New Ships, connection issues fixed, new Tech Tree, new graphics, a better tutorial... so much stuff has changed!
So we say this a lot but it's been a while since our last public push... but we think this one's been worth the wait.
We've got a TON of new features, tweaks, polish and bug fixes in for your enjoyment, and I've detailed the most important & interesting ones here, along with plenty of gifs and screens.
Connection/Stability Issues:
We've been working hard in tandem with the guys & gals at Improbable (the company behind SpatialOS, which powers the online infrastructure we use to run Lazarus), and this new version of Lazarus should be a lot more stable for everyone, as well as a lot easier to connect to for most of the people who were struggling to do so until this point.
We really want to hear from you if you still cannot connect, we're only able to track down and fix the problems if you help us diagnose them... but we're confident most of you should be a-ok with this latest patch.
Player Death:
When you die, you will lose your currently equipped Systems, as well as any loot crates or resources you’re carrying in your ship. Anything you’ve safely Banked at a Xenotaph is permanent and will not be touched, but there’s a risk in staying out in the dark void of space for too long, farming Drones for goodies.
If you die, you can still re-quip, but you’ll need to hope the Shop you’re docked at stocks what you have unlocked (via Loot crates, see below). This loss of loadout also occurs on you quitting or logging out, but we’ve got plans to save your loadouts across sessions, as long as you don’t die!
PVP is no more:
Friendly fire is now OFF. You can still shoot at other players, and they will still block your shots (so you have to keep aware of each other when co-operating against enemies) but you will no longer do any damage to each other. Lazarus is meant to be a PvE game and even though we never rewarded players for killing each other, the fun of it meant people kept trying.
This way we can push people towards fighting enemies and claiming territory, and really work on polishing that stuff. We may well re-instate PvP in some form in the future, but for now… just go shoot the bad guys :D
3 New Ships!
3 new Ships for you to play with, and more differentiation between all 6 now in the game. They each have different amounts of each System slot, so for example the default Sheherazade-15 ship has 1 slot for each of Core, Special, Active and Passive Systems, while the much heavier and tougher Scarab has slots for 2 Special and 4 Passive, but 0 Core and 0 Active making it a really interesting ship to pilot effectively.
The Mantis - Named after its peculiar wing formation.
The Dragonfly - Definitely not a 'Durgenflee'.
Le Bug - Small, fast, and an annoyance.
The Knuckle - A fast, punchy but brittle craft.
The Sheherazade-15 - A thousand and one fights. The ship that started it all.
The Scarab - The scarab was emblematic of life & death for ancient Egyptians.
Tech Trees & Upgrading!
New Xenotaph Menus - Tech Screen – upgrade your systems here. How? By unlocking them via Loot Crates, and then using Lazarene (also from Loot crates) or Upgrade Tokens (automatically awarded from duplicate Systems) to upgrade them – there’s a max of 10 levels per System.
Loot Crate Tweaks:
Loot Crates now drop from everything you kill (enemy Drones or Asteroids of all sizes) a lot more often. They contain Ships, Skins, Lazarene and Systems. Plus we've got a snazzy (but still not quite finished) opening ceremony:
Enemies:
We’ve edited the HP of various enemies. Most notably, the Drone Fighter which is much more easy to kill now; it’s lots more fun.
More:
- Quadrupled the maximum Asteroid count.
- Rammer Passive System now has levels 1-10 of upgrades (the damage it prevents, and the damage it deals).
- Deployable Turret Special System now has levels 1-10 of upgrades (rate of fire, damage, its own HP).
- All Blaster Core Systems now have level 1-10 of upgrades (rate of fire, accuracy, damage, that sort of thing).
- We’ve temporarily dropped the Heal Beam, the Damage Beam, Smart Bomb and Repulsor Systems, as they’re not in a position we’re happy with. Rather than have something of poor quality we want to focus in on what we know is do-able for the short term. They will certainly be reintroduced sooner rather than later.
- We’ve had a big visual overhaul. Everything now 90% done in terms of visual style, with all ships and asteroids - planets too – stepping a lot closer to the kick ass concept art and character art we’ve been working on. It’s somewhere between a Western cartoon and Anime, without being overtly ‘like TV’ or ‘retro’. Hopefully you like it - here it is on the giatn Drone Carrier:
- Tied to this, and on the same day, we addressed the bloom and lighting in-game, so it’s much clearer where you are and the various pyrotechnics don’t make the screen unreadable. We’ll be rolling this, and the other visuals tweaks, across all menus in the game very soon.
- We’ve implemented a bunch of tweaks to the Tutorial. Now you have to kill fewer enemies, destroy fewer asteroids and collect fewer resources to progress. Makes it a LOT simpler and quick to get through.
- Tons of metrics added so we can track things like how often players die to asteroids, or to enemies, or how many resources you pick up. All anonymous of course.
- We’ve added a new screen to the game, right after our lovely logos, explaining where we’re at and getting you some nice hot links to the Discord and our Twitter so you can talk to use about the game some more.
- Players will now spawn spread across the world on first entering the game. After that, you’ll respawn close to where you die, but this is an important step to getting the first few minutes and hours of the game in line with the flow we want to establish.
- Glob Walls in their hard state now have a new mesh, with straight line detail that more closely matches the Xenotaph’s shells.
- Fixed the boost trail (looks like we originally wanted now, with lots of cool particles zipping past) to give a better sense of speed.
- Improved the hit fx from Blasters.
- No more Missions, until we have a thorough re-design of that whole system. There’ll be more features being dropped temporarily as we get close to Early Access launch – we want to trim anything that is not a) absolutely critical to the game, or b) already brilliant.
- Tons of work done in the background on the Lazarus Wipe, which will be fully re-integrated in a future update. Won’t be long to wait!
- Before this update, you could teleport/warp jump into solid objects. This would be bad. Now however, we do a few things to make sure that doesn’t happen and if it does, you’re still able to move and get out of there and play as normal.
So there you go, a pretty giant update that we're really proud of. We hope to get anothe rone out this side of Christmas, so see you soon - and until then, hop into the game and tell us what you think!