Nov 16, 2023

Starship Troopers: Extermination - OWI_Gray

Hello Troopers! It's time for the November Community Q&A. Thanks again for all the great submissions, as always we decided to select questions from a range of topics to answer. This will be the final Q&A for the year, our goal is to continue this initiative in the new year.

Questions

Are there plans to create more communication lines between player characters, like shouting quotes from the movie?
Yes, we will be looking to add more voice overs into the game post 1.0 and are exploring a robust Emote system for players to communicate with each other.

Will there ever be more Grenade variants added to the game?
We definitely want to add more grenade types into the game. Nothing is planned short term, but new grenade types are in the works.

Will there be customizable Troopers in Game?
A big thumbs up to this. Not only will there be customization for you to earn through progression, you will be able to customize three different areas on your trooper. The exciting news Trooper customization will be coming in the December Update! Stay tuned for more info!

Will you consider adding a third-person camera mode?
Not at this time.

Was the performance and stability impact from the Unreal Engine 5 upgrade expected?
As a team we decided that if we were going to upgrade the engine we needed to do it sooner than later. The more we continued to add features to the game the more complicated it would be to upgrade the engine, as more systems would have to be verified and integrated and eventually the ROI would not be there for the team. So we decided to do the upgrade when the game was still relatively small and had a smaller set of features, maps and game systems to upgrade.

There was expectation that there may be some short-term performance degradation after the update, but the goal was to have performance parity with UE 4.27 or close to. Since the upgrade was also mixed in with feature updates, it became very hard to keep track of the performance across the engine upgrade and new features.

In the end, some upgraded settings and changes slipped past that severely degraded performance, specifically on our server-side. The worst of which did not appear until our production servers were put under load.

Although we did hot-fix the major issues, future updates will further improve performance as we use the new tools available to us in UE 5.2.

What steps are taken to deal with player griefing through Team Killing? Can we have a vote-kick option?
Since our game has friendly fire, we need to make sure every report and individual case is handled with as much due diligence and investigation as possible. We all understand this is a serious issue and we look at every player report that is generated when players behave this way.

We are actively managing this through our player support operations and are actively actioning accounts that have been engaging in this behavior. We have acted on over 1000 accounts since Early Access began.

With all this being said in our December update we will be releasing an in-game system that will hopefully put the power to deal with this traitorous behavior back into the hands of all you loyal members of the Deep Space Vanguard. We have codenamed this system Shoot to Kick!

Will there be a Morita Mk3 in the game?
Yes, down the road we want to have as many of the weapons from the movies in the game.

When do we get our Text chat to communicate with each other?
Text chat will be added in Game Update 6.0. We will also be adding more accessibility features around communication such as Text to Speech and Speech to Text options during this update.

When are you going to introduce weak points on Bugs?
We are hoping to introduce this feature around the 1.0 launch of the game.

How do the developers intend to monetize the game in the long term?
We have no plans to move away from a buy to play model. Our goal is to offer cosmetics through skins for both Weapons and Troopers. We will NEVER sell POWER!

If this game takes place after the events of the CGI films, why do we have lower grade gear?
Our game takes place 25 years into the future from the first live action movie. More upgraded tech and weapons are coming to the game over the next few years, we have just started!

What is/will be the difference in difficulty levels?
Currently right now the only difference between difficulty levels are the following:

Recruit

HP/sec = 3.6
Bonus Health = +45
Revive Speed = 80% faster
Bug Health = - 50%
Bug Damage = -25%
Threat Events = Every 720 seconds (12 minutes) starting at 8 minutes into the game, they last 8 minutes
Decrease Bug Speed = -20%

Trooper

Hp/sec = 2 per 5 (0.4 per sec) 37.5 seconds from 0 to full basically
Bonus health = None (Base health is 90 for Hunter + Op, 180 for Bastion)
Threat Events = Every 720 seconds (12 minutes) starting at 8 minutes into the game, they last 5 for minutes.

Veteran

Hp/sec = No Regen
Bonus health = none
Bug Health = +50%
Bug Damage = +50%
Increased Threat Event Frequency = Every 180 seconds (3 minutes) starting at 2 minutes into the game, they last 5 for minutes.

We are planning on updating our approach to mode difficulty over time. The first one is rewarding players who choose to take the fight to the Bugs in harder difficulties. In update 0.6.0 with Trooper and Veteran difficulty levels now having a bonus XP amount per game mode. This new XP reward table will be outlined in the 0.6.0 patch notes.

In a future update, we will offer different enemy challenges and scenarios per difficulty level. So that people who chose to play on higher difficulty tiers will have new interesting game mechanics. More to come on that closer to the design being finalized.

Powersuits/armor?
They are on the roadmap to come to the game in the future. Our hope is to get some of this into the game post 1.0. We do not have an exact timeline but we want to include powered armor into the game eventually.

The good news is we have concepts and high level designs on these important aspects of the universe. We also need to ensure the current gameplay balance is not impacted by introducing this impressive tech into the game.

Will it be tied to classes? Will it be world drops akin to power weapons, or will it be tied to base building? All of these scenarios are being discussed internally by the design team. The good news is that everyone at the studio is very gung ho about this feature.

Below are some very early concept images:

Is it possible to change the mutator for different servers?
No, currently right now it is a global system, though as we move to the Bug War (Galactic War) we will be adapting and curating the mutator system around the missions you go on.

Are you thinking about a solution for the dropship camping "problem"?
Yes, nothing we can share yet, but our designers are working on something.

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Check out our last Q&A for October.

Thanks again for supporting Starship Troopers: Extermination!

Nov 16, 2023

A Wind of Changes

Mist Legacy - Virtys

Greeting Mistwalkers,

At last, we have a new update for you! As you may be aware, we had a talk with our community a few months back about the game and how it can be improved. Many of the comments we got were about our game shop and that was the main focus for this first refactoring update, we have described those changes below.

On the content side, we worked on new regions in the northeast of Gantras. These regions are focused on mid-level players and will offer them more to do while they are progressing on the game.

We also modified the experience for new players with the default recipe and improved the difficulty of Saharanelle Raid for endgame players.

We really hope you like the changes we made to the game!

Thanks for playing!

Changelog

Features and Changes

PvP (Player vs. Player) arena regions are no longer available.
You can now delete characters.
When you inspect a character, you can see every item they have.
The shop has been updated, and all previous items are back.
There's a new subscription feature that doubles Mastery, Skill gain, and combat XP, and boosts movement speed by 30%. Please note that this subscription is applied on a per-character basis, meaning you need to activate it individually for each character you want to receive these benefits.
Some items in the store are now cheaper.
You can now use Blue Crowns to skip the wait time for non-end-game tasks.
The difficulty increase per Power Level in the Saharanelle Raid has been lowered to 20%, down from 25%. This means that for each level of difficulty, the challenge will now increase by a smaller margin, making the progression through the raid's five difficulties smoother.

Content Changes

Check out the shop for new cosmetic items!
Bosses now have reduced Magic Protection, lowered to 20%, down from 30%.
Enhanced the gaming experience in the mid-level zones of the Eastern Gantras Mountains.
Updated the initial crafting recipes for a better start.
Decreased the materials needed for crafting items at beginner levels.

The new game shop

Let’s take a few minutes to check out our new shop.

The biggest change is the optional subscription system that will double all types of experience and activate the fast travel feature. We hope that this subscription will become our main driver for the creation of the game, it gives us clear metrics on how many players are expecting new content because they are engaged enough to pay for the subscription.

In the game, there is a new skip cooldown feature that will allow you to skip all non-endgame tasks. We view this new feature as a means to get a character faster to endgame for players that are in a hurry. This feature also allows a player to skip the end of an almost finished cooldown for a low price when there is a bad synchronization between the play session and the cooldown end. The decision to keep the endgame task out of this feature is to make sure we keep some balance on high level features in the game.

The cosmetic shop now offers a wide range of styles, frames and cosmetics that are not limited in time but that will be on sale when they are related to the current game event. This will reduce a lot of the frustration that comes from the possibility of a missed event because you discovered the game too late. Major exclusive frames and pets coming from events like the Portal Pioneer (Early Access) and the Virtysia Festivities (Launch) will stay unique as they are meant to show that “you were there”.

With the improved offer, we decided that the companion slots price could be reduced as we want the player to invest in more elements of the game. This basically means that the base price for the game is now lower.

Our monetization in a nutshell:

Premium

If you buy any of our real money packages (Baronis, Princana, Royonar or Emperator), you unlock:

The Trade between character features.
Get a bonus to harvest.
Unlock the feature to create a custom style for your character.

Subscription

You can subscribe (per character) to the game to get:

Double XP on all progression (skills, combat and mastery).
You get a 30% boost on moving speed.

Unlocks

Account wide: Slot for additional companions.
Per character: Slot for additional equipped talent slot.

Items

These are power ups for the game. Most of them will help you save time or overcome difficult challenges.

Blue Chest : Allow to trade pack of 250 Blue Crowns
Portable Portal : Create a portal at your current location. Only one portal can be active, if you setup a new portal, the old one will disappear.
Mists Snail : Send all your “new” items to your domain.
Change your name : That’s it.
Change sex : That’s it.
Mist shard : Is a currency linked to the Mistwalkers progression with Leonidas.
Phenix Elixir : Forgot to bring a healing potion? Get this item to heal yourself.
Tonic Biscuit : Forgot to bring a restoration potion? Get this item to restore your stamina.
Hyperserum : Will give you a serum (potion) with +10 on many skills for one of durability.

Cosmetic

These are cosmetic items (with no skills) that will help you personalize your character. New items are added periodically to the store and they will normally be on sale when they are new or linked to the current event in the game.

In the game

Trade slots: After your initial unlock of the trade with a real money purchase, you can unlock 3 more trading slots.
Domain coffers: You can increase the base capacity of your domain.
Skip cooldown: You can skip the cooldown of a non-endgame task.