Sneak peek: Respawning changes and campaign difficulty settings

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

Hello everyone!

The next update is just a few weeks away now, and we have more new features to sneak peek at. We also wanted to give a little update on the development of the Permadeath mode that we polled you about earlier this year. Let’s take a look!

Respawning changes and Permadeath As we wrote before, Reaper’s Tax gets replaced with customizable respawning skill loss. This makes skill loss on respawning entirely customizable, via two separate sliders in the server settings.

The Permadeath mode unfortunately had to be postponed, as it took more time to develop than we thought. Thus it will not be included in the next update, but you will still get to try it out soon: we are aiming to have Permadeath, as well as the related Ironman mode, available for testing in the Unstable version soon after the update goes live.

Thank you everyone who took our poll and participated in the early feedback discussion about Permadeath! We selected the design alternative which allows you to take control of a bot when your character dies. Here’s a quick recap of what these upcoming, optional high-difficulty multiplayer modes will mean:

• Permadeath: any character death is permanent, and you can only respawn by acquiring a new character – either one of your bots, or a new character hired at an outpost.
  
• Ironman: any death is permanent, and there is no respawning at all. You can only spectate after you die. Intended for crews who want to try no-death runs.

New campaign difficulty settings We’re adding a lot of new customization options to the difficulty settings in campaign mode:

• New difficulty parameters: adjust common item consumption rates, world hostility, character vitality, and a couple of other hazards for added or diminished gameplay challenge…
  
• ...Or choose from a list of presets for balanced difficulty levels.
  
• Added a new “Abyssal” difficulty preset.
  
• New server lobby layout to make these and all the other settings easier to find and use.

We hope that these changes will make Barotrauma enjoyable to players of various experience levels and difficulty preferences. Read more about all of them on our blog[barotraumagame.com] and let us know what you think!