Hello, pilots!
Thanks to all your feedback, we added and modified some elements, gameplay, balancing and progression. Let’s start with the new stuff.
Emotes in game
Many of you want a better way to communicate with the opponent than wiggling. A chat system does not necessarily seem wise, we prefer to add a wheel of emotes to share a fun moment with your opponent.
More emotes will be added in the future and you will be able to customize your emote wheel as you want. You can use them with 1/2/3/4 on the keyboard or with the D-pad on your controller.
Emotes will be unlockable by playing the game and reaching certain levels or by achieving challenges.
Progression System
At the launch of Exoblast, we made all the ships, pilots and game mode available from the beginning. This has caused you three problems:
- You could play against experienced opponents who take away the pleasure of smooth discovery.
- Once the gameplay was in hand, you had no real reason to take levels.
- A “guided” discovery of the game was missing.
So we’ve added a first progression system that will make you play against AI at level 1, before unlocking the online mode at level 2 and the ranked mode at level 6.
The same goes for the ships: you will unlock them from level 3 to level 5 depending on the difficulty of taking control of them.
As we just said before, emotes and other things will be unlockable through leveling and achievements in the future.
A necessary balancing
You quickly found the most outperforming character and ship combos.
This allowed us to see that these combos were too strong and became omnipresent.
We have therefore done a balancing that should completely disrupt the meta and hopefully make almost all combos viable.
Statistical Changes
- We removed the fire rate which was the same for all ships.
- We added the shield size. All ships have their shield sizes reduced to 80% (except the Hovership which stays at 100%).
Pilot Balance
- Rikito : Aggression duration > 3s to 1.5s
Rikito profited too much from his aggressiveness which created a snowball effect very hard to counter.
- Nisha : Adrenaline > 2% to 3%
Nisha is the least used character. Increasing her adrenaline, we hope you will feel a real usefulness to her kit.
Ships Balance
- Bee : Health points increased > 25hp to 50hp.
The Bee has a nervous gameplay, but gets destroyed by bullets not being powerful. We want to slightly reduce the punitive aspect of its kit.
- Hovership : Shield return power > 75% to 150%
Projectiles speed > 300 to 208
Charging speed > 2.7 to 3.1
The Hovership was a decent ship, but it struggled too much to send powerful bullets. From now on, the ship will be able to rely on smash shields to send ultra-fast bullets.
- Devonian : Shield deflection power > 50% to 75%
- Destroyer : Maximum Power > 6 to 6.5
- Pretorian : Move speed > 302 to 292
Recovery of projectiles > 65% to 60%
The Pretorian/Rikito combo was widely used. So we nerfed the ship so that it can be countered while remaining viable.
Bug fixes and features
- the timer stops at the last set point and no longer after the victory animation.
- Joystick navigation on the readycheck has been removed to avoid missclicks.
- Accents are now filtered on the “End Game” screen.
- The custom popup translation is now fixed.
Thank you for your feedback!
Constructive criticism is really useful to us, whether positive or negative, so thank you for sharing your feelings with us!
Positive reviews allow us to expand the community and thus improve the game accordingly.
For those who don’t know yet, we are very active on Discord so join us! https://discord.gg/2mMTMRxaCb
See you in the arena, pilots!
