Greetings Captains! Some of you might have seen our Facebook comments where we talked about October 2nd being the release date. Today, we are here to announce... ... that we are still alive and working on the game, but today is not the release date. We've been largely upgrading the game behind the scenes, fixing a lot of the bugs we've seen, ironing out some of the balance issues, but we are definitely not ready yet for a full release at this point. We still have assets to add, encounters to build for a bit more variety, and bugs to fix. So release is still a little ways out.
In the meantime, we agree with several of our posters that we haven't given a proper update on what we're doing with the game for too long. Today, we'd like to introduce you to one of the changes we've been making to Nav, one that some of you might have noticed when watching twitch streams of SC:G. Nav in the live version is currently a bit of a chaotic mess. A call is sent out to you from somewhere in the galaxy, you select the node where the call is coming from, then you travel along a pre-selected path to reach that goal. This can lead to the galaxy feeling less like a specific choice and more like a chore. It can also lead to extremely different feeling play experiences when it takes 5 nodes to get to a mission in one game and 2 nodes to get to the same mission in the next game. One issue with that system is we can't necessarily control what order you do those encounters in and, on a larger scale, we can't necessarily tell where you are in the macro-game. So to solve this chaotic and disordered delivery of content, we decided to make more of a choose-your-own-route to the endpoint which we call Tendril Galaxies.
With Tendril Galaxies, you get some novelty every time you replay, but the main story missions are delivered in order of the narrative. These are a lot smaller than the current galaxy, but they will have far more obvious paths to take. When you first enter a Tendril Galaxy, you are explicitly choosing where to go and what to do. Do you want to deal with two hard nodes and a vendor, or would you rather deal with 2 medium nodes and a hard node with a nebula on each one? These nodes will also have encounters largely designed to fit within that Tendril Galaxy (with some randomization still around, of course).
At the end of each mission, you will receive a request from your crew to return to your station where you will find new things that await. New vendors, a new mission, new NPCs, possibly even new hireable crew. These changes to your station will help prepare you for the fight ahead...but be warned, the fight ahead will be preparing for you as well.
We should have a new version of Galaxies up on the beta branch within the next few days so you can try out this new setup. We still have a lot of content gaps to fill, but we hope that the idea of where we are taking this comes across better with this new version. As always, let us know what you think and what bugs you find. Cheers, Warballoon