Hello Riftbreakers!
We published a series of patches for The Riftbreaker Closed Co-Op Beta a couple of days ago, featuring some experimental changes in many areas of the game. Massive overhauls of the weapon and loot systems were a significant portion of these updates. These reworks are something we have been planning for a while now. The experimental nature of our Closed Co-Op Beta makes it a perfect environment to test and consult these changes with our community, whose feedback is invaluable to us. Today, we want to tell you more about this process. We will explain our philosophy behind the reworks, what the process looked like, and how we are working with our community playtesters to ensure we are moving in the right direction.
There's been a lot of testing going on lately, both in and out of the studio.
Let’s start by talking about the reasons behind these changes. The weapon system in The Riftbreaker has never been perfect. The lower-quality weapons were often underpowered, while higher tiers shredded through everything the game could throw at you. You could fire some weapons with seemingly no end, while others would run out of ammo after only a few seconds. Moreover, the weapon mod system was more complex than it should have been, with some mods being outright useless in the grand scheme of things. On top of all that, some of our guns simply lacked their identity and did not encourage players to try them out, as they were likely to already have better alternatives.
Co-Op on higher difficulty levels is going to throw some difficult Omega creatures at you. We want you to have an arsenal that is ready to tackle them.
We knew we wouldn’t solve these issues overnight, as the scope of the necessary work extended far beyond tweaking some numerical values in the weapons database. Clearly, the ammunition system, mods, and crafting also had to be improved. Based on the results of multiple gameplay sessions, we decided to examine each weapon individually and determine the proper course of action. We inspected each weapon, examined mod interactions, and asked our community on Discord for their thoughts and conclusions.
Working together is important - both when playing co-op AND developing it. This is why we pay a lot of attention to what our community has to say about the game.
One of our community members, wzysb, went above and beyond this call to action. Wzysb is a high-level player with extensive experience in strategy and action games and a deep understanding of the systems that make them run. He produced a 40-page document with his own analysis and thoughts about the weapons in The Riftbreaker. Wzysb’s conclusions offered us a different perspective and highlighted some issues we wouldn’t have considered otherwise. While we did not agree on all fronts, it was a great resource that helped us considerably.
Since we're giving Omega creatures more abilities, we can't leave our players behind!
Once we started testing in detail, we realized that the vast majority of the standard-level weapons were either fine or slightly underpowered. We boosted the weaker weapons, as we wanted to keep the damage output consistent across all variants. Please note that we are not going by DPS here, as this stat is often quite misleading. For example, the Flamethrower deals a little bit of direct damage, but the burn damage over time does the heavy lifting in its case. It is also worth noting that weapons are created with specific use cases in mind. A Lightning Gun will shred through Canoptrix and do very little against a Gnerot. Once we were happy with the baseline, we moved on to more advanced weapon tiers.
Tweaking weapon stats is not an easy task - here's just one screen of our Weapons Editor. The table goes much further, both horizontally and vertically, and each value has the potential to completely mess things up. Boy, am I glad I'm not in charge.
When you crafted higher-tier weapons, they received additional characteristics on top of their regular properties, such as piercing or multiple projectiles per burst. We quickly realized that these additional abilities had the potential to mess with the weapon’s power level by quite some margin. Certain combinations of stat rolls could double the weapon's damage output, but on the other hand, they could also increase the ammo consumption to very high levels. On top of that, the crafting screen DPS calculation would take into account the absolute worst and absolute best rolls, neither of which were actually possible, throwing the numbers off by a country mile. This situation needed some radical steps.
One of the complaints we often got was that the Corrosive Gun felt like a tool to destroy the magnetic rocks in Volcanic Zone. This is no longer true. More projectiles, more splash, more firepower will solve all your Volcanic Zone issues.
We decided to remove the extra characteristics from the craftable weapons to combat the inconsistencies. To compensate for that, we adjusted the base stats, like damage, rate of fire, and ammo consumption. Thanks to these actions, we removed the extreme outliers from the craftable range and ensured that the power level remained consistent across weapon tiers. The additional properties can still be added via mods, allowing you to still get truly devastating combinations. However, managing the power level of weapons stat-wise is not the only thing we have done.
No trickery here - this is a basic, crafted Advanced Laser, with no cheats or unlimited ammo, dealing with 40 Hammeroceroses. There is a delicate auto-aim going on to help you keep the beam on target and not lose the bonus damage.
We have also introduced some functional changes to those weapons, which didn’t see much use for one reason or another. Two great examples of this are the Laser and the Root Gun. The Laser used to grow in power the longer you managed to keep it on a single target. However, the bonus damage was immediately lost after you lost track of the creature you were firing at. We decided to change that. Now, the Laser will gain extra damage as long as you keep firing at enemies. You can switch targets freely, and as long as you keep hitting an enemy, you will retain the damage bonus. The laser is now very effective against single targets and groups of enemies. We hope you like it.
Two Superior Root Guns vs a pack of 50 Flurian Alphas. The weapon is much easier to use thanks to its high fire rate, piercing, and unlimited ammo. Perhaps a bit too good, but we'll iron that out at some point!
The Root Gun arrived in the game with the latest World Expansion but did not amass a huge fanbase. The leading cause was that the weapon utilized high-caliber ammo - a very valuable resource used by some of the most reliable weapons in the game, like Burst Rifle and Shotgun. The Root Gun simply did not deliver the same kind of firepower you could get from other weapons using the same type of bullets. To address this, we decided to take a radical step to improve its effectiveness - we removed ammo requirements from this weapon altogether and gave it a bit of a boost. This means that players can now use the Root Gun without worrying about running out of high-caliber ammo, making it a more viable alternative to other more established weapons in The Riftbreaker arsenal.
You can still do some crazy damage using weapon mods. Cluster Projectiles and a Minigun are a match made in heaven!
We hope it is pretty clear that the purpose of our weapons rework is NOT a nerf. It is not in the best interest of our players to decrease their firepower. The DPS stats on the newly crafted weapons will most definitely be lower than before, but that is mainly due to us correcting the calculation algorithm. The gameplay impact is negligible at best, while the weapon line-up is more straightforward for us to control. That last part is essential because The Riftbreaker 2.0 update will also include an overhaul of the loot system, allowing you to find unique, more powerful versions of weapons in the wild! We are committed to bringing you more exciting updates in the future, and we can't wait to share more details about the improved loot system in next week’s news.
You will get to know more about finding unique loot items in next week's article, stay tuned!
We hope you’re as excited about the upcoming updates as we are. If you want to try them out early, sign up for our Closed Co-Op Beta. We treat it as an experimental playground where anything goes, so you always have the chance to play with the latest developments and shape the game going forward. We encourage you to join our streams on Tuesdays and Thursdays, where we share the new developments and answer your questions live.
To sign up for The Riftbreaker Multiplayer Beta please fill in the following form:
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See you there!
EXOR Studios