was that we had a lot of features that fit thematically into the update. There were just too many things that we wanted included in the update, so we thought "yeah, that one would be quite cool, too!" leading to a never-ending stream of cool ideas and features that we wanted to ship with the update, delaying it further and further.
We have all the most important features in and we've decided that now it's enough and we'll just ship it so you won't have to wait any longer. This also means that there are a few features that we initially wanted to include that didn't make it. But we'll release them in future updates.
These are the features (roughly) that will make it into the game with the update. A more detailed list of these will be posted with patch notes once the update goes live on the beta branch.
- Alliances, ie. player-founded factions, similar to guilds/clans in other games
- Steam Workshop support for ship and station models
- Co-Op ship steering of alliance ships
- Out-of-sector simulation for player ships and stations
- Improved server performance (less lag, less memory consumption)
- Whole Ship modification, ie. upgrading materials, scaling, rotating, modifying internal blocks
- UI improvements, searching on galaxy map, filtering in inventory
Future Plans
In the future we'll most likely do smaller, but more regular updates again. We tried an experiment with this update as we thought that huge content updates might be somewhat more impactful, but we realized that while it made development easier, it didn't help you guys a lot. So we'll be moving back to the system where we'll release smaller updates, but a lot more regularly.
We've got a few updates planned already, not necessarily in that order though. I'll give you a quick description on what we've planned in these updates.
Combat and Stealth
We want combat in Avorion to be more exciting than just flying in front of each other, shooting at shields and seeing that my firepower is slightly stronger than the enemies shields so I win. We'll add more specialized weapons that will be capable of destroying or bypassing shields a lot better, making shields a lot less overpowered, completely necessary thing. But don't worry, you'll see what you're up against so you can prepare for a fight against an enemy that won't care about your shields.
Fighter Rework
We'll rework the way fighters work. Right now they can be very strong in terms of firepower, but they die off very quickly, making them nearly unusable. We want them to be a strong alternative to turrets, that's equally strong and just works differently. This includes easier replacement of destroyed fighters and their pilots, as well as specialized weapons against fighters. And customized fighters. This is actually something we initially wanted to include in the Alliances update (since it would fit in perfectly) but we realized that this is easily a week's worth of work, so we'll ship it in a separate update.
Okay great, but when?
Now that we're done with all the features we want in we'll do some more internal testing and if everything goes well the update will hit the beta branch by the end of next week.
Thanks for reading everybody, and stay tuned!