Ahoy Captain,
We've released a new Major Update, our first since leaving Early Access. It's titled "Blade of the Assassin" and you can read about all the exciting new additions below.
Your saves from the full release version of the game will work with this update, as will those on the recent Beta Branch update from November.
Here's all the cool new stuff:
Second Combat Campaign
Our original combat campaign was a popular game mode from our very first Early Access release. Since then we've added many more environmental modifiers, so we wanted to bring all those together into a new combat campaign.
The original had randomised ports and the maps were random-within-groups, which meant that RNG could have a massive influence on a particular run.
We wanted this new one to be slightly different, so while there are still ten battles with up to five port visits for you to deliberate over, this time the ports stock all weapons and upgrades all the time, and the combat arenas are in a set order, so you can plan your runs and try different approaches in battle.
Like all our game modes, the story has some cross-over with the main campaign. It focuses on the mysterious Far Haven Assassin's, and for those people who have explored some of the farthest reaches of the world you'll gain insight into a character you meet.
More Ships
We've added six new vessels for you to fight against and capture their blueprints.
We've chosen ship classes that had slightly fewer variants than others, so these cover the Schooner, Brig, Frigate, Corvette, Galleon and Man O War classes.
New achievements
There are two new achievements you can get, both related to the new combat campaign. The first can be obtained by winning the final battle, while the second is a slightly tougher challenge.
The vessel in the final battle is one of the new ships we've added in the update. It's called the "Fireblade" and is named after our studio. You can only find it in the final battle on this game mode - so the achievement relates to capturing it's blueprint.
Remember that you cannot obtain blueprints for ships that are of a higher class than yours, and you start the campaign with a Warship. So you'll need to save enough money to get a better ship, make it to the end and capture it intact. Needless to say it's intended as a tougher challenge ;)
Japanese & Chinese Testing
Our Japanese translation is about 90% complete, while our Chinese translation is about 40%. We've put these in the game so that they can receive testing from our community, so if you find any problems please report them on our Translations Steam sub-forum.
Once these languages are 100% complete we'll mark them as officially supported, but until then please consider them as work-in-progress.
Other Notable Updates
There's a lot of minor bug fixes and other improvements, and you can read the full list in the patch notes here.
There are a few noteworthy additions we wanted to call out:
- If there is an environmental modifier in combat it will now be displayed as an icon with tooltip on the middle-right of the combat scene.
- Enemy loadout information is now displayed over the enemy section display, so hover the mouse over individual sections to see what weapons and upgrades they have. This ties into visibility rules, so if you can't see the section health, you won't be able to see their loadout. Either get closer or purchase an Advanced Crow's Nest to gain better insight into enemy vessels weapons.
- We wanted to give more reasons for engaging in faction battles, so there are a few changes with this system:
- Defeating a Cult Kraken Boss will now reward you by removing a random negative mental trait.
- Defeating faction pirate ships now reduces wanted level. Handy for if you find yourself pursued by bounty hunters, low on money with no floating outposts about.
- Ports in maps under faction control will now have a small price penalty.
- We've slightly increased the costs of the last four ship classes as a lot of people were maxing out everything too early.
- There's also two new monologue images in the original combat campaign!
As 2019 winds down, Adam, Alex and I will be taking a well-earned rest - but fear not! Early 2020 has more cool things in store, including Italian, Japanese and Chinese translations plus some other things that we can't quite talk about yet, but as soon as we can you'll be the first to know :)
Thanks for the support,
The Abandon Ship Crew