Hello Martians,
It has been a long time since our last communication, we acknowledge the radio silence and lack of updates since the new year. We have been working hard on a couple big items… but we couldn’t share the news with you until now.
Around one year ago we started preparations to bring Mars onto additional gaming platforms and around six months ago we reassigned a big chunk of our developers to the task of porting the game to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
But there was a clear directive to keep working on PC in parallel and make sure that all versions of Memories of Mars share the same code and feature-set. As a result of this direction the PC version benefited from a constant flow of optimizations, Quality of Life improvements and new features required or intended for the console version release. We even have full controller support for PC players now!
We've come a long way, so , so here is a small recap of the past year:
We completely redesigned our UI system to work better and faster both using keyboard and mouse or a control pad (on both consoles and PC).
We optimized and completely reworked 75% of the game's assets and code since we started this secret journey last year! This helped us optimize the minimum requirements to play the game and makes it accessible to more players. We still have a bit to go on the optimizations, especially on Player-Made Buildings, but we will keep working on those improvements.
But, life in Mars is not a walk in the park, we also had some setbacks that delayed our work quite a bit. We were forced to replace the backend of our netcode twice in the recent months. First away from Steam to a Third-Party Library and then, as we encountered unexpected performance issues with the Third-Party Library (remember those disconnection issues we had two seasons ago?), to our own in-house system.
This system is not feature-complete yet, but we are also still working on it.
As we approach the final stretches of the console porting, our coding team is spending most of their time polishing and fixing critical issues to secure the game release on both Steam 1.0 and consoles. Our game and level design teams are taking the feedback you offered over the last few months to fully rework game balance, like enemy performance, with many new enemy variations, and new loot distribution throughout the game. You will also notice with the new 1.0 version that we have spent a lot of time improving the rendering of the world, VFX and audio across many parts of the game.
Beware the new rocket scuttlers!
As you see the focus of the last push into 1.0 has been improving the experience over adding new untested content. But this doesn’t mean there will not be new additions, of course.
We've added a new "Chemical Processor" device, it will replace the Demolition Workshops and take some functionality from the Laboratories. It will also integrate into our improved Deuterium extraction system by providing "Synthetic Fuel" for the ice area extractors that will provide Deuterium in just a few minutes. This shifts a lot of the system out of the PVP zone, which should reduce the risk for smaller alliances and solo players to get the end-game resource, while making the whole process more interesting in general.
Another new feature is the "Mission Reward Tracker", which will be awarded on completing the final protocol of sending the Memories of Mars back to Earth. It will lead to stashes containing high quantities of FLOPs and high-grade items and schematics. We have also made the mission repeatable, so you can launch the Memory Capsule again and get a new Reward Tracker each time.
The 1.0 version will contain changes to nearly every area of the game because of this we have gone with the player requests asking if we could wipe once again for the full release to "clean the slate". With this in mind we will wipe all servers for the official 1.0 release to give everyone a fair chance again to secure their survival on Mars. There are currently no further wipes planned. They will be triggered only if there is a technical need that makes it mandatory. As a side note, we are also removing "cross-server hopping with the same character" with their flops and skills. Therefore server-hopping and quick domination of servers of bigger alliances should be much less of a problem.
When all is done, we will release this new and improved version of Memories of Mars as our 1.0 Steam version and will leave Early Access. We are looking to update the new game on March 5th, to give our EA community the first chance to experience it. The Official launch of 1.0 coming out of Early Access will be on March 12th along with both the PS4 and XB1 versions.
We want to thank our community, the new players and the ones around since Season 1 alike: You helped shape the game we have today and you made it possible for us to work continuously on the game for the past two years of Early Access. Memories of Mars would not exist without you!
So thank you very much and best wishes,
The Dev Team