New Things for New People

This weekend we'll be kicking off another alpha test! Join us July 26-28 as we tested the latest changes to the game. This time, we've focused on refining Lucky Jack and Andrea's playstyle and identity, along with completely overhauling the new player experience.

Lucky Jack

With this new design pass, we wanted to achieve four things for Lucky Jack:

1. Focus the character on combat - make the player want Lucky Jack to actively find monsters, and be disappointed when he finds scrap. Let scrap serve as a relief for other characters, but definitely not our brawler.
2. Give the player combat-time decisions - where Lena is balancing “day-long” decisions and Buster is focused on “camp” decisions, we wanted Lucky Jack to play as someone with a lot of tools in his toolkit when it came to combat itself. If you find yourself saying "cmon cmon let's gooooooo" to your friends while they're taking care of business at camp, we've done our job.
3. Eliminate the injury-focused playstyle - while we initially liked the idea of an ebb-and-flow of injuries for Jack, in practice taking an injury was too damn costly to play most of his cards. While there is a single way to increase his maximum injuries in the game right now, the entire combination rarely felt worth it.
4. Bring Lucky Jack in balance - certain combinations for Jack were able to nearly one-shot some bosses, which is out of whack with the rest of the game. We wanted to make sure Jack still had strong prowess in normal combat without eliminating the challenge of bosses.

With those goals in mind, the backbone of Jack's playstyle now is his new passive, Thrill of the Fight. When Jack kills a monster in combat, his party gains a draw. So long as Jack keeps rampaging across the Wastes (and has the life to do it), he's free to draw as many cards as he wants. Keep in mind that this passive means Jack has to strike the killing blow; that might change whether you decide to have Jack as an escort for weaker characters.

We're introducing 3 new abilities for Jack this patch as well, and we have reworked Brace for Impact, Adrenaline Surge, Ready 4 Round 2, and Magnetic Coils. 

Cecilia Andrea Belyle

​Our initial concept for Andrea was the risk/reward balance in her speed and fight; the core idea was that she could draw a lot of cards if you chanced it, but would be hurt terribly if forced into combat. We wanted this so badly that we implemented the ability to end your exploration phase early more or less entirely for her. But in all of our playtests, we’ve never once seen a player say “you know what, I don’t want to draw this 4th card” unless they knew exactly what it was and that Andrea would meet certain death if she drew it. 

At the same time, Andrea’s become a catch-all for things not just speed related, but mechanical, scrap, consumable, crafting, etc. As a result, our goals with Andrea were the following:

• Reestablish Identity - Andrea was feeling a bit of a mish-mash of concepts, from one kit focused heavily on consumable play (Scavenge / Jerry Rig / Supply Drone / Energy Cell / Shorter Fuses) , another focused on combat (Animate Scrap / Reflex Implants / Build a Bomb Kit), and a third focused on deck manipulation. The move away from consumables in the last alpha generally gave us flexibility this time to take another look at most of the cards in that camp.
• Focus on Scrap - just as we want a Lucky Jack player to feel bad about collecting nothing but scrap, we want Andrea to feel really good about it. Her role is sneaking around and carrying a ton of resources back to camp for crafting. 
• Give the player exploration-time decisions - to emphasize the sensation of “tip-toeing through the Wastes,” we wanted to make sure players had more tools at their disposal to actually decide whether to take the risk of flipping over a card, and more reasons not to.

We already showed our hand a bit with the change to Animate Scrap and the new ability Just a Peek. Beyond those, we've added an important passive for Andrea - Grab & Go. Every resource card Andrea draws gives her a stack of Grab & Go, and the streak continues until she draws any other kind of card (at which point it resets to 0). At every 3 stacks, Andrea gets yet another resource card - at 15 stacks, she gets a free component. Get resource cards for drawing resource cards!

Andrea will also be getting 3 new abilities, 3 new blueprints, and changes to Scavenge, Build-a-Bomb-Kit, and Rechargeable Power Core!

New Player Experience

Lastly, the entire progression through the tutorial is revamped. Two new tutorial sessions and nearly a dozen additional scenes have been added. Every account has been wiped so you can experience this content fresh, and learn not just about the core session mechanics, but about Adventure Mode, Upgrades, Matchmaking and more! 

Hope to see you in the Wastes tomorrow!