Stinger’s Debut, New Ship Modules, New Story Content, New Enemy Ships, Overhauled Crafting and Ship Devices, Rebalanced XP plus Difficulty Settings, WIP Localization
Greetings, pilots!
Spring is here, and we’re dropping another meaty content update as promised. Along with a new fighter class, new ship modules, new story content, and new enemy ships, we’ve also made major changes to the crafting system, mining, and resource management as well as how ship devices work. We also addressed progression issues and reprioritized difficulty settings and localization. Meaning, we’re ahead of schedule! So let’s get right into it with the official release trailer.
Stinger’s Debut
Stinger’s Debut, previously titled Rogue’s Debut in the 2022 roadmap, adds the Stinger, EVERSPACE 2’s third light fighter class. This new ship focuses on electronic warfare, making devices a critical component for pilots who favor agile, ability-focused spacecraft. When using ship devices, a third weapon hardpoint underneath the Stinger’s hull is activated, dealing 50% more primary damage.
The Stinger’s Void Swarm Ultimate instantly resets device cooldowns and releases a swarm of aggressive micro-bots that consume everything in their way, prioritizing the locked target. Upon return, these bots restore the player ship’s hull and armor based on damage dealt. Stinger vessels can roll with random perks like 20% reduced cooldown for support or warfare devices, Void Swarm radius increased by 25%, or become cloaked for five seconds after its shield is depleted.
New Story Content
As we announced in our 2022 roadmap news in December last year, the spring update will feature “a bit more” story content among lots of other things. While there are “only” one and half main missions left to conclude the Early Access portion of the story campaign, it finishes with a large-scale boss battle and major storyline beat before things continue into the grand finale at full release.
We also added the 2nd part of the multi-stage side mission Parasite. As many of you might recall, Adam now has to prevent a computer virus from spreading all over the DMZ that he has accidentally unleashed, so he’ll need help from his new, dubious hacker friend, Fallon Pango.
New Enemy Ships
With the continuation of the story, we also introduce new enemy ships, like the Okkar Clerical Corvette and the Okkar Prime units. With the introduction of these ships, time to share some lore with those not familiar with the Okkar that were introduced in the predecessor.
The Okkar Fleet manufactures its own ships, weaponry, and mining equipment without the aid of independent contractors. Private corporations do not exist in Okkar society, the concept of capitalism was unknown until the arrival of Colonials in the 30th Century. Nonetheless, this has not prevented Okkar technology from developing on par with human advancement, although distinctively different in design and function. Experts put the origins of Okkar space exploration and technological development at some one thousand solar years before humans.
Overhauled Crafting
As always, EVERSPACE 2 is all about that sweet, sweet loot. The crafting system is designed to complement the player’s gear growth when loot drop RNG isn’t working as desired. However, “filling in the gaps” is neither the crafting system’s main nor sole purpose. Our overhaul gives purpose to crafting from the beginning of a new save file to beyond the final mission; no RNG needed. This has been accomplished through the resource overhaul, granting access to new blueprints through a far more accessible system.
Item blueprints are needed before crafting, and our veteran players know a blueprint can be earned by dismantling three of the same item at the same tier. To make progression just a little easier, we’ve made blueprints infrequently drop from enemies as well. Instead of RNG working against the player, now it randomly helps instead. This small change gives players faster access to crafting possibilities.
Components (previously called tech resources) have also been added to the crafting list. Because of this, and because of the changes above, a lot of the RNG that hindered players before is quickly vanishing. We’ve seen forum posts trying to find ways to spawn certain components over others (spoiler: they don’t), so being able to craft with a handful of ingredients should be a powerfully welcome addition.
Speaking of additions, catalysts are powerful new craftables that can directly specialize an item’s prefix through modification, however, the blueprints themselves are harder to find. Instead of being dropped from random enemies, catalyst blueprints can only be found from high-risk location bosses. Also, this is just the first round of catalysts. More will appear in the future, opening up new customization routes by tampering with item modifiers themselves.
With all these overhauls, it is more than possible to track the location of desired resources, build a specific much-needed component, and upgrade a desired perk or craft a catalyst.
Reworked Ship Devices
Device progression has been fundamentally changed. Upon acquiring a device, players can now upgrade it up to four times, improving the duration or strength of the device’s effects, increasing the number of charges, or lower cooldown timers. The previous three modes are now unlocked once you master a device by maxing out its level, and you can freely swap between all three modes so long as the device isn’t on cooldown.
Choose device upgrades carefully, however. If you want to remove the upgrades you’ve applied, you’ll have to spend crafting ingredients to peel them off. Good thing the crafting inventory is now limitless!
Rebalanced XP plus WIP Difficulty Settings
With the EVERSPACE 2 Stinger’s Debut update, we’re also addressing balancing and progression issues, again. The XP curve has been flattened at the beginning, so when starting a new game, players should hit level 10 after playing through all main and side story content as well as completing all challenges in Ceto. Since complaints about the game being too hard or too easy have still been the biggest issue even after several rounds of rebalancing, we also introduced experimental difficulty levels: Very Easy / Easy / Normal / Hard / Very Hard, which can be changed anytime.
The system is still at an early stage and just the first step to providing more pilots with the level of challenge they are looking for. On Very Hard, our most skilled devs finally started seeing a proper challenge when playing EVERSPACE 2 for real. For a change, they occasionally die even when using every trick they have up their sleeves. On Very Easy, even less skilled pilots can enjoy the adventure through space without breaking too much of a sweat when learning combat and build mechanics of the game.
Right now, the settings affect enemy damage output, enemy aim accuracy, and enemy health, but we also plan to add different enemy spawn rates, game economy, and gameplay rules aka handicaps much as we did in the predecessor. Of course, difficulty settings will also have an impact on loot and resources drop rate and quality in the launch version of the game.
WIP Localization
Another re-prioritized feature is the addition of WIP language support for German, French, Italian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Furthermore, we also plan to enable our community to add further languages through Crowdin which we will add in the future if there’s enough demand.
Now, even though the game’s story content is not complete yet, we’re already at a whopping 80,000+ word count and we’re using a lot of genre-specific terms as well as puns that carry on for several missions. We’ve been working with our professional localization friends from Synthesis on the listed languages above. However, we can tell from double-checking the German version that a lot of things can be lost in translation. So, if anyone finds any awkward or incorrect translation, we would highly appreciate the community’s support to iron out any kinks before the full release.
Last but not least, shout out to Polish science-fiction author Stanisław Lem for letting HIVE borrow various quotes from the novel The Cyberiad in the Polish language version of EVERSPACE 2, free of charge. During the process of translating the game into Polish, our localization partners came up with this idea, and we just loved it, but no spoilers!
Demo Content
While less important to all you Kickstarter Backer who already have Early Access, the content-gated EVERSPACE 2 demo on Steam has been updated with all relevant changes, including WIP localization. In the updated demo, players from all over the globe can explore the first sector of EVERSPACE 2’s first star system and carry their save game over to Early Access. Got a friend on the fence about EVERSPACE 2? Point them at the demo to get hands-on before buying!
Changelog
0.8.25290 – Changelog
Features
- Added text localization for various languages (work in progress)
- Added new main mission and new side missions
- Added new player ship class: Stinger
- Added new enemy faction: Okkar Prime
- Added new voice recordings (no Text-To-Speech fallbacks in version 0.8)
- Added new ship modules for heavy and light player ship classes
- Added new companion perk for decreasing cruise mode charge duration
- Added new weapons and modules
- Added new “Sustained” weapon prefix that increases energy capacity
- Added new item sets
- Added option to show a horizon indicator in HUD
- Added an option to en- or disable pausing of the game when window is unfocused (community suggestion)
- Blueprints for crafting equipment can now be found or received by dismantling the respective item multiple times
- Parts, mineable resources, components and catalysts are now stored in a separate crafting inventory, no longer occupying space of cargo or storage
- Crafting of components (formerly tech resources) and catalysts now possible
- Mining resources has the chance of spawning the same resource in a higher rarity
- Mined resources are now displayed in the location info window once the Location Scanner perk level 2 has been unlocked
- Devices can now be upgraded and mastered. Upgrading increases device attributes. Mastering unlocks all device modes
- UI: Added dedicated crafting tab to ingame menu
- UI: Added option (toggle) to show current item level on top of the item icon within inventories
- UI: Added new sorting option “SortByLevel” for cargo inventories
- UI: Added total selling value info when selling multiple items at once
- UI: Added ingame dialog log to the pause menu to recap the most recent conversations
Tweaks
- Revised ore and crystal resources and properly distributed them among regions of all systems
- Removed random spawns in the last stage of mission “The Convert”
- Dialogs get aborted when involved speakers are destroyed
- Improved texture streaming
- Improved video ram usage
- Speedward shield will now also recharge during cruise drive
- Reworked Outlaw Bomb Thrower: No more invincibility shield but a fast high-capacity shield
- Reworked Outlaw Bomb Thrower barrel bombs: Less damage but disable shields for a few seconds
- Slightly decreased Cruise Booster’s cruise mode charge duration
- Improved handling of player attacking the freighter during “Picking Up The Pieces”
- When having to get rid of all interfering creatures during “X Marks The Spot”, a vague search area waypoint is now displayed
- Combined log books 2 & 3 in “X Marks The Spot” into one and removed one “locate signal” task
- Invasions will not show a warning banner anymore and often spawn farther away so that invaders do not target the player immediately
- Show in marker details when hovered from further away if a pickup is needed as an ingredient for a tracked perk
- Renamed Mainframe Expansion to Mainframe Component
- Renamed Augment to Mainframe Expansion
- “3rd Person Camera Stiffness” setting now affects linear camera lag
- Limited linear camera lag to prevent player ship from leaving the screen
- Ship colors and decals don’t get previewed on hover/select anymore. They now only change when “equip” is pressed
- Improved performance in Charybdis Bowl
- Tareen now flies a ship that looks like the one he used in original Everspace
- Use a new icon for debris from which drones can be spawned when flying Vindicator
- Changed “Adapt Item” to “Remove Level Restriction”. This modification now also costs slightly more parts
- Made ship handling a little more tangible through slight tweaks in banking/inertia behavior
- Changed EMP Generator “Short Circuit” mode to apply normal energy damage instead of damaging the shield only
- Updated Outlaw Drone Carrier link drone visual effect
- Increased Redeemer Inquisitor hull and shield HP
- Outlaw Vipers are now immune to corrosion
- Prevent Disintegrator from accumulating excessive backwards acceleration
- “Powerful” and “Marksman” affixes can now also appear / be applied to launcher weapons
- Enemies, except for Anti-Missile Drones, can no longer shoot down player missiles
- Balanced prefix chances for items
- Balancing: Increased probability of Elite enemies with player level
- Balancing: Slightly increased Outlaw Missile Turret damage
- Balancing: Increased Synchro Pulse energy consumption and spread
- Balancing: Adjusted shield and armor bonuses for all ships to match late-game hull hitpoint values
- Balancing: Slower leveling, less xp from lower-level enemies, less aggressive downscaling of enemies to player level
- Balancing: Decreased hull hitpoint bonus gained from Structure attribute
- Balancing: Increased shield capacity scaling, use same scaling for armor with lowered base values
- Balancing: Increased divergence of shield and armor bonus values between ship classes
- Balancing: Added two additional underside turrets to Outlaw Drone Carrier
- Balancing: Outlaw Drone Carriers now spawn combat drones
- Balancing: Reduced “Crit Happens” perk range from 500m to 300m
- Balancing: Reduced Striker expertise scaling
- Balancing: Slightly reduced Precision scaling
- Balancing: Adjusted Firepower scaling curve for greater damage bonus in early game and less in late game
- Balancing: Signal Decoders will now only drop from outlaw stations, some rare containers, elites and capital ships
- Balancing: Slightly reduced drop chance of colors
- Balancing: Increased Outlaw Drone Carrier drone respawn delay
- Balancing: Reduced Raid Booster effect
- Balancing: Increased Flak range and damage, reduced energy consumption
- Balancing: Increased Vindicator drone damage Expertise scaling
- Balancing: Increased Vindicator “Phalanx” fire rate bonus
- UI: Use dedicated HUD marker icons for Ancient Rune and Ancient Rune Socket
- UI: Tweaked dialog box design
- UI: Show “new” highlight on freshly unlocked and not yet viewed colors and decals in customization screen
- UI: Enemies currently debuffed by player receive a special offscreen indicator in HUD
- UI: Show obstructed interactable and structure HUD markers with dotted outline
- UI: New icons for several items
- UI: Show potential resource yields instead of amount of resources mined in the location info tooltip
- UI: Changed XP bar color and only show XP numbers in menus
- UI: Ship stats panel was slightly redesigned and optimized
- UI: Various performance improvements for item rendering
- UI: New stackable item price info showing dedicated “per Item”-price as well as total stack price
- UI: Overhauled design of repair and restock buttons in hangar tab
- UI: Added animated background for launch action button on stations
- UI: Item selection – “Other ships”-navigation now using L2R2 navigation instead of R3 cycle behavior
- UI: Changed multi-sell action label from “Sell” to “SellAll” to be more precise
- UI: Cooldown slot animations are synchronized now
- UI: Item info widget – optimized scrolling to exclude empty space at scrollbox bottom
- UI: Reduced opacity for item stack amount when maxed (community suggestion)
- UI: Overhauled crafting UI/UX to support new crafting-tab and -inventory
- UI: Re-added expand/collapse cargo view button in ship inventory headline
- UI: The number of Device Ugrade Points and Mainframe Expansions is now displayed in yellow color if greater than 0
- UI: Optimized action button caption paddings for non-hold actions
Bugfixes
- Fixed bonus attributes changing their value after saving and reloading the gam
- Fixed Gunship Arsenal perk: Double fire rate for async weapons, double damage for sync weapons
- Fixed that Vindicator Drones were attacked by neutral Outlaw Group during “The Good, The Bad & The Decent”
- Fixed being able to destroy Maddocks’ ship inside the storage hangar during “The Magic Of Umami”
- Fixed a potential mission blocker when killing Maddocks right before reaching the end of the chase in Sato during “The Magic Of Umami”
- Fixed that “Downtime Warrior” perk was not affecting secondary weapon energy on Bomber
- Fixed freighter in front of Smuggler Base during “The Vortex” not having any collision
- Fixed being able to use the Flying Dutchess’ Beacon near Khala’s Vessel during “Picking Up The Pieces” although she was already present
- Fixed winding up outside of cave during “The Emissary” if loading initial auto-save and immediately creating manual save and then loading that save
- Fixed NPC HUD marker being transparent after game was paused during jump-in
- Fixed HUD marker “spotted” animation being stuck when game was paused during animation
- Fixed wrong waypoint image and wrong player position in system view
- Fixed shield and armor break effect appearing when collecting energy orbs while no armor or shield is equipped
- Fixed that destroying the plating given by Dax would stop the mission from progressing
- Fixed that arriving within interaction range of Spatial Bypasses always lead to the “Can’t interact during conversation” message being shown
- Fixed several slide doors accidentally being open
- Fixed Outlaw Demolisher shooting mines from very far away
- Fixed being able to fast-travel to the same location you are currently at
- Fixed that the prototype and starforged prefixes lost their effect after increasing an item’s rarity
- Fixed that the mission log for “Gathering Dust” side mission was missing
- Fixed “Repairs 3” perk not working as intended (was supposed to only repair the ship’s hull up to 30% if lower when docked)
- Fixed gravitational behavior of Shadow Creatures on planets when they’re detached
- Fixed that “Gathering Dust” side mission was available at the start of “Old Friends,” not after
- Fixed mouse axis inversions not working when using centered crosshair and operating system mouse position
- Fixed inverted mouse controls not working when having relative mouse controls enabled
- Fixed Vindicator drones sometimes not disappearing while docked
- Fixed being able to track an already completed mission when double-clicking on a mission button
- Fixed a problem in which it was possible that the “Spares & Scrap” mission did not start
- Fixed ARC9000 explosion not damaging larger ships at certain impact angles
- Fixed that mines being displayed because of a sensor bonus attribute were staying in sensor memory and were still shown at a large distance
- Fixed “Downtime Warrior” perk not stacking correctly
- Fixed critical hit damage using a wrong value
- Fixed that item rewards for jobs couldn’t be claimed
- Fixed error in Temporal Nano Recompensator “Resurgence” mode description showing wrong repair increase percentage
- Fixed Drone Carrier link drones not repairing carrier armor correctly
- Fixed bug in repair costs calculation
- Fixed implicit downsizing of (cargo) inventories in some cases. (e.g. storage)
- Fixed some save and restore problems with certain objects like freight containers
- Fixed a few issues with Loot screen that gets shown when not all items could be picked up
- Fixed that “pull all” on pickups was sometimes not possible
- Fixed that “Redeemers” name was missing in the “kills” stats
- Fixed player projectiles colliding with player missiles
- Fixed player Flak projectiles being triggered by player missiles/mines
- Fixed NPC missiles spawning with a too large offset
- UI: Fixed loss of focus after clicking quick repair and quick restock buttons
- UI: Multiple improvements and fixes for screens with non-16:9 aspect ratio
- UI: Fixed potential bug that repair action was available in item selection even though it isn’t available on the station
- UI: Fixed that shop inventory might not be sorted correctly after mission items were added to an already visited shop inventory
- UI: Fixed various smaller color & alignment issues in ingame menu
- UI: Fixed rebuy indicator disappearing after selling items to shop
- UI: Fixed multiple bugs regarding devices in shop inventory
- UI: Fixed that side-by-side info would not scroll on gamepad in case current item wasn’t scrollable as well
- UI: Fixed that the damaged equipment indicator wasn’t refreshed after repairing
- UI: Fixed mainframe expansion points animation problems
- UI: Fixed homebase storage space counter not always being correct
The following changes are only relevant if you have been playing a preview of this update on the experimental branch:
Features (Experimental relevant only)
- (Exp) Added one additional light fighter body module
Tweaks (Experimental relevant only)
- (Exp) Balancing: Slightly reduced drop chance of blueprints
- (Exp) Replaced superior kinetic damage Catalyst with rare energy damage Catalyst
- (Exp) Balancing: Reduced Void Swarm repair amount
- (Exp) Balancing: Tweaked some Catalyst effect values and rarities
- (Exp) Worked in localization feedback from the community at crowdin.com
- (Exp) UI: Catalyst slots and action buttons in catalyst selection are now clickable
- (Exp) UI: Disabled catalyst selection and show info banner in case there are no compatible catalysts available
- (Exp) UI: Refined catalyst modification description
- (Exp) UI: Added dedicated item category icon for catalysts
- (Exp) UI: Items cannot be modified anymore while they are damaged
- (Exp) UI: Fully implemented reworked device appearance including upgrade animations
Bugixes (Experimental relevant only)
- (Exp) Fixed that “Okkar Prime” name was missing in the “kills” stats
- (Exp) Fixed that obsolete items were gone instead of replaced when loading an older savegame
- (Exp) Fixed Freelancer Cargo Carrier not exploding correctly
- (Exp) Common Catalysts are now always unlocked
- (Exp) Swift Catalyst can now also be applied to Disintegrator
- (Exp) Fixed one Stinger passive being wrongly assigned to the Scout
- (Exp) Fixed Optimized and Prototype Catalysts not working on modules
- (Exp) Fixed Void Swarm not resetting device cooldowns
- (Exp) Fixed that obsolete Catalysts and Affixes were not removed when loading a game
- (Exp) Fixed that Cruise Drive Duration perk did not unlock under certain conditions
- (Exp) Fixed bug where Cruise Booster’s cruise drive activation time would be overwritten by upgrading the perk
- (Exp) Fixed Okkar Corvette shooting through its own geometry
- (Exp) Fixed mining Catalyst bonus attributes not being removed when applying a new Catalyst
- (Exp) Fixed some dialogue lines repeating during mission “The Emissary”
- (Exp) UI: Fixed that the item info in the “Modify” screen could not be scrolled using a controller
- (Exp) UI: Fixed that the device description text wasn’t clipped properly after scrolling
- (Exp) UI: Fixed overlapping descriptions in catalyst selection screen
- (Exp) UI: Fixed a bug that occurred after a companion was unlocked but no perks were shown
- (Exp) UI: Fixed that the repair banner of an item tooltip could have elements from the device upgrade banner
- (Exp) UI: Fixed a bug in which the amount of an item for sale would get bigger after buying
- (Exp) UI: Fixed a bug in which the item rarity wasn’t instantly updated after a modification
- (Exp) UI: Fixed that the dialog board entries always showed “text-to-speech placeholder”
Well, this concludes our first major content update of 2022 with two more to come, one in summer, one in fall, before we wrap up production and will only be working on final polish for the full release, currently scheduled for early 2023. Check out our 2022 roadmap for more details.
So there’s still plenty of work ahead of us, but we’ll keep you in the loop with our weekly gamedev & community streams so that everyone can see for themselves where production is at, on Twitch and YouTube, every Friday from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm CET / 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm ET / 11:00 am to 1:00 pm PT. 🚀💥🙌
Don’t stop being awesome, and see you in space!
Michael and your dedicated ROCKFISH Games Team
PS: As per usual, we timed another 20% sale with the release of The Stinger’s Debut, so here’s another chance to get in the cockpit and save a few bucks. Note that we’ll raise the price at full release, so you won’t find a better deal to grab a copy of EVERSPACE 2 anytime soon. Unless you’re on Game Pass for PC, that is.