It's hard to believe that only about a week has passed since the release of X4: Tides of Avarice and the big 5.00 update for X4: Foundations. We would like to thank you for what has turned out to be a very successful week for us. We have received loads of positive feedback, and are very happy to have welcomed so many new players to the X4 universe.

Now, we wouldn't be the Egosoft you know if we just sat back and took a break after a big release. You've probably noticed that we've already put out a couple of hotfixes for 5.00, to iron out a few bugs, and today today we're adding a third hotfix to that list. Below this news item, you'll find the complete changelogs of the three hotfixes so far.

We hope you continue to enjoy X4: Foundations and X4: Tides of Avarice! Please keep spreading the word, and don't forget to leave a review for X4: Foundations and X4: Tides of Avarice.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1701060/X4_Tides_of_Avarice/
Fixed Kyd from stranded gamestart being invulnerable.
Fixed player-owned station being selected in The Station Swindle mission of Pirate story.
Fixed captured High-Tech Traders disappearing in High-Tech Hold-Up mission of Pirate story.
Fixed incorrect pay-out when personally towing wrecked ships to processing module.
Fixed encyclopedia description text for Teuta.

Fixed Axiom refusing to fly to Woodworm Scrubs in The Past a Prison mission of Pirate story
Fixed objective sometimes reverting to Install Mod in Brantlee Northriver's Competition mission of Avarice story.
Fixed ammo selection disappearing when using ship editor in custom gamestarts.
Fixed Erlking turret blueprints not being obtainable.

Fixed Aurora Casino being selected as target in A Demonstration of Power and A Change in Management missions.
Fixed bar disappearing if player leaves early during Trading Lessons mission of Avarice story.
Fixed missing actor in bar during bar investigation during Arcadian Ambitions mission of Pirate story.
Fixed research not being possible in Avarice story when starting custom gamestart with Protectyon set to researched.
Fixed ship travelling to Avarice sometimes not being warned about Tide.
Fixed Kha'ak Forager ships not firing weapons.
Fixed game sometimes freezing when loading certain savegames.
Fixed saving sometimes taking excessively long.

Hi everyone!

As mentioned, as teased, as promised! A new, fresh-out-the-oven demo version of Harmony's Odyssey is now live on Steam, packing new content, levels, animations and most importantly, the Co-Op and Versus game modes that are the main dish of today's The MIX 10th Anniversary Showcase!
Hopefuly you tuned in and already saw all the great stuff we prepared in this update. If not, you can check it out here:

https://youtu.be/iNLNYnicQW4

Check out some of the most important updates of the demo here:

• full support for versus and cooperative modes in minigames like Spot Objects, Find the Differences etc.
  
• independent or synchronized split screen for various 2-player local minigames
  
• new levels and a plenty of updated and new in-engine cinematics
  
• a brand new "Arcade" section with extra levels to explore apart from the main story mode
  
• all puzzle levels can be played in co-op mode
  
• new UI for difficulty and game modes
  
• various improvements in camera control and block selection movement
  
• fixed incorrect cloud colors on some levels, animation glitches and other minor bugs
  
• option to skip cutscenes and other small quality of life improvements
  
• improved player's click handling in various minigames

Again, we'd like to again invite everyone to our Discord channel after checking out the new demo and share your precious feedback with us humble devs. Btw, our server is filled with great stuff:

👉https://discord.gg/e69WDgdbKW 👈

🎁 Giveaways
😃 Most awesome puzzle recommendations
💎 Exclusive content from Harmony's Odyssey
🛠️ Work-in-progress content (including some of our most crazy ideas!)
🎨 The most awesome concept art and drawings from our talented team
📅 First hand info about events, expo's and fairs
🤣 Wholesome fun!


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1531490/Harmonys_Odyssey/


Don't want to miss any news? Follow us on social media:
Harmony's Odyssey website: www.mythicowl.com
Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/MythicOwl/
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Fall in line, campers!

We’ve gathered you here today to inform you of an important camp-related video that was released during The MIX showcase! This video featured completely normal not-strange-at-all camp footage and revealed that campers will be able to attend Camp Canyonwood this summer during Early Access launch!



See you there, and if you haven’t already, be sure to Wishlist Camp Canyonwood here on Steam and to follow us on Discord and Twitter to keep up with the latest news on development.

Farewell,
Your Trusted Camp Canyonwood Counselors

• New trees!
  
• Two new enemy types
  
• Enemies now have their own unique voices and talk
  
• Hand poses can now be manually adjusted (Doesn't save between levels or deaths at the moment)

• Beefed up the recoil for some guns
  
• Simplified AI code (they're more reliable and consistent now)
  
• Changed out shotgun for the Thompson
  
• Bullets don't make fuzzy sounds anymore
  
• Updated enemy pathfinding some
  
• Fixed ammo crates not spawning in the range

Hi everyone,

for this experimental build we were mainly focusing on issue fixing and we managed to add some new features too. The Fast Sailing reduces the time needed for discovering New clusters and the Napping  feature makes the gameplay faster for the players with slower timeflow values. The Black Mangrove provides Salt.

To switch between stable and experimental game builds make sure game properties in your Steam client are set to either "Experimental" or "None" (which is the stable branch)

The Fast Sailing feature is a true game changer and we appreciate your patience and your help from the past weeks. When using Fast Sailing, searching for clusters is a breeze. What was previously a couple of real time hours is now a couple of minutes. Fast Sailing only works when you’re out on the Open Ocean. The Raft will begin to sail automatically in the actual direction for a given time interval until it gets close to a new cluster. Given the complexity of these new mechanics, the Fast Sail is fully automatic and we plan to add more interesting and unique features to it. Enjoy it and let us know what you think about this new feature.



You asked us to improve the sleeping mechanics and we are happy to announce that now you can take a nap in-game. The Napping feature makes the gameplay faster for the players with slower timeflow values. Planning your daily activities is now easier than ever. Players can now fast forward the time for shorter intervals during the day.


The Attach/Detach mechanic for Rudders, Sail Masts and Sails has been changed to work the same way like attaching Doors and Windows - Item needs to be equipped, aimed at the desired place and Attached. Strong Rope is required to fasten the item in its final location. By using this mechanic we eliminated many issues that were caused by the physics engine.



You’ve also asked for an easier way to harvest salt. We hope the new Black Mangrove tree will help. These trees grow on the shore around the tide level on some islands. They excrete a small amount of salt on their leaves which can be collected by the player.


The liquid mechanic was reworked to allow handling of multiple components at the same time. The first Multi component liquid is Salt water. This means that harvesting salt from salt water is dependent of the amount of water used. Less water gives a low salt amount and more water gives a higher salt amount.

The remaining changes and optimizations we made, will allow us in the future to spawn more rocks, sticks and various other items on the ground more efficiently. We also looked into the low FPS issues you were experiencing and are happy to announce that we optimized this too, but keep in mind that if you run the game on a low end computer you might still experience low FPS.

Changelog:

New features:

1. Fast Sail
2. Napping
3. Black Mangrove
4. Collecting Salt from Black Mangroves
5. Multi component liquid

General:

1. New Attach/Detach mechanic for Rudder, Sail Mast, Sail
2. Performance optimizations

Fixes (highlights):

1. Smoker issues
2. Sometimes disappearing Doors and Windows
3. Fruit and Fronds respawn on trees
4. Canoe and Raft sometimes disappears
5. Dropped objects falling into the ground
6. 'Starred' recipes' issues
7. UI stuck issues
8. Pond not acting as water (wet, floating, sounds)
9. Raft movement issues
10. Building blueprint placement issues
11. Sextant usage issues
12. Local & Global map drawing issues

For the complete list of all (~72) bugfixes please see our hotfix list (english only):

Hotfix 1
Hotfix 2
Hotfix 3
Hotfix 4
Hotfix 5
Hotfix 6
Hotfix 7
Hotfix 8
Hotfix 9
Hotfix 10

The next update will bring exciting new additions to the game. We will also continue fixing more complex issues. We plan to add Mud material, Primitive Stove, Water filtering, Reworked tutorials, Map UI, Old Telescope, Old Pistol, Spear, Dolphins, Simple Quests, Building modules aging and so on. We will work also on solving the new issues and we will recheck some older issues too. Other new features will be added as implementing the planned features and fixing issues will allow us to.

We have set up a Patreon for those who wish to support game development. Announcement page is here: Patreon News.

Thank you for your patience and for your constructive feedbacks helping us to get rid of the issues as fast as is possible.

Do you like our game and want to help even more during development? We look forward to every positive review posted on our Steam page and thank everyone who decides to support us along the way!


G4GTeam.

If you have any further questions do not hesitate to ask us. We will try to answer your questions in detail.


Patreon
Discord
Twitter
Facebook
Youtube

Patch Notes:

• Base movement speed has been increased slightly
  
• Player model size has been increased slightly
  
• Almost every dungeon room has received a graphical update
  
• Wind has been removed as an element and is replaced with Earth
  
• Whirlwind is renamed to Firestorm and is now a Fire spell
  
• Leeching Strike and Drain Life are both classified as Earth spells
  
• Added multiple light sources and pillars throughout the dungeon
  
• Teleport VFX is now fixed
  
• Critical hits should be fixed
  
• Boss spawns are now fixed and will no longer cause the dungeon to not be proceedable
  
• Fixed the issue where the boss gate wasn't clickable
  
• Added an altar near the boss gate. Currently gives full corruption but in the future the % will scale with the amount of monsters that you kill in the dungeon
  
• Added an option to reset progress in the escape menu (demo only)
  
• All AoE ability damage has been lowered
  
• Monster health has been increased
  
• Added shadows to the dungeon once again

Hello everyone, RX here. It's been a while since I've spoken at length about what goes on behind the scenes, so today I'd like to take a moment and do exactly that with all of you.

I'm very aware of the fact that things have been slow regarding the game, and this is what I want to discuss with all of you. Things have been much quieter than normal, and that's for good reason. Something that is important to remember is that Project Torque is a privately-run venture managed by a group of volunteers with preexisting obligations and/or day jobs, meaning time available to many of us is limited. However, that is not to say that things have been at a standstill behind the scenes. On the contrary, we have quite a few projects in the background that we all look forward to putting in the hands of our community. Projects like these require time and effort from everyone on the team as each of us has our own skill sets and access to unique tools, and thus getting the stars to align is difficult. We hope to do something about this when we can, but we can't give any sort of ETA and for that I apologize.

For now, I'd like to give a huge thanks to the community as a whole, and in particular I'd like to shout out 3 people:

Deus Iratus, who has done a great job of picking up the GS role in my absence.

Facepalm, who has been such a huge help internally that it allowed us to have the ability to work on vehicles at all.

SmokeRider, whose community events and endeavors have helped keep the competitive side of the community together and has our support internally.

With all that said, we've decided to give you a sneak peek at some of the things we've been working on. While we can't give any release dates yet, we can say that we're spending our available time and resources polishing up what we have here so that it's the best it can be when the time comes and we look forward to seeing what you all think of them. Until then, we'll see you on the streets!

-RX

Greetings, fellow pervs!

Now that the catgirl is out in the wild we’d like to take a moment to update you on the state of the game and what to expect going forward.

Without further ado, it is our pleasure to introduce our new designer, Bangkok!

My name’s Bangkok( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°), and I’m the Lead Game Designer on Subverse. It is an absolute pleasure to have been given the opportunity to work on this title. First and foremost, I am an avid gamer and hentai enthusiast, much like you, and so I will strive to make Subverse the incredible experience it was originally envisioned to be. I hope I can make all of you proud and happy.

During my first two months, I familiarized myself with every nook and cranny of Subverse's design and finalized certain areas within March's patch. I can confidently say that this project has enormous potential to leave a long-lasting footprint as an authentic AAA adult experience. I am currently working on establishing the way in which to achieve this. We all know that we’re in the middle of early access, so the fans are not seeing the full picture coming together yet and there is some concern over where it's all heading. Hopefully DC and I can allay some of those concerns in this blog.



With Bangkok onboard the FOW train, we’re stoked to talk about some of the design philosophies of Subverse moving forward.

We as a team recognize that the build up to the critical recruitment sex scenes is lacking in eroticism and are too abrupt. They definitely need more fleshing out. For starters, we will be going through all the previous content and adding in foreplay videos to tie it in with what is happening. These short videos should establish some atmosphere and bridge the gap between the novel sections and the abruptness of the initial sex scenes.

The current dating sequences in the bar are also very limited with only barebones gifting being currently available. Dating your crew members is supposed to be a more intimate experience compared to the Pandora framework and it is in the process of a major overhaul. The connection between waifu and Captain is not really present in the current iteration of dating, and we are aiming to gradually implement some more interesting interactive features to help alleviate this.



The payoff for all your hard work needs to be porn. Lots and lots of porn. Titties, ass, splooge and big fat meaty balls all coming together in unholy unison. As of now, there is indeed not enough porn. But fear not, the porn is coming.

1. Sidequests not ending with some kind of porn is a crime. Luckily with the help of our inspirational artists we are going to try and remedy this in an exciting way.
   
2. Part of the overhaul of the Dating module means that it must be intertwined with sex in some way. To complete the intimate, one-on-one experience requires some intimate, one-on-one POV scenes. More on this soon.
   
3. The aforementioned foreplay videos tying the recruitment together and introducing more buildup.
   
4. The interactive scene in Taron hasn’t landed quite the way we hoped considering the amount of effort required to make it work, but we will reuse its components to give existing animations some more variety and shelf-life
   
5. The main storyline starts getting darker in a couple blocks time, so its extremely difficult to intertwine random sex scenes into it without it feeling completely jarring. Sex for the sake of sex is just going to exacerbate the problem of it not meshing with the story. Having said that, once the drama is resolved we are looking into giving the player and the waifus some much-needed downtime via supplementary story beats.
   
6. One of these beats is the Devotion Quest rewards (more on this below) which sees the return of StudioFOW’s famed cinematic eroticism within the context of a tightly-waifu-focused epic questline.

For those of you that have been talking to the ladies on the ship (you HAVE been talking to them, right?) you’ll notice that they’ve been gradually revealing more about their backstories. These stories will be carried through to their glorious conclusion with a Devotion Quest for each Waifu.

Devotion Quests are inspired by the Loyalty Missions in Mass Effect 2, where you buddy up with a specific party member and help them out of a bind. Since the Devotion Quests are the culmination of a lot of invested hours into a waifu we want to make sure they are amazing. We want to do this by

1. Giving you ample opportunity to interact with the waifu during her quest. This means talking with them, discussing the quest problems and their environments (each quest will take you to a place special to that particular waifu)
   
2. Creating an environment that immerses you both romantically and contextually. The performances of the voice talent are incredible throughout these sections. The atmosphere must match their intensity and do them justice
   
3. ROMANCE ROMANCE ROMANCE
   
4. The payoff at the end of the quest has to be amazing and cinematic, as well as feel like a seamless part of the story - something StudioFOW will no doubt deliver
   
5. Give you some cool rewards at the end thematic to the waifu for investing all that time into the romance

We are actively developing DEMI and Lily’s devotion quests at the moment and as soon as one of them is ready, we will make an announcement about the release dates.




World-renowned gameplay designer and shortstack-butt-afficionado Halfpint had some great ideas on this topic, which we are totally going to steal. In a December 12 video, he suggested that the galaxy should be reacting to the revolution in some way. Right now everything feels too static, too dead, you don’t feel like the disruptive force of change that the Mary Celeste is supposed to represent. A great idea he came up with was a simple reputation system, that keeps a track of all the battles you’ve fought against a particular faction. When you’ve killed enough Fuccbotts for example, a reward depicting a short 30 second cinematic would unlock showing Fuccbotts mobilizing to hunt you. If you slay enough Kloi, Landervoo and the council could react in some way to your extermination of their forces. Introducing reactive elements such as this will make Prodigium feel much more impacted by your actions. This is but one of the improvements we are aiming to make to Prodigium feeling more immersive.



The main problem right now (and this is a common part of narrative games in Early Access phase) is that the story is still being released and therefore the connective glue is not live yet... So what is this glue we are talking about?

1. Devotion levels being a meaningful part of multiple modules
   
2. Having a Dating system that makes use of the galaxy
   
3. Resources playing a bigger part in collectibles/upgrades
   
4. More waifu interactions with each other and the Captain across all modules
   

These elements working together in harmony will make the experience of managing your own crew feel more cohesive. But as we keep saying, our focus right now is on delivering the story first and foremost and then leaving the glue elements for later releases to tie everything together once the building blocks are in place.



Things like gold stars and meaningless grinding have no place in a supposed top-end story driven product like this. The original philosophy of the Kickstarter and the no-bullshit stance of the StudioFOW OG’s were successful in capturing the imagination of the gaming public. Introducing artificial progression elements and psychological tricks at this stage would be a mistake for the brand. Our design philosophy for avoiding the mobile trap is as follows:

1. Retool the way player performance is measured by utilizing more of the waifus and less gold stars and badges
   
2. Remove replayable story missions. Do you replay Virmire in ME1, do you replay Ostagar in DA:O? No, these are climactic story set pieces, so why would you replay Temple of Defilement, especially after what happened there? Not only does this make no sense from a narrative design standpoint but it’s a huge resource sink on the dev team
   
3. Reduce the sheer quantity of same-y missions and focus on making them memorable by increasing their quality
   
4. Introduce elements that facilitate replayability through dynamic design, instead of mobile-like repetition
   
5. Make upgrades and collectibles feel part of the world. Having to help someone or find a rare component to make your ship better should be an essential part of an RPG dealing with space exploration. We will have more on this in a later blog.

The original vision for Subverse was that it is not a sex simulator. It was not designed from the ground up to be a sandbox style sex simulator. There appears to be some misconceptions out there that this game is supposed to be the next big thing to supplant Honey Select. This will never be the case because Subverse is a story driven narrative RPG with sex. There are plenty of well-designed sex simulation games out there like Honey Select and Koikatsu that focus on endless customizability, sandbox elements and interchangeable parts. These games have mastered the art of being a simulator and have years of experience and much bigger budgets than ours. There is no point in competing with them. Our design philosophy has always been the complete polar opposite of that, and while the introduction of some interactive elements and things like outfits are planned, they will never be the lynchpin of the game.



We understand the game is not in an acceptable state for many of you currently. Quite frankly, Subverse (in its current state) is so far away from our personal standards that it’s not even funny, so there is a lot of hands-on work to be done here. This is a long marathon process and it will take time. We are not promising every single thing listed above will make it in. Subverse has a lot riding on it so we have to test every design decision internally. A lot of people are looking up to the game and we have to make sure we are delivering the absolute best product we can. Thank you to the fans for sticking with us and for reading!

DC
Creative Lead

Bangkok
Design Lead

Fixes
• Fixed a rare bug where the game wouldn’t start up when running on an uncommon operating system configuration
• Fixed a bug where Guild War didn’t tally scores

King
• Health buffed by 10-15% on waves 2-14
Encouraging workers and reducing long saves in the early and mid game

Seadragon & Lifebinder
• Reduced mana regeneration by 5%
• Fixed a bug where Leviathan’s Aerial command increased their heal amount
• Fixed a bug where they showed up in rolls less frequently than average

Centaur
• DPS: 188 -> 195
— Damage: 92 → 84
— Attack speed: 2.04 → 2.33
Now higher DPS and more efficient at killing cheap (10-25 gold) units

Battle Scars
• Tweaked Power Score calculation

Mother's Arc
- Added AK47 + Ammo in starting zone
- All Super Zombies removed
- 5 AI Zombies removed
- Safe Zone secured + Upgraded balcony
- Foilage lightmap resolution + Colliosion fixed
- NPC Voice acting + Cue sounds fixed
- Auto map loading error totally fixed with optimized loading times in between each map