This update introduces the much anticipated Weapon Gear, Swords, along with several new and reworked Super Mods, and a host of balance changes.
Complete List of Changes
https://blog.novadrift.io/patch-notes/
New Weapon: Swords
Wield a pair of monomolecular double-edged swords that can slice through targets and cleave through enemy projectiles.
Sword's unique scaling interacts in unusual ways with a variety of Body Gear. Bodies that grant additional advanced constructs, or grant additional cannons, add another pair of swords. Bodies that have increased crash damage or achieve high speeds can convert those stats into damage for Swords.
Projectile modifiers affect the sparks that are created when Swords destroy enemy munitions.
Hullbreaker enables slow but powerful cleaving strikes!
Additionally, Swords are Advanced Constructs, which means they can wear your shields when modded with Shielded Constructs. Their unique property of only taking damage while attacking, as well as coming in pairs, makes them an ideal conveyor of any shield effects you have.
Finally, they have unique interactions when used with Loaded Mines and Death Blossom. Give it a try.
Super Mod Rework: Void Slice
Void Slice makes you Blink to your Strafe destination, cutting through targets in your path. Void slice deals damage based on a flat amount added to a percentage of the enemy's remaining hull.
Super Mod Rework: Antimatter Rounds
Antimatter Rounds has been reworked. It now causes projectiles to degenerate or destroy each other on impact. Antimatter Rounds now gives weapons uniquely colored VFX. Additionally, the stat bonuses now benefit constructs at a lesser percentage
Buffs and Balance
Ally Changes
Ally and its mod tree have been updated. Ally now fires "explosive rounds" as its base weapon, which have a cone-shaped blast radius. Additionally:
- Evasion has been removed. Half of the passive attack avoidance from Evasion was moved to Ally base stats and half was moved to Outmaneuver
- Echo Strike has returned to the game and replaces Evasion, adding an additional, larger circular blast radius to Ally explosive rounds
- Outmaneuver has gained a new buff: After dodging, your interceptor's explosive rounds gain +700% rate of fire for .25 seconds
Blast Changes
The Blast Radius tree has been reworked:
- Blast Radius, High Explosive, and Concentrated Blast now affect all player blasts
- Preexisting blast radius modifiers have been divided into new categories: Weapon blast radius, weapon projectile blast radius, and (global) blast radius
- Many mods now scale with the tree's global blast modifiers. This includes: Discord, Force Armor, Last Stand, Mines (base explosion and clusters), Rebuke, Force Armor, Blink, Void Slice, Purge, War Machine (missiles), Bastion (blast wave), Counterpulse, Shockwave (shield reset shockwave), Reflexive Shields, Warp (warp blasts), Volatile Shields, Self Destruction, Ally (explosive rounds and Echo Strike).
- Many of these blast powers, new and old, have received balance adjustments
Some other notable changes include:
- Allowed separate key bindings for Strafe and Blink. The default binding for Blink is now "F". Strafe is still "Shift"
- Strafe has been adjusted to feel more fluid: It now spreads its acceleration over a short interval while strongly redirecting your motion in the direction you strafed
- Strafe now has a cooldown of 1.5 seconds, which is the same as Blink. (We realized that strafe was becoming near-mandatory for any hyperscoring build, and that Blink had trouble competing with its power level. To compensate for this, enemy speed scaling has been significantly reduced, which benefits all builds)
- Lots of buffs for Body Gear: Carrier
- Crash damage adjustments for many bodies
- Armor Stack buffs
- Weapon Construct changes
- A few new enemy encounter surprises
- Steam Deck improvements
- Myriad text improvements
Read the full patch notes here: https://blog.novadrift.io/patch-notes/
What's Next?
The only real obstacle to full-releasing the game is creating the final boss, and the game's ending, so that we can finally allow "Endless" mode to be disabled. However, there's still polish that we'd like to add before we call the game complete. We'd like to make at least one more update before we tackle the ending. Here are some of the things we're considering addressing next:
- Body Gear: Viper redesign
- Ignite and Burn overhaul / simplification
- Flak love
- Additional polish for underperforming and overperforming Mods and combos
- Additional ease-of-access settings, such as press-to-toggle firing
- Something secret...
Discord Upgraded! Come Hang
We've got quite an active discord with a very chill and inclusive community. The dev team is also pretty active there. We recently opened up some new channels like #weekly-discussion, #ask-the-devs, and #feedback. The latter allows you to submit feedback to a bot that lets players upvote or downvote the suggestion. I'm also quite proud of the #game-dev-help channel, which is a space for current and aspiring developers to learn and collaborate. So... come chat with us!
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Thanks for reading. Best wishes,