In our Gamescom streams, we announced Avorion’s first DLC, “Black Market”. Alongside the DLC there will also be a huge free update. Now, we want to shine some light on what’s coming alongside the DLC.
We put a lot of thought into the update and invested a lot of work to improve Avorion and to offer more content and features. In order to clean up some misconceptions about which features will be free and which will be part of the add-on, we’ve created a small summary for you.
Playing Together
First things first: All players will still be able to play together, even if some of them own the DLC and others don’t. Also, everybody will have access to a lot of the DLC content while they play with somebody who owns it. For example, the big Convoy Event can be played by all players on a server, as long as somebody who owns the DLC starts the event.
Docking
Ships can now dock to other objects and take them to wherever you desire - as long as the owners of said objects don’t disagree. Clever captains are now able to steal take containers to safety and they can even have stations open them to see if there is anything of value inside. You can move your own stations or those of your friends, and dock ships or asteroids to your craft and do hyperspace jumps with them.
Controlling Ships
You will now have the ability to interfere with illegal trade and even profit from it. If you catch somebody smuggling illegal goods, you can inspect their ship and maybe earn some bribe money.
Legendary Weapons
Starting with this update, bosses will begin to drop newer, better, awesomer, legendaryer turrets. We went a little crazy on some of those - and would like to apologize in advance.
Performance Improvements
We’re aware that Avorion may require a lot of performance on some multiplayer servers. Of course, we want all of you to be able to play without lag. That is why we reworked the server backend engine. For you as players, this means: If there is a single laggy sector with a lot of action happening inside it, it will no longer slow down the entire server. As long as you’re not inside the problematic sector, you can continue playing without being bothered.
But please remember that Avorion is not an MMO, and just because you can increase the number of players in the server.ini, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a good idea.
Bugfixes
It is our goal to squash all bugs in the game so that you can have as much fun as possible. You as a community help us daily to improve Avorion by sending us a lot of bug reports, and we’ve been busy fixing those. We won’t be listing them all here (we’re still fixing as I’m typing this text), so you’ll find the list of fixes in the patch notes. By the way: bugs that we fixed because of a report from the community are marked with [UBR] (User Bug Report).
Many Small Features and Quality Of Life Improvements
We want Avorion to be fun for both new players as well as veterans. That is why we added tons of small new features and QoL stuff, such as improving the Strategy Mode to have better camera controls, asteroid fields have been visually improved and we’re allowing you to assign icons to ships. Those changes will also all be listed in the patch notes.
Your Wish is Our Command
Okay, but on a more serious note: We care a lot about your feedback and we try to add as many of your suggestions as possible to Avorion. Sadly, it’s sometimes not possible to include everything people wish for since some things simply contradict each other or are not compatible with our vision of the game. However, we are working on implementing some of the most requested features:
- Torpedo launchers that shoot straight ahead
- Improving the AI in several different contexts
- Edge blocks for crew quarters
- Ships share their scanner data
- Better RTS mode controls
- Scripting API requests (for modding)
… and more!
You can suggest features and vote for them here: https://forum.avorion.net/index.php?/forum/8-suggestions-idea-voting/
Server Performance Statistics
We’ll continue supporting our server hosters, so in addition to regularly adding new features servers now log statistics about the their performance. Those include information like the number of players that are logged on at a time, storage used, CPU and much more. This way, hosters can see how their server is running and act accordingly.
Outlook: What happens after the DLC?
We saw from some reactions here that we gave a somewhat wrong impression with the DLC announcement. We will, of course, continue to make and publish free updates. The next big update after the DLC will be a free update again, and it will have a similar scope as the DLC. But we’ll give you more info on that later down the line. For now, we want to concentrate on finishing the current update!
By the way: Features that are highly relevant to fights or PvP (ie. things like Stealth) will never be published in a paid DLC but will always be available to everyone for free.
That's all from us for now! We hope we could clean up some misconceptions around here. Now we'll get back to the update! See you soon!