Hey I’m Luke, I’m the designer on Worlds Adrift and today we’re going to be talking about future features to address some PvP imbalances and frustrations that players have been giving us feedback on.

First things first, Worlds Adrift is a PvP game, and while we’ve got a lot of PvE content planned, we always want PvP to be a major part of the game. Of course with the game being in closed beta it is by its very nature incomplete and we need to tackle issues in priority by the positive impact they add to players and the game. So starting off let’s talking boarding and ship defences.


We recently added the Atlas Pulse, which allows you to interact with your core and send a pulse of energy detaching any players attached by grappling hook and prevent grappling for a few seconds.
We have heard the feedback that with a few well timed grapples the effectiveness of this ability can be diminished and so changes will be made to how quickly you can grapple after your cable has been forcefully detached.

Something we’ve talked about before but will be making its way into the game soon is disallowing players to add momentum by using the movement controls and slowing them down while they are grappling and using salvaging tool at the same time.

Additionally containers will now need to be “broken into” by unregistered players in order to access their loot, so would-be looters are going to need to get nice and close with their cannons.

We’ve already talked about Swivel Guns as a method of quickly dispatching boarders and those pesky mantas, but alongside that will be the ability to place certain ship parts on the ground, so you’ll be able to form a defensive perimeter within your shipyard dome to get the upper hand against trespassers.




Speaking of shipyards, the shipyard dome will now act as a shield, preventing cannon shells and pistol bullets from penetrating it. Anyone attacking will now have to enter in on foot to be a threat.

On top of that, unregistered players will not be allowed to grapple onto the dome, meaning they must approach your ship on foot… and hope you haven’t set up some swivel guns to make their plan a bit more difficult.




Another aspect of PvP we’ve had a lot of feedback on is that there is little risk for attackers, their ship is safe up high or far away and defenders often feel like there is an endless onslaught with few options to truly fend off an attack.

To address this, personal revivers will now have a charge that is depleted every time a player revives on them if they are more than 50 meters from their ship. The further away from their personal reviver a player is when they die, the more this charge is depleted.

Choosing to revive at a personal reviver when its charge is depleted will cause a tremendous surge of energy that will damage the entire ship and every part attached to it. As condensed versions of revival chambers, the personal revivers need protective measures to contain the energy needed to revive a player.



Personal reviver charges are replenished once a ship has docked to a shipyard, and reviving while attached to a shipyard will not deplete these charges.

The intention of these changes is for long range attackers to only have a few attacks before they have to risk their ship being torn apart, or to force them to bring their ship in close to engage in an all out ship battle and allow their crew to revive more often. The result is the same - they’ll have to put their ship on the line.


These are our current proposed changes, and as always we’d love to hear what you, our players, think. PvP balancing will always be an ongoing process, and these features will be tweaked based on feedback and playtesting and as a result make it into the game at various points over the coming months, but now’s your chance to have your input and let us know if we’re heading in the right direction!

Greetings Travellers!

Today is an exciting day for Worlds Adrift. We are pleased to announce that access to the Closed Beta is opening up to territories worldwide! In previously restricted regions - for the first time you can now become a Worlds Adrift Founder.

When we first launched Worlds Adrift some technical and player experience considerations restricted our ability to release the Closed Beta in certain territories. However many of you told us that you would rather have access now and to help in the open development process of Worlds Adrift - we agree.

However we are still a small team with big ambitions to craft an MMO unlike any other. Please keep the following in mind:

- Servers are still EU and USA based only, so you may experience latency issues depending on your distance to these servers.

- While this post may be in your local language, the game itself and all customer support will remain in English only until a future date.

- Worlds Adrift Founder Packs will now automatically be available to purchase from WorldsAdrift.com and Steam in your region. Becoming a Founder grants you immediate access to the Closed Beta.

We are looking forward to hearing what you think about the game, your ideas and to have your support as we move towards a full Steam Early Access launch.

Welcome to Worlds Adrift, the skies are now yours to explore!

The Worlds Adrift team

Greetings island builders!

A couple of months ago, we released a blog where we mentioned that we were working on major updates for the Island Creator - updates that would also affect the adventures of all players in Worlds Adrift. If you haven't read that blog, we encourage you first head over and give it a read, for a bit more context for this post.

We're getting closer to releasing the first of the Island Creator Gameplay Updates, and we wanted to share exactly what'll be in it with you!

Turrets



There are a variety of different types of turrets that you can now place on your islands, ranging from smaller Light Turrets all the way to Explosive Turrets that'll also target ships. We foresee people using them to protect high value areas on their island that are filled with loot.



One of the turret types is a bit different from the others: it uses a similar technology to players' grappling hooks. When it attaches to a player, it reels her in until she's close enough to be shocked and flung away. 



We don't think using your entire turret budget on a circle of these is the greatest idea for gameplay reasons but it just goes to show what is possible with the systems. Perhaps someone might design a secret area that a player could only reach after being dragged to the entrance by a tether turret.

Fighting Back



With these added threats, island makers will need to gauge the difficulty of their islands. Within the main game there'll be multiple ways to destroy turrets, and teamwork will make the task exponentially easier, so we're adding a tester pistol to the Island Creator.

Its power will be adjustable to make the task of disabling the turrets easier or harder to simulate different weapons or player skill levels in game. The test player will now also have a health bar that uses the same impact resolution/fall damage and turret damage as the game, so you can really fine tune your puzzle designs with a decent idea how they will feel in game.

But how do you make an area truly inaccessible when everyone has a grappling hook? That brings us to another part of this update:

Unclimbable Surfaces

We're including a range of building blocks that cannot be grappled or climbed on, just like a ship during the effects of an atlas pulse. These will allow for more elaborate platforming puzzles. To add a little danger, we're also adding spikes and barbed wire to create a sense of danger for any potential explorers.



Bringing all of these things together, we have a video that shows how all these mechanics could affect exploring islands in Worlds Adrift in the future:

https://youtu.be/aYbgbj2Ovrg

Note that this gauntlet has a very high difficulty - you can thank a certain sadistic island builder for this one - and most islands will not be this hard! It will ultimately be up to the island builders to decide on the difficulty of their island dungeon. On our side, we'll tweak the looting system to accommodate this new addition to the game: If a container or chest isn't looted for a certain period of time (due to the challenge of the dungeon, the cleverly hidden location of the chest, or the difficulty of reaching its island) the chest will accumulate more and better rewards, awaiting a plucky adventurer to claim for her own!

We expect this update to be released in September. You may have also seen on Twitter here and here a preview of the Kioki architecture, a brand new culture from the past we'll be releasing assets for soon.

Looking forward to seeing everybody go wild with this whole new aspect of the game!

Greetings travellers,

Ahead of larger work on anti-cheating measures, we’re releasing Hotfix 0.1.4.5 today. Most changes are related to exploits, balancing, and bugs, and while this is a step forward, rest assured we’re aware of additional exploits that we’re working on! Full list of changes below:

WORLDS ADRIFT CLOSED BETA 0.1.4.5 HOTFIX NOTES

- A duping exploit has been fixed.
- A brief delay between uses of the shipbuilding tool has been implemented, to prevent a synchronisation error allowing ship parts to stack on top of each other.
- An exploit that allowed players to display an alias for their player name has been fixed.
- Metal scrap pieces inside scrap deposits would sometimes be buried too deep; other times they would seem to only spawn when the deposit was completely shattered. Both would make harvesting metal more difficult than intended, and both are now fixed.
- The atlas-infused centers of metal scrap deposits are now sturdier, and take roughly 50% more salvage blasts before exploding.
- Occasionally, falling decks and panels could fall right through islands. This should no longer happen.

We’ve been following the feedback on framerate issues and temporary client freezes while playing the game, and have come up with a much-needed fix to make the gameplay smoother. Here’s the story behind the improvements and what’s next for the team on this front, so you are up to date with our latest work.

When a studio gives its devs the best rigs around in order to improve their productivity while creating a game, it also risks causing a serious side-effect: routinely the team packs more graphical demands into the title than they should, unaware they’re breeding performance issues for most players later down the line who don’t run on such top-end machines.

You would be forgiven to think this is the case with Worlds Adrift, given its hardware requirements. But that’s not the entire story…

When we started development on the game, the decision was made to use ‘texture atlases’, which are large 4K texture files that contains textures for several different objects – so instead of the client having to load tons of small textures, it uses a few shared large ones, intended to save on graphics memory by being referenced multiple times by different objects.

The problem is, due to the nature of how the game packs and streams its content from the server to the client, the opposite happened: large 4K textures were duplicated in the client for every object in the scene. This resulted in humongous graphics memory usage, generating lower framerates and, at times, client freezes that spoiled the game experience.

We’ve been hard at work fixing this issue, which happened to be more complex than its nature suggests, and interlinked all over the place with the way the game communicates with the server. There was (and still remains) some code detangling to do, but we’ve already achieved significant savings and improvements to memory usage, which should now be reflected as better FPS and less severe freezes in the last game update.

We’ll continue to improve this on the next updates, doubling-down on optimising the game on other fronts to improve rendering on current machines, and adding graphical settings to make it compatible with a wider range of GPUs and CPUs. The goal is to make the game very easy to run on lower-end machines (with settings turned down), and lightning-fast on high-end setups without compromising its visuals.

Lastly, there’s an incoming round of VFX optimisations aimed at making most visual effects more striking and beautiful, while also improving their performance. We’ll share these in another update shortly so you can see what it’s coming… the work to make Worlds Adrift better all the time continues!

Henrique

Gamer-in-Chief

Hello Skyfarers,

IGP (= Indie Game Promoter) is regularly covering Worlds Adrift on his channel since we launched into Closed Beta at the end of May. His Worlds playlist already has ten videos by now and each one represents really a lot of work and cares for the game and community.

He is also a really good YouTube host, the videos are very entertaining to watch so we wanted to make sure to share his latest video where he builds a new Armored ship and explained in details how to build the same. You might find a few ideas to inspire your next ship design or maybe you can go on his channel and give him extra tips!

https://youtu.be/vYV_539BS7Y

Greetings travellers,

Over the last couple of days, we’ve received a number of reports of cheating in Worlds Adrift, and videos that were shared online showing how to cheat in the game. We aren’t the first game to deal with this problem, and in hindsight we should have rolled out anti-cheat mechanisms by now, but we thought that during Closed Beta we could do without it… this was clearly our mistake.

We’d like to make two statements regarding cheating:

First, the dev team has now elevated this to the highest priority. We are moving developers off feature development to anti-cheat. We will have a solution in place soon, during Closed Beta.

Secondly, we will be handing out permanent bans for the players we identify as cheaters. It should come as no surprise that modifying the client in order to gain an advantage, especially via third party programs, is a violation of our Terms & Conditions http://www.bossastudios.com/terms-condition/

If you find a bug, or an exploit, or a cheat, the right way to help the team and support the game is to reach out to us using this link: https://support.bossastudios.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Thanks for understanding, and see you in the skies!


The Worlds Adrift team

Greetings travellers,

We are glad to share that more Founder's Packs are now available on our official website.The packs are expected to be available until Friday around 11:59 pm (UK time)

Last month, OliverAge24 & Henrique created a series of tutorial that we shared in this blog article. The goal was that it could be used as a good entry point to Worlds Adrift if you are new and want to have a few tips that aren't specifically explained in the game. Worlds Adrift was created with the idea that discovering things on your own through experimentation is part of the fun, and this is how we encourage you to get into Worlds Adrift. Having said that, not everyone approaches the game with that mindset -  some players are interested in getting more info, more tips, more explanation a little bit faster, and this is totally fine.

This is where YOU, the great Worlds community, come to the rescue and help us with the official wiki. Sometimes it can be a bit tricky to browse a wiki, and usually, you need to know what you are looking for. What about a guide? Like an old school manual you used to find in the box of games that you bought? We have three amazing players that have created really in-depth guides that cover a lot of topics from getting started with the basics to game mechanic explanation and even shared some tricks!

fviktor created this great guide (updated during Closed Beta 0.1.3.7) - http://www.ferenczi.eu/worlds-adrift/guide/

Jamesm2w worked on this steam guide, it's even available in Turkish! (updated today, August 16) - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=932986882

Ashguard has a series of question and answers available here and he is also super active in the comments to reply any question. (updated today, August 16) - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=941099276

ZomB Turtles and Sneaky Emu made this one (updated on May 29) - https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=933004497

Keep in mind that while these guides are detailed, they are not official so may or may not be correct or up-to-date! That is quite a lot of hard work and love put into these guides. If you used the guides and they helped you, don't hesitate to reach out to the guys to say thanks or leave a comment here below :)

Now you should be well-armed to become a Founder from this week and explore the skies!

Greetings travellers,

We recently announced the new update, and we are super excited to share that it's now live and available to all players! Since we launched the Closed Beta, the team has been entirely focused on squishing bugs and working on performance improvements so that our Founders can have as an enjoyable experience as possible. For the first time, with update 0.1.4.1, we will introduce new features into the game. Rest assured that we are well aware there are still many bugs to be crushed and that we WILL keep working on client / server side performance, which is why the patch notes below contains quite a (long) list of bug fixes on top of the new features!

We are really looking forward to see how players will make use of the new Atlas Pulse against boarding parties and how you will use the rotating ship part to improve your ship design customisation. Enough with the words, have a look at this short video showing off the new features we have added:

https://youtu.be/PQmgGh0rcjA

NEW FEATURES

• Atlas cores have gained an on-interact ability to send a pulse through the whole ship. The pulse will detach all grappling hooks and climbers, and prevent grappling or climbing for a brief period. This function has a cooldown and uses an atlas shard.
  
• Atlas cores and their upgrades now provide additional lift based on the materials used in their construction.
  
• Players can now find and craft more convenient light sources than the torch. These are equippable in your character’s gear slots, freeing her hands for other tools. Equipped gear items are toggled with T, Spacebar, and V, depending on the slot they fit in.
  
• Players can now freely rotate ship parts when placing them. Tapping Z will continue to rotate an object by 90 degrees, but holding Z allows the player to rotate them more precisely. Some ship parts are still restricted to certain orientations (e.g., engines and wings).
  
• With free-rotate implemented, the schematics for railings are finally being seeded into the world.
  
• Player names no longer display indiscriminately. Crewmates (and in the future, Alliance mates) will display their names when in range, but other characters will only display their names if moused over. In addition, all character names are blocked by line of sight.
  
• Foliage and grass now blow in the wind.
  
  
  NOTABLE BUGFIXES
  
  
• The distance calculation for nearby revival chamber now happens at death instead of respawn, and ignores vertical distance. Crewmates should rarely respawn at different islands now, much less different biomes.
  
• After players travelled some distance away from their registered shipyard and returned, they would sometimes enter a broken state where they couldn’t pick up ship parts with their shipbuilding tool. This has been fixed.
  
• Sometimes sunken, deteriorating ship frames would not be salvageable; this should be fixed now.
  
• Death bags should no longer smash into things and do damage.
  
• Ship docking should happen more smoothly and naturally again.
  
• Wings and engines are now mirrored instead of rotated 180 degrees when being placed on opposite sides of a hull, for the purposes of visual symmetry. Note: there is a bug where occasionally these do not display properly.
  
• Males now play the male vocalisations instead of the female ones.
  
• Pressing Esc when placing an item cancels the placement instead of opening the menu. Quite the technical feat, we know.
  
• Impassable storms at the edge of the world no longer show a fully black screen - even if it ended up being a very clear indicator to turn around, it was unintended!
  
• Every once in a while a strange black void would appear on islands, rendering everything inside the sphere black. This has been fixed.
  
• Various UI fixes.
  
• Various optimisations and load balancing to improve framerates and client performance have been performed.
  
  
  NOTABLE BALANCE CHANGES AND TWEAKS
  
  
• Stormwalls and sandstorms are more difficult to navigate through again, as they constantly turn ships off course now.
  
• The damage calculation formula from physics collisions has been revamped. The ultimate goal is to make ships less fragile, and to reduce the fear in your crewmates' eyes when a loose part slides around your ship interior. Chain reactions should happen less often now, but this is a work in progress, with a comprehensive damage system rehaul to come in future patches.
  
• The Badlands are much less habitable now. Very few players will want to - or be able to - stay there indefinitely, as there will no longer be any revival chambers or fuel(!) in the entire biome.
  
• Resources' stats have been rebalanced and some errors fixed. Farewell, golden combustion internals; your effectiveness was a spreadsheet error!
  
• Individual stats on schematics now have a minimum possible value that depends on the schematic's rarity.
  
• Characters now need to be standing or rappelling (i.e., have their feet on a surface) to equip or unequip clothing and gear - including gliders and the new lights. In a future patch, there will be a larger rework of the glider to make it both more useful over short distances and less exploitable for long-distance travel.
  
• Tweaks have been made to how ships turn. Large ships can now turn more easily when not flying at speed.
  
• Grappling to a shell shot out of a cannon will snap your rope now.
  
• The placeholder crow’s nest model has been remade.

Hey skyfarers,

Today we wanted to feature a video from Criken and the cheerful crew that joined for this adventure and fun ship design experiment! Tomato, MrLawlman and Kiwo were part of this journey.

It involves quite a few good laughs and the construction of a ship that is looking a lot of like one you might have seen in a very famous science-fiction franchise before! ;-)

https://youtu.be/xT66swaZS3k

The Crew:

Criken
Tomato - https://www.youtube.com/user/Tomatoan...
MrLawlman - https://www.twitch.tv/mrlawlman1
Kiwo - https://www.twitch.tv/kiwo
Edited by Shayne Hawke

Thank you guys for making and sharing such a fun video!