Hello Riftbreakers!
We send hundreds of invitations to our Co-Op Multiplayer Playtest for The Riftbreaker every week. Our playtester numbers are growing steadily, and we’re delighted to see many of you sharing your thoughts about the game with us. There is no doubt that we are close to the finish line. Everyone who signed up for the closed beta will get access before we switch to open beta. Before that happens, however, it’s good to look at the past couple of months of development and talk about the significant changes and updates we introduced. We’ll also discuss what’s currently in development and what improvements you can expect in upcoming builds.
Thanks to the weapons and loot rework, old toys became new favorites - laser is a mainstay in some biomes now!
A couple of months ago, we implemented a complete overhaul of the weapon and loot systems. Not all the changes we made hit the mark in the beginning, but we made huge improvements thanks to your extensive feedback after playtesting the game. After the rework, many previously obscure weapons have become not only viable - they got a new lease on life by becoming an excellent choice for certain enemies and biomes. This led to much more varied and experimental gameplay, which we love to see. Getting better tech from loot drops also gave players a much-needed boost in the face of relentless alien hordes with Omega creatures at the helm. We are pretty happy with the results, but this is by no means the system's final iteration- we will continue tweaking all possible values to make sure the game is challenging, fun, and rewarding.
Being able to disassemble weapons, mods, and upgrades all in one go was one of the most requested features. This will save you a lot of time, clicking, and micromanagement.
Tinkering with entire game systems is not the only thing we have been working on. If you have dropped by our streams lately (Tuesdays and Thursdays, 3 PM CEST at https://www.twitch.tv/exorstudios), you might have caught a glimpse of our newest Quality of Life feature - the mass disassembly system. It is accessed through the inventory screen and allows you to select several items you want to get rid of all in one go. You can choose the items for salvaging manually or use one of the buttons that will automatically select all the items of the corresponding quality level. After picking the items to be dismantled, click and hold the ‘disassemble’ button to confirm your choice. This system lets you dismantle weapons, mods, and mech upgrade modules, making inventory management simple and convenient.
This is probably not the final version of the lobby screen, but we're getting there.
A significant increase in player numbers also came with requests for quality of life upgrades in other game areas, such as the lobby screen and lobby invite system. This was long coming, as our placeholder lobby screen was constructed using the GUI elements we already had available. It was always meant to be made from the ground up, and the influx of new playtesters increased the priority of this task. We created an entirely new screen, where you can set up the initial options for the multiplayer session, load a saved game from before, invite your buddies from the Steam friends list to join, and chat before the game starts. We are still working on some functionality upgrades.
Thanks to lag compensation gameplay feels smoother than ever!
We have also made significant improvements in the game's network code by implementing lag compensation in the form of prediction algorithms. We simulate as much gameplay as possible on the client PC, and verify the state of the game world with the server a couple of times a second. This way, you get immediate feedback on your actions, without the feeling of delay between your input and a gameplay effect. Almost all dynamic gameplay elements are included in the prediction algorithms - creature behavior, projectiles, player navigation, and much more. As a result of all this work, the game is comfortably playable even at high ping values, such as 200 milliseconds. That doesn’t mean we can rest easy - we will continue working on the connection's stability and the reduced data transfer. Optimizing data transfer and improving the game’s responsiveness is by far the most time-consuming thing that we are working on.
Emotes require testing, too! Here are our high-quality, very mature and fancy animations.
Apart from playtesting the Survival Mode in the Closed Beta build, we have conducted several Campaign Mode playthroughs internally. Some of those tests were regular gameplay sessions, exploring all possibilities available to our players. However, we have also conducted thorough destructive testing, trying to break the game in every imaginable way. We tried to connect to the game randomly, drop out of it in the middle of important sequences, reconnect during loading, and exploit all the possible avenues that could break the game. We found a lot of bugs that way and managed to fix the vast majority already. We still have hundreds of bugs in our backlog, but we’re getting through them one issue at a time. Re-working the entire campaign mode for multiplayer is a huge undertaking, and we know we can’t find all of the bugs by ourselves. As soon as we’ve fixed all of the critical issues that we know of, we’ll move to an open beta on the experimental branch.
Our dream is to see players working together on their bases, sharing responsibilities as they go.
As a side effect of our Campaign Mode testing, we have ensured that all biomes are playable, at least when it comes to the base biome mechanics. Thanks to this, we will be able to release new maps for the Survival Mode in the Closed Beta. In the upcoming weeks, we plan to release a series of updates that will add the missing Survival missions to the mission pool, introduce new biomes, and bring in new enemies and challenges. This will significantly increase the replayability of the Closed Beta for our playtesters and allow us to find and identify all the issues that might have eluded us during our own testing. You can expect us to send out more keys alongside these content updates!
Not to spoil anything, but we are really close to some huge news. If you don’t want to miss anything, join our newsletter to receive notifications about the latest news for The Riftbreaker and everything EXOR Studios. You can find the link below:
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Hang tight - good things are coming your way! We're incredibly grateful for your support and can't wait to share more exciting updates with you.
EXOR Studios