1 - Fixed an issue where the number of lives was not displayed or was displayed outside of the HUD 2 - Lives HUD has been improved by showing the amount of lives remaining with a larger font size. 3 - Fixed an issue where an information from the English tutorial was displayed in Portuguese. 4 - The English tutorial text has been completely revised, correcting some errors and improving overall comprehension. 5 - The Control Setup screen has undergone a major change. The selected button is now displayed as A, B, X, Y and so on, according to the original XBOX controller layout. 6 - Score counting screen transition time improved. 7 - Fixed an issue where the distortion visual effect would not appear when finishing with the bullet time option. This issue only occurred in the first stage of the game.
High school is hard enough without Sentinels trying to vaporize your chemistry lab.
This season, we’re heading back to Xavier’s Institute with the New X-Men! But just because they’re new doesn’t mean they’re not powerful. Whether they’re navigating teenage drama or defending the school from the latest mutant-hating Sentinel, the next generation of X-Men is ready for anything.
So put down your pencils and put up your fists. Class is now in session.
SEASON PASS
Our newest character is one of the five telepathic Stepford Cuckoos, clones of Emma Frost. Esme is ambitious, rebellious, always seeking power, and not afraid to use those around her to win.
NEW CHARACTER: ESME CUCKOO
On Reveal: Copy a card from your deck into your hand. Set its Cost to 3 and Power to 4.
SEASON REWARDS
NEW CHARACTERS!
There’s nothing “junior varsity” about these new characters. Each week we’ll be adding one of these new superpowered X-Men to the starting lineup.
SERIES 5
On Reveal: Give the top card of your deck -1 Cost and +1 Power. After you play it, repeat this ability.
SERIES 5
On Reveal: If this is in the back row, copy the text of the card in front of it.
SERIES 5
On Reveal: One of your cards destroyed last turn gets revived here.
SERIES 5
After ANY 3 or 4-Cost card is played here, move it to another location.
New Card Release Schedule
New Series 5 cards will launch weekly as the spotlight card in the Card Shop and will also be available in the Seasonal Series 5 SNAP Packs. All new Series 4 and 5 cards will remain in their respective Seasonal SNAP Packs for both the current and following season. Additionally, the previous month’s Season Pass card will be added to the Seasonal Series 5 SNAP Packs on the first day of the new season.
May 6th: Surge - Seasonal Series 5 Release
May 6th: Captain Carter - Seasonal Series 5 Release
May 13th: Prodigy - Seasonal Series 5 Release
May 20th: Elixir - Seasonal Series 5 Release
May 27th: Xorn - Seasonal Series 5 Release
NEW LOCATIONS
Pit of Exile: Cards with 10 or more Power can't be played here.
Genosha: After turn 5, all but your highest-Cost here are destroyed.
BRAND NEW ALBUMS
Get all new Avatars, Variants, and Emotes by completing two new albums!
You may know him as Gabe, but this time Mike Krahulik is suiting up as a SNAP artist. Maybe this album will earn us some more mentions in a certain web comic… The new album with super cool new variants will be here on May 8th!
Collect 2: 1000 Credits
Collect 4: Devil Dinosaur - “Cool” Emote
Collect 6: Devil Dinosaur - Penny Arcade Variant
Collect 7: 8 Penny Arcade Borders
Rian Gonzalez is on a mission to turn your whole deck into Chibis with the latest Chibi Supremacy album. Check it out on May 15th.
Collect 3: Redwing - “Shocked” Emote
Collect 6: 3 Cosmic Rainbow Borders
Collect 9: Cassandra Nova - Rian Gonzales Variant
Collect 12: 6000 Collector’s Tokens
Do you like to dance? How about an entire album of Marvel’s finest. The Disco ball drops on May 30th.
Collect 3: 2 Cosmic Red Borders
Collect 6: Dazzler - “Vibin” Emote
Collect 9: Deadpool - Disco Variant
Collect 12: Spider-Man - Disco Variant
SHOP TAKEOVERS
Heads up… must be good luck. This Penny Arcade takeover features FIVE new variants taking over the shop on May 8th.
Rian Gonzales variants are taking over the shop on May 15th. Grab those Chibi!
Prepare for your next dance battle, Disco variants are taking over the shop on May 30th.
TWITCH DROPS
Make sure you watch your favorite MARVEL SNAP Twitch streamers to earn Boosters, Penny Arcade Border, and the Welcome Home Card Back from Penny Arcade! Drops will be available from May 6-13th. Don’t miss out!
Watch 2 hours to earn: 65 Random Boosters
Watch 4 hours to earn: Penny Arcade Border
Watch 6 hours to earn: Welcome Home Card Back
These new heroes may still be figuring themselves out, but if they can handle midterms from White Queen, you should be able to handle a few New X-Men. And don’t forget your homework… Go share your big brain plays on Discord and socials or we’ll be seeing you in the Danger Room!
With this update, we fixed a bug that caused Korean, Japanese, and Chinese characters to display incorrectly. Additionally, we’ve added the option to manually change the language in the settings. By default, the language will still match your system's settings.
We’ve also added translations for French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Furthermore, we’ve updated the Unity engine from version 6.0 to 6.1, which should hopefully improve (or at least maintain) performance.
Thank you for your patience, and apologies once again for the issues with the incorrect text display!
[NOTE: Fireball 2 will be live on Steam shortly. Sorry for the slight delay. It is also available on Xbox Series X|S and Playstation 5. This message will be removed when the Steam version is available.]
Back in May of 2010, Radiangames released its first title, a twin-stick shooter called JoyJoy, on the Xbox Live Indie Games service. It was the start of a small series of games, with 7 small games releasing over the next 11 months. In the 15 years since JoyJoy, Radiangames has released over 20 games on a number of platforms. Today we’re going to focus a bit on the 4th game released on XBLIG: Fireball.
Fireball was based on my favorite Geometry Wars 2 mode, Pacifism. Dodge a ton of enemies without firing, and lure them into an explosion. Despite Fireball not being that popular compared to my other early titles like Inferno or Super Crossfire, it was definitely a favorite for many people, including my wife.
Fireball ended up being ported to quite a few platforms, and was mildly successful on Android in particular (Google featured it on the Play Store a couple times). When playing through my old games, it generally holds up pretty well, aside from the XBLIG and PC version’s bombs not letting you smash through them.
I hadn’t planned to make a sequel to Fireball, but in the summer of 2023, I created a small framework for 2D arcade games based on a very-simplified version of Rhythm Storm. To test it out, I started a new project called RKDN one (Radiangames + Arcade, episode 1). The first thing I thought of to test the particle system was a fireball moving around.
A few weeks later, that small project looked a lot like Fireball. There weren’t as many enemy types, but there were far more of them at once, and the general mechanics were the same too. I kept working on it once in a while, and eventually decided to release it. You can see more details of the game in this video. Or read more about how I finally decided to call it Fireball 2 here.
The last major addition to Fireball 2 was Chaos mode, which came about due to a question on the Steam forums about modes. I was satisfied with just one main mode and two difficulties, but decided to explore alternate modes due to the question. Chaos mode switches up the enemy behavior and speed, along with a few other subtle tweaks and remixed music, to make it feel distinct from Core mode, without changing the core Fireball formula too much.
Porting Is A Process
Fireball 2 is made to play with a gamepad, and it’s made to look good on a 4k120hz screen. Any high-resolution and high-refresh rate monitor is good, really. Porting it to consoles made sense, in terms of where it feels good to play. The technical aspects were a bit challenging, mostly due to processing the enemies on the GPU. But that was not unexpected, and we figured out how to make it look and play well on all 3 platforms.
On the other hand, the complexity of releasing a game on 3 platforms is hard to overstate. Steam has a pretty complex and elaborate backend for managing games and your store page. It’s taken me years to fully understand it and know where all the settings are, and which subsites have what info. And I still have to look around to find some things. Now multiply that by 3, and try to learn 2 of them at the same time, while also having to do the first time set up and learn all the ins and outs of each SDK to port the game (save/load/achievements/etc).
I could go on for a while here, but my brain hurts just writing about it. I’ll just say the experience changed my plans for future games. You’ll see down below.
A Year of Radiangames Releases
To celebrate the 15-year anniversary of Radiangames, not only is Fireball 2 launching, but Instruments of Destruction is being featured by Steam in its first Daily Deal with its biggest discount yet. Radiangames’ classic title Inferno 2 is also on sale. And Rhythm Storm is getting a new demo next week.
The releases will continue throughout the year. Rhythm Storm’s updated demo and Speed Demons 2’s all-new demo will be in the June Steam Next Fest. Those 2 games will be coming to Steam, Xbox, and Playstation later this summer. Rhythm Storm will come to Steam first in July, while the timing of its ports and Speed Demons 2 are still a bit uncertain.
After Rhythm Storm, Speed Demons 2, and the console ports of Instruments of Destruction release, Radiangames will be shifting to PC/Steam releases beyond 2025. You can read more about that at the end of this news post on Instruments of Destruction, or on the Radiangames website.
The may 1st update provided a lot of new content, but also new spells, talents and even mechanics or special status effects. This update provides further polishing, dealing with a lot of minor issues and raising the XP cap, which was never intended to be reached without 'grinding'.
Adjustments
Raised XP cap to 29,600, to better allow progressing through the new content.
Size of party inventory increased from 64 to 96.
Ethereal type enemies such as ghosts are now immune to 'Root' effects.
Potions of Deep Breath now last 10 rounds instead of 5, its purchase cost has been increased accordingly and the alchemy recipe will now produce one potion, not two.
NPC spellcasters have more willpower now.
Fixes on new content
Potion of Serenity now correctly reduces insanity, not poison.
Ebran will now grant several potions as reward for the 'Expedition to Hell' quest, as intended. This will be applied retroactively if you already completed it.
Solves a dialogue error with Legionaire Gerthe at the inn that could freeze the game.
Fixed a loop in the conversation with Lysael.
If you meet Centurion Goran on the square, you can now talk to him.
The option to conclude the 'Vow to the Fallen' quest at the stone altar will only appear if the quest has been properly initiated by talking to Dondra, and not if you simply looted the amulet without receiving the quest.
Certain door in the Legacy of War quest could be opened too soon, breaking the quest. Fixed.
Added the appropiate collision to certain wall in the Imperial Manor's library.
Fixed Unglar's dialogue to reflect correctly previous events in Urendale.
Solved a potential lock in the dialogue with Molvante.
Several wilderness camps in the Harlin Plains now are less "sensitive" to nearby enemies, the threshold distance was too high.
Solved combat graphical glitches that could appearin the Hall of Justice.
Solved a specific bug in Turkish language related to Greyward Potions.
Bug Fixes
While typing in the new 'search' button, key mappings will be ignored, so you can now search properly without other windows popping.
Amulet of Purification works properly now.
Solves a few 'exploits' related with game-reloading and pausing.
Dying by poisoning or disease was sometimes not correctly setting the dead status on characters, causing multiple issues.
During combat, closed doors will properly block the grid.
Requirements for learning Talents or entering a Career will now only take into account a character's 'natural' value, not including temporary modifiers or item bonuses to traits or proficiencies. Similarly, only temporary INT bonus will affect your maximum spells known.
Enemies that use any kind of teleportation will now remove any 'Root' status, as intended.
Improved the party spawn code to avoid party members to spawn in glitched positions.
Scrollbars on your party inventory and other places in the UI can now be scrolled faster with the mouse wheel.
The mouse tooltip will no longer linger around after hovering the journal or party options button.
Combat hotbuttons now correctly allow to assign items, since their position has been fixed.
The willpower cost of the spell 'Summon Void Spider' has been set to the intended value (19).
Added further checks to avoid dead enemies to stay in "running" animation.
The game can no longer be saved while the party is falling.
There will be at least two more 0.8.x updates before we move into the 0.9.x development arc. They'll arrive relatively quickly since the two large outdoor areas (Urendale and Harlin Plains) are already out. I'll be posting about it soon.
Recently, we hosted a special preview Beta for gaming press and content creators that resulted in hundreds of articles, videos, and livestreams breaking down and showcasing the first 20-25 hours of the game. It’s been great not just seeing all this coverage, but also your many comments.
What the participants of this preview didn’t get to experience is many if not most of the massively multiplayer aspects of Dune: Awakening.
As a result, many of your comments and questions were about those aspects of the game, and we’ve been keeping an eye on the many discussions that have come up across our community channels. Now is a great time to address some of the questions that have come up!
Of course, this write-up only addresses some of the many questions you have raised, and we aim to answer many more of them in the Reddit AMA we’re hosting today. Make sure to tune in!
Dune: Awakening is a mix of genres
Dune: Awakening is an open world, multiplayer, survival game on a massive scale, with content and mechanics you haven’t seen in combination before.
Labels can be weird, especially when you’re making a game like this, and a while back we decided to drop “MMO” from our top-level, one-liner description. Many of you have been asking why, and the reason is simply that we saw expectations were veering too far into the classic MMORPG paradigm.
At its heart, Dune: Awakening is an open world survival crafting game, and while it has many typical MMO features – including the massively multiplayer aspect – it’s important to be clear about what the game is and isn’t.
But let’s take this opportunity to clarify further.
Survival open world crafting at the core
In Dune: Awakening, you’ll find tons of classic survival elements.
Surviving the environment is a challenge. You need to stay hydrated, stay out of the sun and its scorching heat, and you need to manage environmental dangers like sandstorms and radiation.
It has resource management. You must harvest resources, process them, and use them to craft anything from armor to vehicles and weapons. Dune: Awakening, of course, also has spice.
Building is hugely important. You start by building a simple shelter, before unlocking crafting recipes that let you build towering fortresses. You need to manage power and ensure that you are protected from the destructive sandstorms.
It’s a sandbox (no pun intended). Nothing is level-gated, so if your friend wants to give you the best rifle in the game five minutes after you arrive on Arrakis – that’s fine. If you somehow obtain an ornithopter and manage to make your way to the Deep Desert in your first hour – good luck.
There is of course so much more that makes it a survival game, but anyone going into it will recognize many familiar mechanics – and some very new and unique ones.
Where Dune: Awakening goes beyond the classic survival formula
Dune: Awakening has you playing in a persistent world, shared with several hundred other players.
It’s not single-player. It’s not just co-op. You’re not just playing on a small server with a few dozen players.
Dune: Awakening goes beyond the typical survival game formula by introducing a large-scale multiplayer world and large-scale multiplayer mechanics.
Beyond just player numbers, there are several mechanics in Dune: Awakening you will recognize from MMO games, but also other genres. Here are a few:
We have a slew of social gameplay features, from server-wide chats and proximity voice chat to players being able to form groups, open trade windows, and create guilds
There is a World-wide (we’ll get to what Worlds are in a minute) trading feature fueled by the in-game Solari currency called the Exchange, where players across multiple servers can trade items. Think of it like auction houses you’ve seen in many MMOs
There are social hubs, where players from many different servers in the same World can congregate to socialize, trade, pick up contracts, and talk to NPCs
There are NPCs that you can talk to, with branching dialog trees, many which send you on missions that can be very similar to what you find in MMOs and other genres
There are dungeons, what we call Imperial testing stations, that you can brave alone or with a group, offering both story and loot
There is a multi-act, engaging storyline to follow, complete with in-game cutscenes, NPC dialog, and missions you’ll be sent on
You can choose to join the Atreides or the Harkonnen, building up reputation with them that unlocks rewards such as unique crafting recipes and building pieces
It offers more than just crafting progression, it also has multiple player archetypes (Schools of the Imperium), where you can mix and match different passive and active abilities
Our goal has been to create a combat system that goes beyond what you can expect from survival open world crafting games, both in terms of quality and combat options, not to mention synergies between archetypes and their abilities
There is an end game beyond just maxing out your progression and unlocking all the crafting recipes, opening a whole new gameplay loop
All this in combination with the more classic survival mechanics makes for an experience that feels different from what you’ve seen before, certainly in the survival genre.
Player population, and server/world structure explained
When you first start playing Dune: Awakening, you pick a server that will be your home. Each of these servers belongs to a World and a World consists of at least 20 servers.
As a player, you will meet and interact with players from other servers in your World. The best way to explain how this works is by looking at how our Arrakis is structured.
Our Arrakis is made up of different and separate maps, some larger than others. You move between these maps on the Overland Map.
Here are a few of the main ones:
Hagga Basin: This is where you start and where you will always return. The server you picked has one Hagga Basin map. It does not instance. Your server is basically your Hagga Basin, shared with several hundred other players, with up to 40 playing concurrently. It’s a big, persistent open world, similar in size to the map in Conan Exiles, and it consists of many different biomes. Here you must survive, build, and fight in the same space with other players who picked the same starting server as you. - It’s important to note that you can visit other Hagga Basin servers! You can do everything on the server you visit, except claim land. So, you can fight, progress, socialize, and even build on your friend’s or guild’s claimed land. - Hagga Basin is primarily PvE, with only a few small areas enabled for PvP.
Social Hubs: These are settlements (Arrakeen and Harko Village) where players cannot build, drive vehicles, nor engage in PvP, but instead go to trade on the Exchange, talk to NPCs and pick up contracts, and of course socialize with other players. Here you will meet players from all the other servers (Hagga Basins) in your World. Once a social hub is full, an additional instance is spawned, similar to how it works in many MMOs.
The Deep Desert: This is a massive, seamless, open space, several times larger than Hagga Basin. It is primarily a PvP map, with only a few smaller PvE areas. This is where players fight over control points and where battles will occur over massive spice blows. You’ll also find many different points of interest, including Imperial testing stations, promising new challenges and rewards. Once per week, a massive Coriolis Storm sweeps across the map, changing the locations of resources and points of interest, and players have to fly out to discover everything anew. - If you want to get technical about it, it consists of several maps seamlessly linked together, meaning you move across them seamlessly without loading. - While we are still fine-tuning the population for the Deep Desert, you can expect hundreds of players here, spread across its many points of interest. The Deep Desert is designed in such a way as to organically spread players across it, preventing all players from all huddling together in one small area. - You share one Deep Desert with all the other players across servers (Hagga Basins) in your World. So, once you leave your Hagga Basin, you can meet other players from your World either in the social hubs or the Deep Desert.
Overland Map: As mentioned above, you can move between all these different maps through the Overland Map. Here, you fly an ornithopter on a top-down representation of the northern hemisphere of Arrakis and can fly from your Hagga Basin to a shared social hub or the Deep Desert. Movement on the Overland Map costs fuel and time costs water. As you fly around, you will see other players from your World who are also flying around.
There are other maps as well, but we’ll save those for you to discover!
This setup gives us incredible flexibility in both how we can expand after launch and how we can provide so many different gameplay mechanics.
Whereas most other survival games would tie a server to a specific map, and when an expansion launches, you would need to abandon your base/progress on one server to start fresh on a new one with the new map, we can simply add more maps that you can travel to from the Overland Map. This allows us to expand the game without ever having to force people to choose to abandon their home or their progress.
It also allows us to create a game that offers a mix of all these different gameplay mechanics. You have land claim and persistent building of bases in Hagga Basin, you have large-scale multiplayer with a constantly changing world in the Deep Desert, and you have the social hubs with all the options they offer. You can move between any of these, and you can even visit other people’s Hagga Basin servers to play with them.
To put it simply: this is survival on a massive scale.
Concerns regarding load and server queues
We’ve seen several comments expressing concerns about server load and queues.
We certainly expect heavy loads at launch, and that is why we are preparing accordingly. Servers (Hagga Basins!) that fill up are impossible to completely avoid, same as with all games that operate with the populations Dune: Awakening does.
But, rest assured, there will be thousands of servers grouped together in hundreds of Worlds available at launch. They will be spread out across the globe, offering low-latency connections in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia as illustrated in the image below. If we see that we’re nearing capacity, we will be able to spin up more. This is not our first rodeo, we’ve launched several MMOs and survival games over the past 25 years, and we have a robust set of tools and processes in place, managed by an experienced live operations team.
What’s important to note is that while a Hagga Basin server can support 40 people playing concurrently, the way populations ebb and flow over the course of a day means that it still supports several hundred people picking that server as their home. This has been rigorously tested during closed beta, and we have systems in place that will restrict too many characters being created on a server that is becoming too popular, to minimize the chance of servers becoming full
As with all games operating with populations like this, that doesn’t mean servers will never reach the 40-player concurrency cap. If that happens, you will join a server queue when logging in.
The term “server queue” is rarely used in positive context – but to us it’s a quality-of-life addition. Commonly, survival games don’t offer this, and you are left having to wait and hope you are able to click fast enough when a slot opens up. By adding a server queue functionality, you can simply click once and rest easy knowing that you will get in when a slot becomes available to you.
Again, because of how player populations ebb and flow throughout the day, you should not have to wait long before being let in.
Servers can be filtered by location as well as language, and you will be able to see which servers your Steam friends are playing on.
While transferring between servers or Worlds will not be available at launch, this is something we will introduce in a post-launch update as populations stabilize. Remember that you can visit friends on any server belonging to the same World your home server is in, and you can do everything – including building on a friend’s or a guild’s base – except claim land on a server that you are visiting. You can even create and join cross-server guilds.
We are still tweaking population limits on servers, Worlds, and maps to provide a smooth experience for everyone, and we have the flexibility to do so even after launch as we get an even more complete picture of how people play.
What about single-player and private servers?
What’s hopefully clear after reading the above is that much of Dune: Awakening’s unique brand of fun lies in its large-scale multiplayer mechanics.
While the game does not have a single-player or offline mode, it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it alone. You have to connect to a server and play in a multiplayer environment, but much of the game is perfectly soloable, and ultimately, it’s up to you if you if you brave Arrakis alone or with others.
The game is not launching with private servers, but we plan to introduce them in a post-launch update. Because of the game’s focus on large-scale multiplayer mechanics, it’s important to us that we retain that part of the gameplay, and our goal is to introduce a system where private servers belong to groups of other private servers that all share social hubs and a Deep Desert.
In this case, you will still have a private Hagga Basin server that only you and your friends have access to. We’ll talk more about this later.
Wrapping up
To define Dune: Awakening, we’ve had to talk a bit about what it is not, because it doesn’t fit into any single genre’s box, as most people would know them. It has a survival core, a pretty unique server structure, and several important online multiplayer features.
We believe Dune: Awakening’s server structure, where hundreds of players flow seamlessly between different areas of the game world, is doing something other survival games are not.
One thing that’s become more and more apparent to us as we’ve been developing this game is that you need to experience it to fully comprehend the scale and complexity of its systems. Some of you will get to experience a small part of this in the upcoming large-scale Beta Weekend (early game), and while our ongoing persistent closed Beta has allowed us to rigorously test both tech and gameplay, it’s only when the head start begins on June 5th that it will truly come into its own and players can get a real sense of what we’ve been building over the past several years.
The time is almost here, and we can’t wait for you to set foot on Arrakis with us.
For today's playtest * Various input improvements and fixes for mouse, gamepad, keyboard * Fixes to cinematics triggering when various UI is up * Bridge Push+Cancel fix * Fix painter borked on loaded game * Rare (1-repro) crash fix attempts * Fix for gamepad prompts on joining MP game * Cinematic resizing visual improvements * Text tweaks * Punch anim over network * Auto-saves reenabled after host migration
