Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG - Stormtrooper
Important notification for all CRONUS employees.
Dear employees!
CRONUS foundation is grateful to you for your hard work, academic studies, implemented technologies and maintaining order at C-21 facility. Thanks to your work our station can boast about new discoveries!
Delivered artifact has been fully studied by us, the information on properties has been forwarded to the head CRONUS office. Now you can quietly celebrate Halloween! Chief Administrator Vince Frederick has already been notified about the organization of the party in the laboratory (the most spacious rooms at the site).
*The artifact will be removed from the site in the coming days.
**Dr. Hawtorne was detained for spreading misinformation about the dangers of the artifact. All results of his experiments were never confirmed.
We would like to remind you that Encased is on sale right now! Now is the perfect time to join the foundation and take your first steps under the Dome.
Steam page and Steam community are the most important for us - we are going to follow up those closely for your feedback on the game.
The game is still in the development so if you want to stay in touch on other channels than Steam you can follow us on social media and visit other cool resources with game updates information new artworks and lore pieces.
Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG - Stormtrooper
Greeting, employees!
Today we have an important announcement from the C.R.O.N.U.S.: Halloween is almost here. In honor of this, C.R.O.N.U.S. offers you a lucrative contract!
From October 28 to November 1, any employee can move under the Dome on more favorable terms, and give himself completely for the future of mankind!
_________________ We remind you that "Trick or Treat" is a joke. Fines, punishment and correctional labour are clearly written in the Black Wing instructions.
Steam page and Steam community are the most important for us - we are going to follow up those closely for your feedback on the game.
The game is still in the development so if you want to stay in touch on other channels than Steam you can follow us on social media and visit other cool resources with game updates information new artworks and lore pieces.
Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG - CRONUS EMPLOYEE
Encased stream is live now! Check it out! The creative director of Dark Crystal Games, Vyacheslav Kozikhin and Scott Hamm, the senior english writer of Encased and Age of Decadence, will be with you.
Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG - Stormtrooper
Patch note for version v0.14.1024.1302
Today we release the fourth hotfix that fixes a number of errors that interfere with the normal functioning of the game. All balance edits will be included in the fifth hotfix, work on which is already in full swing.
After its release, all the studio’s forces will be thrown to the first content patch, the same one that we talked about in the Kickstarter update. The original plan remains unchanged: in December we plan to please you with an update that will reveal part of the main storyline and literally transform the game.
Thanks again for complaints and suggestions: it is your support, your comments and bug reports that help us to quickly fix errors and regularly release fixes. We study each message, so if something has not been fixed, this does not mean that we do not care: all changes will necessarily appear in the following patches. Please continue to send us bug reports, this is important!
The list of changes is below. But before reading it, we recommend that you familiarize yourself with this incredibly warm article in PC Gamer.
Here’s the list:
Fixed the game build: starting with hotfix 5, all updates will become much more compact,
Nashville, Residential Floor: patency on location, fixed,
UI: fixed interface error when applying the Hacking skill and choosing a tool for hacking,
UI: items equipped with a player are now marked with a special icon during barter,
Magellan, Administrative Floor: patency on location fixed,
Magellan, Residential Floor: fixed battery check in a discharged elevator,
Magellan, Training Ground: patency on location was fixed,
Magellan, Training Ground: fixed the use of a canister on the generator,
Magellan Reactor Room: now you can’t bet on Rocker if you accused its owner of doping,
Magellan, Lab Floor: the mechanics of treatment of Dr. Burdansky and the Medkom-72 apparatus fixed,
Gunsmith's House: rewards added to ammo and food drawers,
Gunsmith's House: the approach to the Vega machine gun has been fixed,
Gunsmith's House: increased Heinrich Stolman character level,
Nashville, Excavation Area: added ability to use the artifact during battle,
Nashville, Offices: patency on location fixed, now you can sit on sofas,
The game is still in the development so if you want to stay in touch on other channels than Steam you can follow us on social media and visit other cool resources with game updates information new artworks and lore pieces.
Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG - Stormtrooper
We’ll be streaming Encased this Friday! Tune in to hear answers to the most interesting and important questions live and learn about the nearest development plans!
Come yourself, call your friends and leave your questions in the comments section here!
I’m in a crowd of gamblers, all craning our necks at flickering security monitors to watch a group of rats scurry through narrow tubes. I had to slip a guard 100 Combonds just to watch the race: She looked the other way while I shimmied down an elevator shaft into a cavernous reactor room, my radiation meter ticking up every second. I’ll have to visit the lab later, but it was worth it. Cherry—a rat I’d heard her owner boast about just before I placed my bet—pips the leader at the post, and I net a tidy profit.
Later, I help an engineer catch a rat that’s nested beneath the floors of a transport bay filled with rusty cars. I consider giving it a new life as a sprinter in the irradiated depths, but it seems cruel. Instead, I stash it in my inventory, and now I’m carrying a rat in a cage around with me as I blast mutated bugs with a shotgun, crack once-genius scientists over the head with an electric baton, and try to figure out why the whole world has gone to hell.
Together Preston and I, as I’ve named him, have completed Encased’s first act. We’re happy to report that despite being nine months from release out of Early Access, Encased already feels like a deep, complex post-apocalyptic RPG full of mini storylines that will easily steal 40 hours of my life. The turn-based combat is entirely average, but I like how vividly Encased creates its world and the social structure within it, before wrapping everything in a shroud of mystery. It starts by explaining its rigid, rules-driven society and ends with me floating through an imaginary world of smoke as the shapes of characters drift around me.
The setting goes something like this. Humans have discovered a giant indestructible dome in the desert, believed to contain invaluable artifacts from an ancient civilization called the Forefathers. The world’s great and good flock to it, drawn by grand visions of what they might find inside—but once you go in, you can’t come back out.
Upon arriving at Magellan, the first stop for dome newbies, it’s immediately clear just how fractured society is. Everyone is classified into one of five jobs: Orange Wing for prisoners shipped in as unskilled labour, Blue Wing for engineers, Black Wing for soldiers, White Wing for scientists, and Silver Wing for financiers. You can feel the weight of the hierarchy, and your registration is a complex administrative process that takes you to every floor of the station.
The role you pick drastically changes your playthrough: as a scientist, I arrived with the aim of researching the Forefathers and advancing humankind. I could’ve equally been an Orange Wing-er in handcuffs, tasked only with my survival. My White Wing status means I can freely roam the laboratory level, and other scientists instantly like me more. But many dialogue options are greyed out, either because they’re only open to other factions or because my tech, criminal or leadership skills aren’t high enough.
That dialogue system provides lots of ways to solve a given problem. When a Black Wing soldier staggers back to Magellan dragging an injured comrade, I can pass a Survival check to help him hang on until doctors arrive, a First Aid check for a more invasive approach, a Dismantling check to carefully prize his armor off, or inject him with a med kit, provided I’ve got one in my inventory.
That freedom extends to whole questlines. I’m offered an apartment on a lower floor of Magellan, provided I can find a stolen watch. I can intimidate a local know-it-all to cough up the culprit, or take a gentler approach and steal some chemicals from the lab for him in exchange for the information. Alternatively, I can find the thief’s dropped ID card and confront them, or turn them into the floor’s security guard. I can even just head upstairs to security HQ and ask the station’s CCTV operator to examine old footage.
Your route is never prescribed and there’s no quest markers, so you actually have to think about what to do next. After your orientation, you’re asked to investigate a missing team at the C12-Nashville facility, and you’re told to speak to a specific person in Magellan’s labs for some extra med kits before you head out. In most games, you’d know exactly where that person was: here, you have to hunt them without the aid of a floating arrow. It immediately made me feel more a part of the world.
The combat is simple and based on percentage chances to hit, which leads to fights where both sides waft aimlessly at each other with baseball bats. But planning for combat is fun: Every consumable, from pot noodles to steroid pills, grants you a different stat boost. My Deftness is too low for my favorite baton weapon, but coffee boosts it, so I spend every spare moment in canteens and kitchens, hunting caffeine.
I’d like to see more ways to get past enemies without resorting to weapons. You can stealth past turrets using ventilation shafts, but most of my last two hours of Encased’s first act (two more are coming by the end of Early Access) were spent shooting enemies with shotguns or mashing them with my trusty baton, gulping down coffee and munching noodles between battles. The combat isn’t satisfying enough to sustain that, and I would’ve loved to talk myself through these situations, or at least program some security turrets to do the hard work for me.
Encased could also do with a key for highlighting objects you can interact with so you don’t miss anything (that ID card was tricky to spot). The dialogue has a fair few typos alongside some awkward turns of phrases, too. But on the whole, Encased is remarkably polished at this point: the quests I played all worked, and worked intuitively. The ending, without spoiling anything, was vague enough to leave me with plenty of questions, but concrete enough that I could start forming theories about the strange goings-on around C12-Nashville. I'm looking forward to finding out if I'm right as Encased finishes development.
Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG - Stormtrooper
One whole year has passed since our Kickstarter campaign – it is both too much and too little. To us, it still feels like just a couple of months ago. But looking back at these past 12 months, we can’t stop thinking about what Encased looked like when the Kickstarter launched, where we’re at now and, of course, where the game will be in a few short months. What we’ve come to realize is that this year was damn long, and a lot was accomplished.
In today’s update we will show you some old screenshots, boast about new ones, and tell you how Encased has grown and will continue to grow in the near future.
First Demo
The first months of game development involved a *lot* of writing.
We created dozens of documents totaling hundreds of pages, addressing every aspect of civilization under the Dome. Before the first explorer ever traversed the dead barrens, we already knew how many inhabitants the Dome had, what they eat, what kinds of cars they drove, and what kind of community (or rather, communities) was being built upon the ruins of this ancient technological artifact of the distant desert.
The very first version of the game produced in the spring of 2018 was a tech demo, where a human avatar with asset pack animations ran around on grey sand. Sometimes grey sand was replaced with grey caves or grey stones. Other times, as a big exception, the game showed landscapes inspired by Tarkovsky films. However this joy was short-lived, and the faulty camera would inevitably bump up against another relic cobbled together from primitive polygons. At the time, our modelers were struggling with huge and complex tasks, like creating a system for composite characters, and the game was populated by a few crude models created by our main scripter.
Kickstarter Demo
By September 2018, Encased already had a completely different look. It was the summer we were planning for our Kickstarter launch, and we were working around the clock to prepare the game for public display. The demo was still rather empty but was already playable, and the scenery was vastly improved. Our Kickstarter audience got to see the very first version of Magellan Station... Looking back, we’re surprised at how small it seems – all of last year’s Magellan would fit within the storage level today.
Sometimes it seems as if that Kickstarter demo station was scattered around the game world by a powerful explosion. It may appear to have disappeared without a trace, but even now you can find bits of content in Magellan from that first demo: the arrogant Dean Rayhet, the sleeping soldier Keith Boseman with his pretentious attitude, and the love letters between two scientists... It all started in the September 2018 demo.
The Early 2019 Game
But some things from those days remain unchanged. The station was conceived as the starting point of the prologue and remained so ever since.
The prologue itself has been redone many times; half of the original content consisted of text-based vignettes. In the first version (which was never completely finished, and wasn’t included in the game), events unfolded at the Nashville facility from the very beginning.
The fate of the characters accompanying the protagonist was also completely different: you can still meet the engineer Duncan and scientist Sebastian at Magellan, but Sarah from Silver Wing and the Orange Fritz turned into additional portraits for the player. What happened to Bao, a recruit from Black Wing, we ourselves do not know. Perhaps he is still wandering somewhere under the Dome...
Early Access Version
The spring and summer of 2019 remain in our memory as a wild, never ending race. The creative search and seemingly endless series of alterations completed, it was time to polish the old content and actively produce the new.
The studio ceased to joke about the combat system. It was finally online and worked as intended, along with the global map and random events. Like the gas station run by the one-legged old man or the Nashville facility, overrun with psychopaths.
The Early Access release was postponed twice and finally, on September 26, our players received the first EA version of Encased, which included a story prologue and a global map with random events and a variety of hassles. Now everyone who’s gone through Nashville’s hell has had the opportunity to feed lead to giant cockroaches, and encountered the mutated rodents, MOBIOS (better known to the community as “crabs”), aggressive robokids and bandits populating the barrens.
Despite these delays to the release, we had still not defeated all the bugs, so immediately set to work on hotfixes and balance improvements. By the way, another fix is coming out very soon.
Later in 2019
We really want to show you how Encased will evolve over the next couple of months.
We heeded your comments and put a lot of effort into making the game as exciting as possible. We started reworking the prologue once again, removing the text-heavy opening vignette. The passenger capsule and landing pad have instead been turned into full-fledged locations. Game events start there, and the player travels to Nashville immediately afterwards. This will make the prologue more dynamic and less protracted. Don’t worry about Magellan Station though! That location is too well liked by our players to send off into oblivion. We decided to move the station to a later stage of the game, and expand it for deeper exploration without tedious minor tasks like saving humanity.
Jokes aside, Magellan will play a significant role in the storyline, and the station itself will be significantly altered. If you wanted to know how CRONUS has changed since the old world collapsed, Magellan Station, now under control of the New Committee, will provide the answers.
‘Story-driven content’ are the key words to describe the upcoming, large scale update. The open world will be accessible much faster, and feature more random encounters. We’re working to make these more than minor local events. They should act as pieces of a puzzle comprising the atmosphere and setting. It is as important for us to show how the world changed after the Incident as it is to talk about the various factions vying for territory under the apocalyptic Dome.
We’re also working on the party members management system, so companions will definitely appear in the update. The main character’s partners don’t just act as cannon fodder and fire support. Each one has a story and complex personality, and the player will have to spend time and effort to gain the trust of their companions. Companion quest lines will be supplemented throughout the entire Early Access period, and the selection of available companions will be expanded.
The crime system will also be improved – people will become more responsive to theft and hacking attempts.
We’re working on ability trees. The Heavy and High-Tech Weapons branches will be expanded and revised, and Psi Abilities will finally become functional.
We’re making changes to controversial mechanics, such as hunger and thirst. The overall usability of the game and all interfaces will be improved, as well as experience progression, medication effects, and munitions.
Weapons will receive a modular modifications system. We started working on this a long time ago but did not have time to implement it for Early Access. Spare parts and upgrades will be available to replace standard components, increasing weapon stats. Weapons and armor will wear out and break down; maintaining them will require repair kits. You’ll also be able to destroy an enemy’s armor by means of new anomaly types, as well as with mines and traps.
The perks system will be significantly expanded. At the moment, only a few perks are available for reading books, but in Patch 1 your protagonist will be able to adjust his progression by picking a perk every several levels. In addition, reputation perks will be obtainable through quarreling, or becoming best friends, with a whole faction or companion. There will also be passive perks for mastering specific types of weapons, wearing armor, evading enemy attacks, killing various opponents – humanoids, mutants, robots and other foes.
We won’t say what will happen next, but one thing is for sure: the story of Encased has just begun. There’s a long road ahead, and we’re thrilled to be walking it with you.
Steam page and Steam community are the most important for us - we are going to follow up those closely for your feedback on the game.
The game is still in the development so if you want to stay in touch on other channels than Steam you can follow us on social media and visit other cool resources with game updates information new artworks and lore pieces.
Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG - CRONUS EMPLOYEE
Patch notes for version 0.14.1004.1801
All this week we’ve been working hard on bug fixing, correcting typos, and other annoying little things that spoil player immersion in Encased. The main changes in this patch concern the interface and general player experience of the game. We’ve also addressed annoying critical errors like freezes and memory leaks.
We read every review carefully, and therefore have also made several balance improvements regarding the cost and characteristics of some items. Gameplay balancing is complicated, and work in this area will continue in upcoming patches.
Next week we’ll talk about the upcoming content patch. For now, here’s our complete list of fixes.
Interface: using the Alt key, you can now click on a grid cell obscured by the character or an object;
Interface: improved looting when several corpses are lying on top of each other;
Interface: the “Equalise” button has been added to the Barter tab;
Interface: when the player attempts to confirm a disadvantageous deal, the barter tab warns them;
Interface: fixed weight display in items stack tooltip;
Interface: workbenches are marked on the local map now;
Interface: added camera rotation speed adjustment;
Interface: fixed status effects counter on the character’s badge;
Interface: fixed fractional numbers in equipment and stats tooltips;
Interface: fixed “create some” and “create maximum” buttons text;
Balance: changed servoshell parameters;
Balance: changed the Nashville parking lot shotgun parameters;
Balance: fixed the Nashville parking lot secrets discovery rewards;
Balance: fixed work gloves cost and parameters;
AI: fixed the behavior of AI after reloading several times;
Fixed memory leak when changing locations;
Fixed freezing when exiting locations during random combat encounters;
Fixed game freezing on some configurations;
Fixed freezing when putting on servoshell;
Fixed servoshell duplication bug;
Fixed “Heartfelt talk” random encounter;
Fixed a bug where the player did not receive experience for discovering certain locations;
Steam: achievement alerts have been fixed.
Descriptions added to three types of batteries;
Nashville office floor: portrait of Louise Dekker-Schulz improved;
Nashville office floor: fixed location black screen;
Storage level: fixed car trunk access;
Expanded the selection of portraits available to the player;
Status effects: mercury consumption status effect changed;
Gas Station: Aaron Malville now has a shotgun;
Gas Station: basement passability fixed;
The Point: fixed Right to the Punishment Cell quest errors;
Nashville Sewers: faulty passage fixed.
All this work would not have been possible without your participation – most of these errors were discovered and reported by you. Thanks for helping us improve Encased for everyone!
Steam page and Steam community are the most important for us - we are going to follow up those closely for your feedback on the game.
The game is still in the development so if you want to stay in touch on other channels than Steam you can follow us on social media and visit other cool resources with game updates information new artworks and lore pieces.
Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG - Stormtrooper
Almost two years ago we started the development of Encased, our dream game. Almost immediately, one of the best, in our opinion, community of RPG fans began to gather around the project.
We've been through a lot together: the most difficult days at the start, the Kickstarter campaign, long months of development, and now early access. At every stage, you gave us incredible support, showing how much people need our game.
We are grateful for your incredible feedback, comments, ideas, suggestions, useful critiques, and extraordinary look at the story and the world of our game. You inspire us to achieve new heights. We are sure that this is only the beginning of a long journey and glad that you are with us from the very beginning.
Encased: A Sci-Fi Post-Apocalyptic RPG - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (John Walker)
I have a healthy hesitation when it comes to Early Access RPGs. It almost never seems like the right method to deliver the genre. And then along comes Fallout tribute, Encased, and I m pretty well converted. While this first playable release of the game certainly has bugs and issues, it offers a hefty chunk of a completely absorbing and intriguing RPG world, that is quite astonishingly deep. And while future updates promise to maintain your progress, I ve finished the ten or so hours of game on offer here with a desire to start it over anyway, to see how else it could all play out.
