Hello Riftbreakers!
We have a lot of great news for you today. Let’s kick things off with the most important one: The Riftbreaker will be released in fall 2021. The game is very close to reaching the ‘feature complete’ status, which means that our internal development build is playable from start to finish with just a few functionalities left to be finished. We are currently focusing on filling the game with final content and balancing the final game mechanics for the campaign and the survival mode. You can see some of this new content in our latest trailer!
Ready for more news? Great! The Riftbreaker will be released simultaneously on PC, Xbox Series X|S consoles, and PlayStation 5. Our initial plan was to release console versions at a later date, after the PC release. Thankfully, the power of the next-gen consoles has changed our minds - they are able to handle The Riftbreaker with all its features with minimal changes and optimizations, reducing the required amount of work. In addition to that, we will be releasing physical, disc versions of the game for both Xbox and PlayStation thanks to our partnership with Maximum Games. Box copies of the game will be available globally on day 1.
Did you really think we’re done with the news? Not a chance! We are also releasing a huge content update for the closed Alpha build of The Riftbreaker. It’s one of our biggest updates yet, introducing the new research tree and a complete balance shakeup. You can read the complete changelog at the end of this article. As always, this is accompanied by a new wave of Alpha invitations. Check your Discord messages to see if you got one! The Prologue version of the game will receive its update at a later date. We will also have some extra opportunities for you to get Alpha keys, so if you haven’t joined www.discord.gg/exorstudios, you definitely should do so!
Changelog Alpha 5, April 22, 2021:
Features:
- Completely redesigned research tree with new inventions, new upgrades, and new weapons (over 250 research items instead of the previous 60). More info in the articles here and here.
- New creature species added to survival: Bomogan, Gnerot, Baxmoth, Kermon, and Krocoon. They are now included in survival attack waves and mix things up by a lot!
- New types of towers have been added to the game. You can now build and use rocket, plasma, laser and minigun towers. Oh, and there's also the heavy artillery - 2x2 size, shoots nuclear shells. You're welcome.
- Vegetation lifecycle has been introduced. The plants that get cut down will grow back over time. This makes plant biomass power plants more viable even without access to flora cultivators.
- The First version of mech upgrades added to the game. There are lots of modules you can now research and install in the Mecha-Suit. They grant various bonuses that are also randomized.
- Added a penalty for player dying. Upon death, the player now drops equipped items based on the difficulty level. The player can then pick their items back up from the ground.
- Higher levels of HQ added to game - 5, 6, 7. These are required for downloading and researching advanced technologies.
- Added steathComponent support. It allowed us to introduce invisible units and also give Mr. Riggs items that engage an invisibility cloak.
- New effects for the geo scanner - it can now also detect enemies hidden underground. It will flash red instead of blue and play a different sound if that happens.
- DamageSystem: add DamageEffect::REFLECTED. You can now install new armor modules in your Mecha-Suit that will deal a portion of the damage you take back to the attacker.
- Save system has been refactored. Saves take up less space, they are more robust and include a screenshot for easy navigation in the menu.
- Particle effects now scale with damage. More damage - more boom.
- Added support for damage resisted status. Creatures with elemental resistances will take a % amount less damage, according to the resistance value.
- Proper display of disabled grid based on building exclude terrain types. What this means is - if you can't build somewhere, you will immediately see why because of icons on the building grid.
- Bestiary screen added - more information in the article.
- Added new music - the adventure playlist.
- Added Ribbon System - it allows us to create more aesthetically pleasing energy trails (eg. like the one in the sword attack).
- New and better attachments with level numbers have been added to a lot of buildings.
Changes:
- Reworked Survival mode difficulty
- Big weapon balance iteration
- Rebalanced resource drops from monsters and environmental objects
- Rebalanced crafting costs
- Crafting of consumables is now manual instead of automatic
- Handheld shield item and forcefield item category removed. Forcefield stat has been added to armor properties.
- Repair items now have a much longer cooldown. This nerf is offset by adding many items that have regenerative properties.
- Geothermal vents are now more visible on the minimap.
- Minigun - default piercing turned off
- All advanced, superior and extreme weapons rebalanced: burst rifle nerfed - piercing and projectiles per burst swarm missiles nerfed - splash radius, fire rate laser buffed - damage multiplier cooldown, piercing, damage railgun buffed - beam width, fire rate, damage rocket laucher buffed - splash radius, damage, fire rate shotgun buffed - range small machinegun buffed - damage grenade laucher buffed - damage
- The inventory screen has been changed visually - the mech now has an idle animation and some extra effects have been added. There are less colors in the item lists.
- The "run" sound is turned on only when the monsters move fast.
- Blood effect templates for all kinds of monsters - particles and decals.
- The Rift Portal now costs 25 carbonium.
- Splash damage changed to area damage in ResistanceComponent.
- Physical damage changed to area damage in the nuclear mine.
- Fixed uneven storage space for solid resources.
- Loot is now conditional - certain items will drop only after requirements are met.
- The Canoptrix Spawner has been significantly improved - the effects are better, the model changes as it receives damage, destructible parts have been added.
- CrashReporter: add content corruption warning. This lets us know if the game files were okay at the time of your crash.
- Water or supercoolant is now required by the nuclear powerplant.
- Radiation damage added to nuclear explosions.
- Animal biomass powerplant gives more energy.
- Changed the cluster projectiles spread angle defaults. You can now aim with the ricocheted projectiles.
- Rare resources are not needed for crafting - all items require only carbonium and ironium (this is temporary, rare resource costs are coming soon).
- High-level weapons are much more expensive.
- Special weapon and ammo stats can only be added by mods - lifesteal, cluster, auto-aim, homing, splash, time damage, stun.
- Tweaked mech ammo production time.
- Smaller mech ammo storage and ammo production
- Elemental mod effects added to muzzle, hit, and projectile effects for weapons with projectiles
- Announcement timeouts increased to avoid audio spam.
- liquid_pump new model (textures, meshes, material)
- Target effect added to the grenade launcher.
- Repair kits are now more expensive, but they do not require animal biomass for crafting.- Changed the HQ portal to an energetic version - it had a metal frame before.
- Building cap added to armory, comms hub, and laboratory. It can be increased by researching higher levels of these buildings.
- All prop file names and references to those files have been standardized and moved into their proper folders. This is a huge change that included over 40000 operations on files. Hopefully, the folder structure will be much clearer to you now. The caveat is that old mods will no longer cooperate with this new file structure.
- The prologue mission received its own version of the research tree. Try to break it. NOTE: we're still talking about the prologue mission in the Alpha 5 build, not the free prologue. We will update that version too at a later date.
- Removed HQ requirements from most buildings.
- New version of proximity mines. They require a couple of seconds to arm themselves after being placed down. They can be destroyed by creatures in that time. No more running into a pack of canoptrix and blowing them up at will!
- The emergency explosions skill can be researched and crafted in four rarity levels, each with different stats.
- water OR supercoolant is used by fusion and nuclear powerplants and magnetic stabilizers
- The creeper is now more intelligent, actively growing towards your base
- Building limits can be upgraded by completing research for the armory, research lab, and comms hub
- New crafting costs added to all skills, consumables, and upgrades
- Tweaked water filtering plant - resources input/output ratio is more reasonable now
- Longer cooldown for power jumps and special dash to prevent abuse
- More visible uranium damage effect
- No floors can be built under the creeper
- Bigger death effect for quelver
- Disconnect the save system from the AdaptiveMusicSystem - being stuck in a 'battle' playlist will no longer prevent the game from saving your progress outside of combat.
- INFINITE PARTICLE VERTEX BUFFER!!! Blow things up as much as you like (and as long as your pc can handle it).
Graphics:
- New models for each upgrade level of walls, gates, and towers.
- New icons for weapons, skills, and consumables.
- Building level numbers are now attached to buildings with level 2 or higher.
- Light with raytraced shadows added to the teleport exit effect.
- Tweaked the big atomic explosion - smaller, better shockwave.
- Refactored CameraShakeComponent - we have a greater deal of control over screen shakes now.
Sounds:
- New sounds for many creatures, both old and new.
- Changed instance limits on some announcements - if you research multiple items at the same time, you won't get attacked by the same sound multiplied.
- Ambient sounds added to magnetic rocks
- Mech footstep sounds change with the kind of surface you're walking on.
Fixes:
- Improved CPU and GPU performance optimization
- SettingsScreen: fixed crash on display modes detection failure
- Fixed basic tower not hitting air units
- D3D12: add support for stretched-scaling modes in GetSupportedVideoDisplayList
- HUD: fixed scale/size on ultra-wide displays (action menu, augments menu)
- fixed radius_name in pumps lvl 2 and 3 - higher level pumps can't be built next to each other anymore
- sniper rifle renamed to High Caliber Rifle
- Fixed a lot of bugs with the DX12 renderer, thanks to your help back in January.
- Stun time changed from 10s to 2s in all weapons to prevent the player from stunlocking bosses and other high-health enemies.
- Fixed uranium shards - damage has been turned off
- Menu: targeting 60FPS
- Fixed multiple CustomizeControlsMenuScreen crashes
- Added Exor::IsWindows10OrGreater implementation - We check this to see whether we can enable DirectX 12.
- Fixed fullscreen focus lost with always on top applications
- Better and much cheaper lava pool effect - this reduced the performance hit in lava regions.
- DisplayRadiusSystem: fix tower range on the minimap - The minimap used to show the range of towers twice as big as they really are.
- Fixed AMMO_COST mod stat - it now properly give you a chance to fire a bullet for free!
- Inputs: fixed input leaks from "Pause" to "Gameplay" state.
- Fixed artillery idle turret rotation. Artillery Towers in idle state aim upwards.
- fix load game after failed game - you can no longer get stuck in the load game screen after losing and trying to reload your last save.