First of all, I want to say I'm sorry. In November I published part of an update I was working on at the time, but the work had to be interrupted and the game was left in a very problematic, buggy state for two months. That earned me quite a few negative reviews and emails, and you were right, I shouldn't have left it that way, especially for so long, in such a critical time of the year. I hope this new update can serve as an apology for that mistake.
Here are the major changes in version 1.2.1, now available for all platforms:
Difficulty Balancing
When I originally published the 1.2.0 version, I said there were still problems to be solved with the game's difficulty thanks to the new AI, but they were never as bad as in the previous patch. Now I believe I've reached a good spot, where the AI is challenging and consistent but not excessively hard like before.
I've also balanced some aspects of the game's difficulty on the player's side. It's now easier to turn at high speeds when using the slipstream, so players won't crash as often as before. The rewind cooldown is now proportional to the amount of rewind time used. If you use 25% of the rewind bar, you get 25% of the max cooldown time. This will increase the availability of the rewind, which will also allow players to crash less often.
New Feature: Game Speed Control
This is a new accessibility feature inspired by Forza Horizon 5. The player can now reduce the global game speed up to 50%. That means the whole game will play out more slowly, giving the player more time to react to the race (and enjoy the scenery), but the physics and gameplay will otherwise be exactly the same. I believe this will help players who find the game too fast for whatever reason.
For the sake of fairness on the online leaderboards, the game will not record the times of races using any speed other than 100%. If you reduce the speed in a single track on Grand Prix Mode, both that one race and the cumulative cup time will not be recorded, but the other races at 100% speed will. Everything else is the same, you can get all the trophies and complete the whole game on any game speed.
Other Changes
- Fixed a major bug on windows where the game would freeze when closing the application.
- Fixed a bug on windows where the game would open a cmd.exe window along with the graphical one.
- Fixed a bug on time trial mode where the ghost car wouldn't start the race at the proper position.
- Fixed several bugs with the Steam Platform functionality in all versions of the game. If you got a trophy and it didn't show up on Steam, open the Trophies screen and it should be added to your account.
- Added description text to the weight classes on the main menu.
- Added the option to import saves from Slipstream 1.1.
I haven't forgot about the modding system, I'm already working on the tools and documentation but it's taking more time I expected, as usual. My next deadline for that is March 2022, so stay tuned for more updates, and thanks for playing Slipstream. I hope you enjoy the update.
