Answer: a whole incredible heck of a lot internally, but nothing as far as players can see quite yet. We'll have something ready in the next few days, though, both for showing videos of and for alpha players to test. We'll also be letting in a new batch of 10 players at that time. I don't know exactly what day this will be, maybe Wednesday, hopefully Thursday at the latest.
Combat was identified as clearly the weak link in the game based on our tests and feedback with existing alpha players, and I was getting that feeling myself. It was one of those things that was aaalmost right in some ways, but just didn't quite feel right for a lot of small reasons. A hundred little paper cuts. What mostly we were getting as suggestions were the ideas of band-aids for the various paper cuts, and that makes a lot of sense -- identifying those sorts of things is the main thing we look for from testers.
My job as the designer is to look at things in total, though, and what I was seeing is that basically there were too many paper cuts and too many band-aids to make sense trying that approach further. Cyborg actually pretty much said the same thing as well, and I think Misery may have also been thinking along those lines from some comments he made. Heck, all of you may have been thinking that for all I know, but that sort of thing is not typically voiced by everyone.
Anyway, so what we've been working on is basically a complete overhaul of combat. The interface is really different and streamlined, so are the controls, and so are the ways in which you can interact with combat directly. But the AI side of things has gotten incredibly beefed up in terms of our capabilities there, and basically a lot of that has been rewritten from scratch. That AI stuff is all working now, and is bloody cool to watch, actually. We have multi-faction fights, and all sorts of really beautiful patterns, and so forth.
We've also been working towards having the combat even more tightly tied into the main solar map game, both in terms of direct influences on it, as well as the FEEL of the two. Aka, keeping that "Batman in space" vibe into the combat itself, and giving you a lot more tactical options to do... whatever it is you want to do. You might enter a fight on one side, and betray that side halfway through. Or you might enter a conflict ostensibly to do one thing (so the races believe), but then you just take that opportunity to sneak around and mess up some infrastructure and then withdraw. You slip in and out of battles, sometimes dominating them or helping to dominate them, but often just coming in to kick some butt on part of the map, accomplish some self-set objectives, and then get out of dodge. It's not retreating anymore -- it's "withdrawing." Batman doesn't have a reason to stick around and murder everyone for the heck of it.
All of this has knock-on effects to a lot of things, as you might imagine:
- Combat AI
- Combat Interface
- Available Contracts and their content
- Combat Practice
- Black Market screens
- New structures and other floating space installations
- New influence reactions to various actions you take, such as betrayals
- Multi-faction combat in general
- Revised balance
- Revised player flagship abilities
- And I'm sure I'm forgetting some other things.
The list is absolutely enormous, and it's a lot of under-the-hood work. So that's why it's been taking us so long without much word on what's going on. But based on past comments by our existing alpha players, and based on my own testing of both the old and new systems, I feel pretty confident in saying that you're going to love this.
