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Ho ho ho everyone!
It’s almost the end of the year, and almost time for the last Barotrauma update of 2022: our Holiday Update is coming next week, so let’s take one last look at what you will find inside.
Campaign tutorial
To continue the tutorial rework done for the Hoist the Sails update, we’re adding tutorial features to the singleplayer campaign mode to help new sailors get their bearings. We wrote more about the campaign tutorial a couple of weeks ago, and you can read that post here.
Reworked talents
After we announced the talent rework four weeks ago, we have made a few changes to our plans based on further testing and your feedback. Here’s a final sneak peek:
- New generic talents. There will be two new rows of generic talents for all jobs, and you must unlock a few of them before picking a specialization. You can unlock as many generic talents as you like, even all of them.
- More talents. There are 50 new talents being added in total.
- More streamlined trees for more specialized characters. The specialized talents of all the different jobs have been fine-tuned and redesigned to create more coherent and streamlined talent trees. You must unlock an entire tree before picking talents from a different tree. You can still get talents from several different trees, but probably not as many as before, as the trees now take a longer time to complete.
- Talents for bots. All talents can now be unlocked and used by bots as well as human players. This required some redesigning throughout, so many talents will be slightly different from before. Recipes unlocked by bots can be used by the entire crew.
- Powerful boosts, recipes and items for completing a tree. It now takes a longer time to complete a talent tree, but the rewards are worth it, we hope!
- Talent points spent in ongoing campaigns will be refunded so you can spend them again in accordance with the overhauled talent system, without losing progress you’ve made before.
New talent items
In the course of the talent rework, we got the chance to design a number of new items for the rewards of the final talents of each tree, and for some talents along the way too. We wanted to make sure the overhauled talent specializations offer something really powerful – and fun, too, so we’ve created a number of brand new weapons, gear, and recipes to unlock via the talent system. These include but are not limited to…
- The Scrap Cannon, a handheld weapon that fires, well, scraps, which might save your life when you’re out of ammo but under attack all the same. “Scrapper” Mechanics can unlock this item.
- The “Chemist” Medic gets various new items used to inflict Acid Burns, adding new offensive capabilities to a medic’s repertoire.
- The Arc Emitter works like a handheld Discharge Coil and allows “Electrician” Engineers to combat enemies inside alien ruins, wrecks and hostile submarines from the safety of your own sub, as the emitter’s electrical current travels along metal hulls.
- The “Enforcer” Security Officer has access to the Riot Shield, an item which has been in the game in the distant past and is now being reintroduced and updated. The shield does not block all damage or last forever, but it still offers a sturdy barrier against hostiles, or annoying crewmates.
- The Petraptor, probably one of the most highly-wishlisted additions in Barotrauma’s history. We added some conversation lines about a pet mudraptor named Rex at some point and unwittingly caused everyone to want to have their own Rex. Now you can. In fact, you can have two, but only if you play a “Grayshirt” Assistant.
You can sneak peek the complete list of the upcoming talent items on our Trello roadmap.
Where’s the Captain’s third tree?
As many of you have already noted while playing the Unstable test version, the Captain’s talents number fewer than the other classes’. We’re sorry for the temporary setback for captains but hope that what comes later will make up for it: the missing third Captain talent tree, named “Politician”, has talents related to the various factions of Europa, and thus it will only be added along with the faction overhaul… coming next year.
What else is new?
Besides these bigger changes, there are a number of smaller improvements and fixes included in this update. Here are some highlights:
- Shrapnel from hull breaches. Monsters that can’t get inside your sub may still hurt you, and not just your sub, now that breaches hurl shrapnel at nearby characters.
- Fabricating multiple items at once. We added a slider to select how many items you want to craft so you don’t need to stand next to the fabricator and press the button for each item.
- More creature loot. Some of the bigger monsters now drop bones, which we’ve heard sell for a decent price, and upon killing a human-eating monster, you may find the remains of a deceased diver inside. Overall, creature loot becomes a bit more varied.
- New guns: We’re adding the Rifle (and rifle grenades), Heavy Machine Gun, Machine Pistol, and Harpoon Coil-Rifle. These new guns can be obtained without talents, but they start appearing at different points in the campaign to give you access to more powerful guns later in the game.
- Attach flashlights to your rifles.
- VoIP improvements. Radio voice chat quality now diminishes over distance before breaking up entirely, just like text chat within the radio range. We’ve also made a few other small fixes to improve voice chat.
- Fixed the Chinese and Japanese typing method to display the candidate box properly while typing.
Happy new year!
The Holiday Update is coming next week, and soon after that we will take a little break from work to enjoy the holiday season and spend time with friends and family.
We’ll return to work in January, ready for what comes next: preparing for Barotrauma 1.0. While there is still much work to do, the long-awaited full release update with the faction overhaul and campaign ending is now getting close. We aren’t quite ready to give you a release date yet, but let’s say we’re hoping to celebrate our release in the coming spring.
The 1.0 release won’t be Barotrauma’s last update, though! We still have more things planned for our favorite outer space submarine simulator, and we hope you’ll like them too. More about that, and everything else, next year. Enjoy the update and the holidays!
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