Hail, Sky Captains!!
It has been a while since we chatted about the state of Drone Strike Force, and what’s going on behind the scenes. But that doesn't mean we haven’t been working hard! In fact, that’s probably the best reason I could give you for how quiet we’ve been. We are taking many lessons during this Early Access period and trying to steer the game in a direction that is more rewarding for our existing players and the thousands more we hope to have join us at launch. We are eternally grateful for all the amazing feedback we have been getting on our Discord server from all our players. So, without further ado, let’s go through some of what we’ve been toiling away with the following main goals in mind….
- Creating Unique Gameplay for Each Drone
- More Meaningful Decisions in the Garage
- More Incentives for Team-Based Gameplay
- Loads of New Content!
FIRST UP - BALANCE!
Sentinel Class Flight: We are balancing flying to tease out a more unique feel for Sentinel’s flight. Tweaking the balance so heavier drones feel a little, well, heavier. While buffing in other areas to compensate. Thanks to the hard work of our amazing engineers we have a lot of variables in our flight systems to tweak.
Storm 99 and Predator: We are also working to balance out Storm 99 and the Predator to ensure there is proper differentiation between them, and unique instances where it is of benefit to use one over the other. Making sure there is a meaningful reason to choose one as opposed to the other for your load out. We are taking a pass at all of DSF's weapons with this in mind, as well as while we design new ones.
Olympus: We developed and are testing a system for the Olympus that allows it to charge up over time when in zoom. This way you can decide to go for the lower damage quicker snapshot or wait for the higher damage to kick in and take that one.
System Changes
Discoverability Changes: We have made some interesting changes to the discoverability mechanic that we are testing. We feel these changes are so far inducing more team based game play and hope that our community will notice an improvement when creating tactics with your teammates.
Magazines and Reload: We have started work on a new system to decouple ammo from energy. We feel this has a lot of potential to create more interesting variations of weaponry by liberating ammo and reloads from energy and therefore boost. While potentially something like our LWS laser armament could still use energy, we will be able to create more balanceable varieties of weaponry going forward. Generally, we found having energy and ammo systems linked to one resource as a source of friction. It was not easy to tell when your weapon was out of juice, and there was no way to force a reload. The end result was a player was incentivized to disengage from combat and recharge energy instead of just jamming a new magazine in quick to reload and start shooting again.
Skirmish and Matchmaking: Our engineers have been hard at work ensuring our matchmaking system is more polished. Skirmish was a big introduction to our matchmaking system and we had a lot of work to get it into a more polished state! Stability and reliability are continuously improving and we hope to push out those improvements as soon as possible.
Bots: We have also been improving our AI on the skirmish bots to make sure they provide a more rewarding experience so players can test out their drones while in the matchmaking queue.
New Content
New Game Mode - Package Run!
This is almost ready! We are polishing some final touches on the design of the mode to ensure balanced gameplay. We are having loads of fun playing it internally and cannot wait to share it with our community!
Preset Builds: We also wanted to let everyone know we are experimenting with preset loadouts that are super fun, unique, rewarding and tactical. The key criteria are under the same framework presented here, more unique gameplay experiences, more team based dynamics, new content and meaningful decisions for the player. We may run a playtest with our community in the coming months as these become more polished to get feedback.
It’s all just another step on the road to launch, and we hope you’ll enjoy all the changes and additions we’ve been working on. We will announce soon when they go live!
Thank you for all the support!