Question: Back in 2013 when Survarium was announced and the Alpha version of the game was available, Vostok had plans to create a rather ambitious Freeplay mode to go along with it. Freeplay's description (When reading the previous developer diaries) sounds like it was a Battle Royale style concept, even before the genre was widely known globally. Subsequently there were many changes to the game's vision, gameplay and visual appeal. Yet many players are still unsure as to why the Freeplay mode of the game was set aside and if, in the future, it will ever become a reality, being it a changed concept or not. Can you please give us some insight into exactly what became of the concept? Daily there are players questioning this and Vostok's motives. So, perhaps this feature can set the record straight, once and for all.

VG: Ok, this will be a long read, sorry.

Freeplay has been an ambitious concept indeed, especially at the start of Survarium development, when we had neither the technology in place, nor the experience of operating a free2play game and the possible challenges behind it. So, as the development progressed, we realized that we bit off more than we could chew, and the decision was made to start with PvP as a simpler concept and then move to PvE as the next step. However, despite the seeming simplicity and less innovation required, the implementation of the former didn’t turn out as an easy road for us either – building a technology and the game at the same time considerably slowed down the process of releasing updates and the new features. That made our initial planning and expectations continuously shift.

The launch of Early Access on Steam attracted a lot of attention – we had more than 450 000 players try the game in the first month, however technically the game was not there yet to be called ready and polished, so many players left after the first try, leaving negative reviews behind, and never came back. It was a tough lesson to learn, especially in the context of a free2play game, where the players do not need to pay to be able to play and only a small percentage of them would donate in the game. Therefore, you need to sustain a fairly large and stable playerbase to be able to support the development and succeed with the game.

So retention of the players has become our main goal and the challenge. Normally you get that beaten with quick patches, continuous iterations on game balance and economy, in-game events as well as newbie-friendly content, such as tutorials etc. We did the impossible, but the pace of changes was still too slow while the volume of unresolved issues and the expectations only grew. So that turned out a double-kick for us: the stream of the players online gradually shallowed, while the revenues generated by the game did not allow us to expand the development team to speed things up. On the contrary, we had to start cutting costs and reduce the number of developers on the project to be able to continue with the game. Naturally, that didn’t help building something as big as the Freeplay mode.

In the long run, we kind of got stuck in this vicious circle of chasing the dream while being limited with resources to be able to deliver it. At some point we managed to attract more investment money into the game, which helped pump up the team and deliver a bunch of good features and content, like in-game events, new UI, the first PvE mission, new graphics renderer etc. That wasn’t the Freeplay yet, but just the first step in that direction. That effort brought good results and feedback from the community, but still not enough resources to build a vastly new experience like Freeplay in the quality that we believe would be satisfactory. So for the moment, we stick to the policy of smaller feature and content updates to improve the game step by step in hope the community of the game could grow and make the Freeplay possible.

Hi everyone! While working on Survarium 0.63 we concentrated on balancing, and in the upcoming update we want to address some of the community's concerns and suggestions. We will add new items, change certain game mechanics and update some descriptions so they are more clear and easier to understand by all players, both new and old. In addition, there will be a summer event in Survarium 0.64, which will bring unique decals and weapon camouflages as rewards.


One of our streamers, TheGamersHive, shares his breakdown of this preview, check it out!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDyBSW-H13c
BALACLAVAS FOR ALL FACTIONS

For a long time the community asked to add balaclavas into the game, since those were present in early Survarium art even before the alpha version of the game was released. So, we'll do this in Survarium 0.64! To emphasize the visual style of each faction, we created four balaclava models: one hole, three holes, buff (neck gaiter) and kufiya. Guess which design is each faction getting!

Moreover, we are adding tactical glasses, and each balaclava will have two versions: with and without the glasses. Regardless, all balaclavas are tier 3 gear with corresponding stats, and can also be equipped into a visual character slot.



NEW ASSAULT RIFLE

Even though there's a lot of various weapons in Survarium, you always ask us to add something new. Among the most requested were Steyr AUG and FAMAS – both bullpup assault rifles. But since there's an obvious lack of French weapons in the game, our choice was simple. The Famas weapon will be available as tier 5 assault rifle.



VISUAL IMPROVEMENT OF DECALS

Up to the version 0.63, decals in Survarium looked as images slapped over the character's clothes. At last, we decided to fix this and totally rework their appearance. Now decals really look like they have been embroidered and have corresponding structure. The majority of the decals in the game have been reworked, including flags.

You might not like it, but we also reduced the maximum possible size of decals: now you can't stretch them over the whole character body. There are a couple reasons for the change. Firstly, we believe that decals should not replace camouflages. Secondly, decals don't really look that good while being stretched too much.



SUMMER EVENT IN SURVARIUM

Play Survarium during the event, gather event currency (symbols of herbs, fire and sun), and exchange them for a new decal and two weapons with unique camouflages and three random modifiers: Vepr "Summer Heat 2020" and VSK-94 "Summer Heat 2020". You will also receive another decal for the first win in a PvP-match during the event. We plan to launch the event at the very end of July, and it will most likely last for 10 days.



RELEASE DATE AND OTHER CHANGES

We are changing the way points are awarded in all PvP-modes, so the list of actions better corresponds to the goal of each mode. Aside from everything else, we added new actions that award points. For instance, you will now receive them for finishing an enemy's killstreak (eliminating an enemy who is currently on a killstreak). As an experiment, in Survarium 0.64 we will disable killcam and hit indicator in ranked matches. This change is only for the ranked battles, and this is another thing that was requested by the community.

We are also changing some gameplay mechanics. Say, now C-4 disappears when the character who placed it dies. These are only the most noticeable of the upcoming changes and improvements. We will post the full Survarium 0.64 change log before the update is released, which happens in the second half of July. So very soon you will be able to see the new weapon, balaclavas, updated decals, and other changes first hand.

Discuss the upcoming changes on the forums and stay tuned!

Hello fellow survivors!

A new ranked season has started and probably many of you are playing it but don't like some of the game modes you're getting. What if we told you that there is a way to play the mode you want?
Modes are not random. Instead we have 10-minute long rotations.

Starting at midnight (UTC) matchmaking will create:

• Battery mode for 10 min
  
• TDM for 10 min
  
• Research for 10 min
  
• Search and Destroy for 10 min

This loop will repeat the whole day.

Especially for you guys Vimako made an easy to access chart in excel to use. The chart is made in (UTC) so take this into account if you're living in a different time zone.

In update 0.63, the #Survarium League store was replenished with new weapons! Here's a look at the Saiga-12 Legend at the price of 2250 league tokens! Take part in ranking matches to earn currency and purchase this and many more unique items!



В обновлении 0.63 лиговый магазин Survarium пополнился новым оружием! Сайга-12 Легенда! Цена 2250 лиговых жетонов! Примите участие в новом сезоне рейтинговых боев, чтобы заработать валюту для покупки уникальных предметов!

The Survarium June League has begun! Participate in ranking matches to earn tokens and purchase unique weapons and equipment!The league lasts until July 1, 2020.

We took some time to gather your most popular suggestions from our Discord (https://discord.gg/survarium) and sit down with the developers to flush out some answers. Below you can read their responses. Thanks to all those who keep submitting ideas, we appreciate it and together we can keep improving the game!

Title : Close Combat Weapons
Description : Adding close combat weapons like knifes, hatchets to kill enemies and diminish the close combat without specific weapons, for example you need to press the "fight" key 3 times to kill someone, not only 1 time, 35 damages/hit. And for the weapons, there is a rapidity, a knife will hit 2 or 3 times faster than a hammer or a hatchet but will deal less damages etc etc. Guns can also have new mods like a bayonet to give more damage if used in close combat. For the animations, I suppose something can be made by using the pistol first and third person fight animations for a knife or a hammer.

Answer: It might be possible to add these, besides, we already have experience with introducing the icicle in the winter event mode. But how would these melee weapons be better than current melee attack? Unless we nerf it, introducing melee weapons makes no sense. And does it really need a nerf?

Title: Ammo Crate Changes
Description: ammo crate is barely used by people, huge 4% slowdown penalty on it makes it a very rare choice. I suggest to reduce slowdown to 1 or 2% or increase slowdown on other consumables (totem has for example 0% slowdown).

Answer: We believe ammo crate provides a strong bonus, and this is the reason it has a substantial slowdown. You have to choose between taking your own ammo box or using the ones placed on the locations.

Title : PPSH Muzzle Flash
Description: let us add some barrel attachments to the PPSH. It is an amazing weapon to use. But the muzzle flash is like flash-banging yourself especially while being indoors.

Answer: That makes total sense. We will see what we can do to reduce the muzzle fire effect.

Title: Delete Minimap for Ranked
Description: In ranked do not allow minimap use at all.

Answer: That's a good suggestion to make ranked battles more tactical, but we think we need to have a poll before introducing this change. It's also possible to make other changes to ranked: for instance, remove killcam. Gonna have polls for that.

Title: C4 You Place Should Be Removed Upon Death

Answer: Will do.

Title: Weapon Toggle With Q
Description: add the option to bind Q for easier weapon switch between primary - secondary. Many other games have this and some people like myself are used to it, so i sometimes end up tapping Q when trying to change weapon and die as a result.

Answer: We might introduce this as a new action, but with a different default binding since Q button is already used by default.

Title: Reduce Team Damage by 50%
Description: 20-50% reduction in friendly fire damage would be welcome, this would cause less accidents and intentional teamkills will stand out more from the accidents. I dislike that this is a skill instead of applied to all by default, imo the skill should be changed to something else or removed entirely.

Answer: We had a discussion internally about that, but simply reducing the damage might cause more problems than it solves. For instance, it could allow for more aggressive usage of explosives (you know, like in those shooters without friendly fire where people attach C4 to their teammates or vehicles). Moreover, we are not sure the skill needs to be removed.

Title: Fix The Spawn Safe Zone
Description: prevent players from camping and sniping from inside the zone, it should be a safe place to spawn, not to stay and camp for the whole match. And please make the zone disappear when enemies reach sudden death, its so annoying having to wait 2 mins doing nothing while enemies just camp.

edit: maybe end the match when a certain number of players is not leaving the safe zone.
Answer: We already thought about that, and the possible solution is to disable the protection zone in the end of a match.

Title: Vote to Surrender Command
Description: Sometimes the matches are very unbalanced and frustrating. The 50 difference to cut the match short is not enough. This would allow the losing team to enter a command /surrender and a vote would pop up. The team must vote at least 6/8 for. If the majority of the team votes in favor the match ends and the rewards are given proportionally.

Answer: We are thinking about this functionality. In fact, we thought about adding voting before introducing current mechanics for premature match ending. But what happens, for instance, when there's a 4 v 8 match, but only 2 players on the first team choose to surrender? And this is only one of examples where it can go wrong.

Title: More Killfeed Icons
Description: add killfeed icons for:
- wallbangs (to know that you died behind the wall because of material penetration, not because of bad netcode)
- kills through smoke. (to know that there was smoke on the killcam).
- no-scope kills. (because it's cool)
- killing someone while flashed (because killcam doesn't show the guy blinded the moment he was flashed, and because it's cool)

Answer: That's a good idea, we will keep that in mind for the future updates.

System update 0.63c1 was released for Survarium
If for some reason your Steam client cannot download an update for the game, please restart the Steam client!

Survarium Patch 0.63c with balance improvements and various bug fixes is now live.



Please find the complete list of changes of the Patch below. Have a good time playing the game!

WEAPONS AND EQUIPMENT

• Since Scavengers won in the V-Day in Europe faction challenge event, prices for weapons and equipment of the faction are temporarily decreased by 50%. Prices of the other three factions decreased by 25%.
  
• Head coefficient damage decreased from 3 to 2.5.
  
• AKM: decreased initial recoil.
  
• AKS-74U: decreased initial recoil.
  
• AK-74N: decreased initial recoil.
  
• AK-74M: decreased initial recoil.
  
• Vz. 58 P: decreased initial recoil.
  
• AKMSU: decreased initial recoil.
  
• AK-12: decreased initial recoil.
  
• ASH-12: decreased initial recoil.
  
• VHS-2: changed recoil, increased dispersion. Aim time increased from 0.25 s to 0.3 sec.
  
• A-545: reload time increased from 2.4/3.2 to 2.6/3.6 sec.
  
• VSS: rate of fire decreased from 650 to 600. Aim time decreased from 0.35 to 0.3 sec.
  
• VSK-94: rate of fire decreased from 650 to 600. Reload time increased from 2.4/3.2 to 2.6/3.5 sec.
  
• Ots-02: armor piercing decreased from 14 to 12. Aim time increased from 0.15 to 0.2 sec.
  
• AEK-919K: armor penetration decreased from 14 to 12. Magazine capacity increased from 20 to 30.
  
• PP-91 "Kedr": armor penetration decreased from 14 to 12. Slowdown decreased from 2% to 1%. Slowdown when aiming decreased from 7% to 5%.
  
• PP-19-01: decreased initial recoil.
  
• H&K MP-7: decreased initial recoil.
  
• Saiga-12S: slowdown decreased from 4% to 3%.
  
• "Keeper" / "Keeper of the sun" set: bonus for 6 items "Slowdown -3%" is replaced by "Delay before the medkit effect kicks in -10%."
  
• UM-2 set: bonus for 3 items "Slowdown -2%" changed for "Protection against bleeding -30%". Bonus for 6 items: “Protection against bleeding -30%” changed for “Slowdown -3%". Bonus for 6 items: “Delay decrease before health regeneration starts” changed from 20% to 35%. Molot UM-2 pants: Slowdown decreased from 3% to 2.5%, energy costs decreased from 11% to 9%.
  
• UM-2A set: bonus for 6 items: “Delay decrease before health regeneration starts” changed from 20% to 35%. Molot UM-2A pants: slowdown decreased from 3% to 2.5%, energy costs decreased from 11% to 9%.
  
• Zubr UM-4 set: bonus for 6 items “Delay decrease before health regeneration starts” changed from 25% to 35%. Zubr UM-4 bulletproof vest: slowdown decreased from 11% to 10%. Energy costs decreased from 38% to 34%. "Zubr UM-4" pants: slowdown decreased from 3% to 2.5%. Energy costs decreased from 11% to 9%.
  
• "Bison" set: bonus for 6 items, "Delay decrease before health regeneration starts" changed from 25% to 35%. Bison body armor: Slowdown decreased from 11% to 10%. Energy costs decreased from 38% to 34%. Bison Pants: Slowdown decreased from 3% to 2.5%. Energy costs decreased from 11% to 9%.
  
• "Nomad" set. "Nomad" bulletproof vest: slowdown increased from 4% to 5.5%, energy costs increased from 14 to 19%. "Nomad" pants: slowdown increased from 1% to 1.5%, energy costs increased from 4% to 6%.
  
• Fugitive set. Fugitive bulletproof vest: slowdown increased from 4% to 5.5%, energy costs increased from 14 to 19%. Fugitive pants: slowdown increased from 1% to 1.5%, energy costs increased from 4% to 6%.
  
• Pathfinder bulletproof vest: slowdown increased from 7% to 8.5%, energy costs increased from 24% to 29%.
  
• "Seeker" bulletproof vest: slowdown increased from 7% to 8.5%, energy costs increased from 24% to 29%.
  
• "Shturm" bulletproof vest: slowdown increased from 9% to 10%, energy costs increased from 31% to 34%.
  
• "Defender" bulletproof vest: slowdown increased from 9% to 10%, energy costs increased from 31% to 34%.
  
• "Zombie" mask: changed the design so the mask looks better with various hats and helmets.

BUG FIXES

• Fixed an issue when some weapons (Saiga-12, Kriss Vector) had different characteristics across various camouflages.
  
• Fixed an issue when there was no echo from shotgun shots at the Duga radar location.
  
• Fixed an issue when points were incorrectly calculated in "Slaughter" mode. Now rules of the mode are similar to those of "Team Deathmatch". The difference between the modes is in the size of the locations.

Download Survarium 0.63c and check it out! Hopefully you'll like the changes.

You can also check the full list of changes of Update 0.63 here.

See you on the battlefield!

Today and for the next 10 days a Faction War has broken out in the world of Survarium. Choose your side and help them rise to the top. Below we have shared all the information you need to know. The rewards available, the time table of each battle and general event information! Good luck Survivors!



FACTION WAR DETAILS

• The game event will last from May 8, 2020 to May 18, 2020.
  
• Earn reputation for your favorite faction fighting in PvP-matches at specific time! The schedule of the fights awarding event reputation is at the end of the news. If you wish, you can support several factions in turn.
  
• Support a faction to receive rewards, including weapons with unique camouflage! All you need to do to get them is gather enough reputation during the event. You can get all rewards from all factions if you play long enough!
  
• Each faction has the following rewards (total reputation required is in parenthesis): 500 spare parts (10.000), 3 day Premium voucher (20.000), peaked cap with faction emblem (40.000), a weapon with unique faction camouflage (60.000) (thanks to John Rivian for the design), a box with 10 rare modules (80.000).
  
• The faction to receive the most reputation by the end of the event wins!
  
• After the event the winning faction will offer a discount on all of its equipment and weapons.
  
• The other three factions will also provide a discount, but it will be lower.
  
• Also, for the first victory during the event you will receive a decal "Victory Day 1945" (thanks to ODESSAmamaUA for the designs). With it, you can earn more reputation for the match.

FACTION WAR TIMETABLE


Peaked Cap


Valmet Rk.62 "Victory"


AK-74M "Victory"


Ots-02 "Victory"


SKS "Victory"

Survarium Patch 0.63b with balance improvements and various bug fixes is now live.



Please find the complete list of changes of the Patch below. Have a good time playing the game!

WEAPONS AND EQUIPMENT

• Equipment energy costs first introduced with Update 0.63 have been significantly reduced.
  
• Energy costs for actions (breath holding, melee attack, jump) decreased by half.
  
• Decreased values of the negative modifier on silencers.
  
• Silencers for VSK-94, SR-3M and OTS-14: negative modifier changed from "Aim time" to "Effective range".
  
• Mosin Rifle: slowdown increased from 5% to 7%.
  
• Winchester 1894: aim time increased from 0.4 to 0.6 sec.
  
• TOZ-122: slowdown increased from 6% to 8%.
  
• Remington 700: slowdown increased from 6% to 10%, aim time increased from 0.75 to 0.8 sec.
  
• SV-98: slowdown increased from 6% to 10%, aim time increased from 0.75 to 0.8 sec.
  
• ASVK: slowdown reduced from 15% to 12%, aim time decreased from 0.9 to 0.85 sec.
  
• Barrett M82: slowdown reduced from 15% to 12%, aim time reduced from 0.9 to 0.85 sec.
  
• VSSK “Vychlop”: aim time increased from 0.8 to 0.85 sec.
  
• Neostead 2000: effective range increased from 6 to 12 meters.
  
• Remington 870: effective range increased from 6 to 14 meters.
  
• KS-23M: effective range increased from 7 to 16 meters.
  
• KS-23M "Catbird" : effective range increased from 8 to 18 meters.
  
• Summer helmet is now a visual item.
  
• Snow-20 Set: added energy cost to pants and torso. Rebalanced parameters of the set items.

BUG FIXES

• Fixed an issue causing some assault rifles to have increased recoil randomization.
  
• Fixed an issue causing the player to not being able to hear the allies in a voice chat after reconnecting the headset.
  
• Fixed an issue when an error message was displayed after you accepted an invitation to a clan.

Download Survarium 0.63b and check it out! Hopefully you'll like the changes.
You can also check the full list of changes of Update 0.63 here.

See you on the battlefield!