Hello Riftbreakers!

A lot has changed in The Riftbreaker since its October release. Ever since that moment, you have been sharing your insights with us non-stop, showing your care and dedication. Thanks to them, we have improved on plenty of aspects of the game. However, our work is far from over. Today, we would like to share a bit of a perspective view on The Riftbreaker, how your voices shaped the game and what changes we are planning to implement over the course of the following months. It’s time for our first ever State Of The Game!

THE CAMPAIGN MODE AND GENERAL GAMEPLAY

The Campaign Mode has been receiving improvements with almost every patch we release. You have informed us about many potential roadblocks and given hints on improving the flow. The difficulty spectrum has been greatly improved. The Easy difficulty was made more accessible, while the Hard and Brutal modes became slightly more challenging. This change allows more players to enjoy The Riftbreaker Campaign at a more suitable level. Additionally, we added the option to use Custom Difficulty settings to play the entirety of The Riftbreaker Campaign. This way, if you don’t find a setting that’s quite right for you, you can fine-tune almost all parameters that define how difficult the game is going to be.

At the same time, we have been doing internal playthroughs of the game. Each member of our team has completed the Campaign and then shared their feedback with the rest of us. What came out of all this is a medium-sized book of ‘to-dos’. Covering all of them would be impossible. Instead, we’re going to reveal the most significant upgrades that you can expect to arrive in the short-to-medium term.

The first one is an all-new economy management screen. With this feature, we aim to give you a new degree of control over what comes in and what goes out of your base at any given moment. The economy screen will show you what kind of resources your facilities are using, where your power comes from, and what consumes the majority of it. Best of all - we are working on giving you control over your buildings through that screen. For example, when an attack wave threatens your base, you will be able to disable all your Synthesizers or Comms Hubs with just a couple of clicks instead of frantically running around the base.

We are also working on expanding the endgame content. Without going into spoilers - we want to introduce new endgame goals and new ways of enjoying the campaign mode for a much longer time. That will include the ability to visit more planetary locations, discover all the flora and fauna species, and cultivate resources to form a self-sustaining base. The first step to that was the Agricultural Revolution from a couple of days ago. That point deserves its own paragraph (or even a couple).

The Cultivators have proved to be very powerful. With that technology, some players were able to even fast-track their way to opening the Rift Portal - which is excellent. Giving players more options, especially the less obvious ones, is a net positive for everyone. Unfortunately, their efficiency and versatility were so high compared to the cost that they could make all other resource production obsolete. Cultivators are intended to be a late or endgame mechanic. If they are available en masse too early, they become problematic. At launch, their costs were not reflective of the power behind them. We decided to tweak their upkeep costs, yields from particular saplings, and the number of drones that operate simultaneously. Additionally, to reflect the fact that Resource Cultivation is the ultimate, eco-friendly way of preparing Galatea 37 for human colonization, we limited certain saplings to their native biomes. That, in turn, requires you to set up several farms around the globe if you want to harvest all of the available resources

That reduced the overall yield you got from your existing setups. There are several reasons for this. First of all - the ratio of Harvesting Stations needed to fully operate one Cultivator has changed. Harvesters now have more drones at their disposal but a reduced operation radius. There is a chance that your current setup is still good, but now you have more room for optimizations. The resources you gain from individual saplings have changed too. If you have noticed that, for example, your previous tanzanite farm might not be producing tanzanite anymore, you might just have to choose a different plant. All resources are available from at least two different species, so we encourage you to experiment.

These changes have been made to make resource cultivation more predictable and controllable. They are more in line with the endgame content we have in mind, facilitating more than one viable strategy. We understand that this might have made some of your setups obsolete and might have generated extra work for you. We are sorry for that and hope that you will understand that we have to make these changes to make the game more enjoyable in the longer perspective. We know that the adjustment period might be a little bit of a shock, but please trust us - it’s all going to be worth it in the end.

As you can see, we have a lot of plans for the Campaign Mode. Its modular structure allows us to expand the game’s mechanisms as well as the world of Galatea 37 and whatever lies beyond…

P.S. We’re making ALT great again. The users from the experimental branch have already had a taste of the ALT key shortcut for building the maximum level building working as a toggle, but we are going one step further. We have designed a system that allows you to toggle the default building level per building. For example, you will be able to set it up so that you always build Solar Panels Level 3 and Wind Turbines Level 2.No more holding the ALT key. No more locked movement. Greatness!

THE SURVIVAL MODE

We have received a lot of feedback regarding the difficulty level of Survival Mode. As it stands now, significant difficulty spikes are an issue for many players. We also heard complaints about the feeling of lack of accomplishment after beating it, as it offers no real gameplay advantage. We have some plans on how to fix that.

Survival Mode will be getting a major balance overhaul. It is definitely true that this game mode could be improved by introducing more variety of enemy attacks. A more gradual increase of difficulty over time could also bring some good. That is why we are going to be reworking all survival difficulty levels from the ground up. We aim to make survival on all difficulty levels demanding but fair. At present, players are sometimes attacked by waves of creatures that they are ill-equipped to deal with early on. That is going to change. We will also give each biome its own specialized technology loadouts. That will make more strategies viable, thus increasing the variety of options available to you.

One of the major changes that are coming for the Survival Mode is the revamped Research Tree. At present, it is shared with the tree used in the Campaign. As a result, you sometimes are forced to spend precious minutes of research on unlocking tech that you will not benefit much from. To solve this, the Survival Mode will get an entirely new Research Tree, to allow you access to as many upgrades as we can, thus increasing the strategic potential. The less impactful technologies will be available from the start, and the ones that have no use in this game mode (like Magnetic Stabilizers or the Research Station) will be removed from the tech tree. We are also planning to make Alien Research much easier to attain.

CUSTOM GAME CONTENT & MODDING SUPPORT

We have seen a lot of great mods published for The Riftbreaker already. Ranging from tweaks to select buildings to complete overhauls of entire biomes and weapon systems - it’s fascinating to see how you put the tools we gave you to use. And our support has only just begun.

An integrated, in-game content distribution service is coming. We know it’s taking a bit long, but as we have said before: this is an important decision that will have its consequences for the entirety of the game’s lifetime. We want users of all platforms across the entire world to be able to use the same platform and interface to share and download custom content. There are a couple of solutions on the line, and we are doing our best to make the best-informed decision. That will, unfortunately, take some time.

What will not take so much time, on the other hand, is an update to our game editing tools. Ever since we published the first version, we have received a lot of feedback and feature requests. We’re happy to tell you that we managed to implement a lot of those changes, and a brand-new editor suite is on its way. We hope to see even more amazing creations from you, just like the ones we spotlighted before: Jungle Variation Pack and Expanded Armory.

As more mods are being created, the number of questions about copyrights increases. To keep a long story short - you are free to use any assets from within EXOR Studios games to create your mods within other EXOR Studios games, and you are free to share them with other players for free. We will publish our policy guidelines around the time the integrated mod support is implemented. We just want you to know that we’re fine with you reusing any existing assets from our games.

Content Creation is a major point for The Riftbreaker. The possibility of using custom tweaks, adding new maps, and even entirely new mechanics are all amazing ways to keep you engaged and give you more creative freedom. Rest assured, we will not abandon this.

MULTIPLAYER

We have a plan. We have a schedule. We have developers. We are working on it as we speak. Even though we don’t have much to share at the moment, we can tell you that we have already implemented the basic client-server architecture and are working on refactoring many game systems that would not work well in a network environment. A positive side effect of that is that we can optimize some systems while doing so, meaning there is even a chance that the single-player game performance is going to improve from that. Our vague ETA is the end of the year 2022.

CONCLUSION

The Riftbreaker’s journey has only just begun. While it might seem that we are working on several big things at once (and we are), the work is structured and divided evenly among our developers. You can expect small, regular updates increasing the stability and quality of life every couple of weeks, leading up to the next point on our roadmap - World Expansion I. It will be an absolute banger, so make sure to stay up to date with the news - we can’t wait to share it all with you.

As always, if you have any questions, thoughts, or general feedback, the comment section is yours. We also encourage you to join our Discord server at www.discord.gg/exorstudios to get insights and updates daily.

Cheers!
EXOR Studios