Nova Drift January Update: Cosmic Powers!
Nova Drift v0.16.3 is live for backers
This update brings new powers in the form of 5 additional Super Mods. Once unlocked, when you upgrade, Super mods are added to your pool of mod choices if their unique special requirements are met. They often grant devastating abilities at a great price, and sometimes alter the rules of the game.
Dying Star:
Dying Star pushes burn strategies to the limit, igniting you and everything around you. If you can build around surviving this punishing cost, you can burn away swarms of enemies, asteroids, mines, and rockets with ease, at incredible range. This allows you to focus on maneuvering and taking down heavy targets. It also boosts the damage and duration of your other burn abilities, including incendiary strikes from your weapon.
Ataraxia:
Ataraxia rewards you for stockpiling unspent upgrade points, providing a means to boost the power of highly focused or minimalist loadouts. Each stored point provides 4% global damage, 1% hull strength and shield durability, and 1% mobility. As it is perfectly realistic to store 20 or more points, this can really add up. Unlike most mods, this bonus affects the damage of everything you can do, allowing for some pretty wild specializations.
Antimatter Rounds:
Antimatter Rounds adds 15 flat damage to your weapon attacks at the cost of hull damage each time you fire. This self-damage is increased for each additional projectile being bolstered by Antimatter Rounds. In addition, a powerful muzzle-blast is added along with heavy recoil. As the flat damage bonus from this weapon affects each of your projectiles, it is stronger the more of them you fire. With it's innate penalty, Antimatter rounds challenges you to find the right balance of power and survivability.
Warp Strike:
Warp Strike allows your projectiles to screen-wrap, just as the player can in Nova Drift. This can be further abused with weapon targeting upgrades or the Splinter Shot mod. Alternatively, you can get more mileage out of devastating single shot weapons that are otherwise one-and-done. Warp Strike also allows you to circumvent enemy defenses or attack while retreating.
Rancor:
Rancor is an upgrade to the Charged Shot mod, amplifying its power and further slowing while the weapon is charging. With Rancor, any damage you sustain while charging your weapon is added to the charge power, with spectacular results! This effect works no matter from where the damage is inflicted, allowing combos with mods like Dying Star and Antimatter rounds to super-juice your attacks.
A New Challenger Approaches
The Seraph has been added to the game. Encountered at wave 100, this is the penultimate boss, gating the way to your destination.
Coming Up
The latest is about to be released to Streamers and shortly after, Early Access will be available on Steam. During early access (and after it!) I will continue to roll out content. Here's what's planned:
- The final wave 120 boss encounter
- Story mode, the game introduction sequence and ending
- Uber boss encounters for Endless mode– Harder versions of the 5 major boss encounters– to challenge top players
- More gear and super mods to unlock
Thanks, all. Please don't forget to wishlist Nova Drift on Steam, even if you plan to play the DRM free version. It'll make a huge difference on launch week!