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EVERSPACE 2 — The Drake: Gang Wars Update Is Out | Changelog 0.9.28028

EVERSPACE™ · Community Announcements · August 13, 2022

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Greetings, pilots!

The wait is over: the hotly anticipated Summer Update aka Drake: Gang Wars is finally here! It’s our most significant Early Access update, adding tons of new things to the game even though we’re not done yet - there’ll be one more update later this year before we wrap things up and work on the v1.0 release which is still scheduled for early 2023.

For now, you can enjoy Drake, an all-new star system featuring well over a dozen carefully hand-crafted locations with stunning lava and ice environments, underwater exploration, exciting new enemy types and status effects, brand new challenges and puzzles as well as a three-chapter side quest, introducing daring pilots to the new system, and much more. Have a look at our official release trailer!


▶ Watch on YouTube



Drake | New Side Missions


Drake is undoubtedly the star (pun intended) of the summer update with its mesmerizing new lava, ice, and underwater locations. These environments not only look darn pretty; they also feature new damage types that players have to deal with on planets and in open space, too.





I think both the lava and ice locations are absolutely awesome. However, I was just blown away when I had to go underwater to disable mines and plant my “own” explosives in a gigantic, half-sunken space station. I haven’t seen anything like this in any other game before, and from my own wreck-diving experience I can testify this is precisely how it looks and feels. Granted, I wasn’t scuba diving on another water planet, but you get me. Gosh, I wished we had even more underwater content, but our team already said we might be revisiting those locations, again at v1.0; fingers crossed!



You get to Drake via a side quest you must pick up from Elek at the Homebase in Ceto. It’s quite a deep side quest, expanding over three missions, and will introduce you to the new system, its most prominent locations, new gameplay mechanics, and three new factions.

New Factions


In Drake, you’ll have to deal with three new Factions, the Coalition, Retaliators, and Zurilia. They have quite a vicious beef with each other which will escalate into a massive space battle. I don’t want to spoil too much but here’s some basic info about them.


The Coalition is a faction that veteran pilots probably still remember from Elek, one of the five side characters in the EVERSPACE — Encounters expansion. It’s loosely named after the Cohhilition community from top streamer CohhCarnage who’s a huge fan of the EVERSPACE series and one of our top Kickstarter backers. This time, he even went for the Space Architect pledge, which allowed helping name and design a space station in the game: The massive Letho Star Port, the main hub in Drake you have seen in the trailer, is what Cohh has been working on together with Uwe, our Creative Director. This is also where the three-chapter side quest kicks into gear — if you know what I mean when checking out Cohh’s logo on his twitch channel.


The next faction you’ll encounter is another fan-inspired faction, The Zurilia, named after Zurilia, another top-tier Kickstarter backer of ours. They control all locations that are fire-themed. Naturally, they are a pretty hot-headed bunch, and even their ships and gear make good use of some fancy heat-based technology, which can severely damage your ship components.


The third faction is The Retaliators, who control the water/ice-themed locations in Drake. You might expect them to be cool-headed, but they are also aggressive when you enter their territory, attacking with frosty weapons and dealing stun damage to your ship which can have some dire consequences when hit in the heat of a fight. Ok, my puns are not getting any better, but you’ll get the gist when listening to their dialog. ;)

BTW, since we know that not everyone is a fan of our TTS placeholders, keep in mind the new story content will be voiced at v1.0; the same goes for localization as things are still subject to change, and to make sure that voice-recording and translating text and UI are worthwhile, we need to hit a certain amount of lines.

New Perks


With the new update, we raised the player level cap to 25 and added three new player perks. Pro-tip: Retaliation, reflecting 30% of incoming damage to your attackers, is especially useful when dealing with the new damage types within the Drake system.



Good ol’ buddy Tareen, also known from the Encounters expansion, received new perks for ship dealers.



Lastly, HIVE also offers a new perk, improving your ability to switch secondaries mid-battle.



High-Risk Area Mutators


High-risk areas have received a major upgrade by adding Mutators into the mix. These expand upon the gameplay variety while creating a higher challenge for those who want to get a taste of what to expect in the upcoming endgame of EVERSPACE 2. And yes, HRA bosses are now a delicious loot piñata.


There are a number of positive mutators, like “Enemies dropping lots of credits upon death”, “G&B reinforcements on-site”, or “Spawn a protector sphere generator, which can be grabbed and used to get immunity to debuffs. On the negative, you might have to deal with “Enemies deal area damage upon death”, “Enemies drop proximity mines upon death”, “Enemies slowly repair their hull”, “Two bosses”, “Enemies are resistant to EMP”, “Enemies leave behind corrosion fields when killed”, and more nasty surprises.

QoL Improvements


Furthermore, the team has been working on several Quality of Life improvements, many of which were community-inspired. For instance, the possibility to craft consumables. But that's not all! You can now craft components from resources, too, so you can build that much-desired Catalyst even though you might not have every single component in place but plenty of others — you're welcome!



Tracking required resources for crafting is an all-new feature that goes nicely together with the new resources map mode. Not only will you see right away what resources are still required to make that nifty new piece of equipment, but with one click on the map's submenu, you'll see right away where chances are high to find that precious ore or crystal that's still missing.

Hot-swapping armor was long in the making and a hot community demand, too, so now it's here! Furthermore, some perks like Percussive Maintenance have been overhauled to better work with regenerating armor.

Not really a QoL improvement but very noticeable: Gero, our Sound Director, has implemented significantly improved weapon SFX based on item rarity, giving primaries more oomph and distinction.

Major Rebalancing


With Drake: Gang Wars Early Access pilots are also receiving a massive round of rebalancing based on internal playtests and community feedback, which is one of the main reasons for our open-development approach. Therefore, we highly encourage everyone to start a new game and let us know how the progression/difficulty feels on the Steam forums. Especially around level 10, the difficulty curve should feel much better now. That said, we also want to give all pilots a heads-up that Drake sits at a much higher difficulty level, so you will have to use all your weaponry, consumables, ship devices and mainframe expansions to the fullest while also keeping your gear up to your current player level to succeed. Also, we strongly recommend doing side activities and not just beeline through the story content — Drake is no picnic in space!

TrackIR and AMD FSR Support


On the technical side, TrackIR support and AMD FSR have also been added to the game. The implementation of TrackIR was much more complicated than we thought — the devil was in the details, as it always is. However, Ingmar, our technical programmer, didn’t let go, and we’re pleased with the result. He was also responsible for implementing AMD FSR and is still working with our friends at AMD on improving the experience with FSR 2.0 further down the road.

Changelog - 0.9.28028


Features

Tweaks

Bugfixes

Tweaks (Only relevant when having played on the experimental branch before)

Bugfixes (Only relevant when having played on the experimental branch before)


Ok, and that’s that for our summer update! We hope you will enjoy all the new content, improvements, and fixes, and we very much look forward to your esteemed feedback. If you like the experience, please give us a thumbs up, leave a comment, or even a positive review, which really does help a lot. If you don’t, feel free to let us know, too. Rest assured, we read every comment and every review, while we hope for your understanding that we won’t be able to please anyone, and that some features would be just too much work or simply don’t fit into our vision for EVERSPACE 2.

With that, I’ll leave you to it, and we hope to see many pilots in our first official Drake: Gang Wars live stream on Twitch and YouTube, every Friday from 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm CEST / 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm EDT / 11:00 am to 1:00 pm PDT. This time, we’ll have another premiere, as Garry, aka GeekByteUK, long-term EVERSPACE fan and Kickstarter backer for both titles will be your host since Erik, aka Giraffasaur, our beloved Community Ambassador, is on another short break. 🚀💥🙌

Don’t stop being awesome, and see you in Drake!
Michael and your dedicated ROCKFISH Games Team
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