[2023] Coming next week: Barotrauma 1.0

Hello everyone!

It’s time for the final sneak peek post leading up to our 1.0 release, now just around the corner. The road has been long and the beginning of this year very busy with all the launch preparations, but we are excited to have made it this far. We hope more than anything that you will like Monday’s release – let’s take one last look at what you will find in it.

Faction overhaul

To anyone keeping a close eye on our news, the faction overhaul will already be pretty familiar. If you’ve missed them, however, take a look at these previous posts about the Coalition, the Separatists, and the clown and husk factions, where we’ve introduced all the four Europan factions as well as discussed the faction overhaul features in more detail.

In a nutshell, the faction overhaul fleshes out the four rival groups you can choose to side with, introducing new story events and faction-specific missions, as well as special items, perks, merchants and hireable NPCs you can unlock as rewards for amassing enough faction reputation.

On that note, we’ve reworked the reputation system: your reputation is now always measured per faction, resulting in fortunate or unfortunate consequences along the way. We’ve done away with outpost reputation, as all outposts are now controlled by either the Europa Coalition or the Jovian Separatists, and the Church of Husk and the Children of the Honkmother have their own districts in outposts. Thus your reputation with the controlling faction of an outpost or district determines what kind of welcome you should expect there.

We’ve also added a second path out of any biome and into the next, so now you no longer need to build a reputation with the Coalition to advance in the game; the Separatists control the other passageway, so you can play through an entire campaign under their banner, if you wish to.

Another addition in the faction overhaul is the Captain’s missing third talent tree. The talents in this tree, titled “Politician”, focus on faction-related experience gains and generally encourage you to pick a side and stick with it. The tree also offers some of the more powerful experience boosts to your crew.

New endgame

Arguably even more anticipated, we’ve finally implemented the real ending of the campaign. If you’ve finished the campaign anytime in the past, you may have been disappointed to find there is hardly any content at the end. That’s finally changing on Monday, and finishing a campaign after that will unlock the proper endgame sequence. (Fun fact, it’s loosely based on a dream our lead designer had several years ago while having a fever.)

We don’t want to spoil the surprise for you, so let’s just say the campaign ending will test the skills you and your crew have learned along the way, take you somewhere you have never been before in Barotrauma, and hopefully even answer a question or two in the process, if you pay close attention. The new endgame adds about 2–3 hours to the length of the campaign, depending on how thoroughly you want to comb through it.

We’ve been working on the endgame for a full year by now, and we can’t wait to hear what you think about it! Special thanks to our volunteer playtesters for all the bug reports and feedback on the endgame, and all your encouragement over the past months. Now that the veil is being lifted, we hope all of our players will find the conclusion worth the wait.

What else is new

Monday’s 1.0 update also adds many other improvements, chief among them the long-awaited language filter for the server browser. Now you can filter servers based on language to have an easier time finding a lobby you want to join.

We’ve also completely remade the Japanese translation of the game, and there are lots of smaller improvements coming too: improved projectile syncing in multiplayer, poison improvements, and various optimizations, to name a few things. The last three song additions are also making their way to the Supporter Pack soundtrack concurrently with Monday’s release.

And to answer something we’ve seen a lot of you asking over the past weeks: the new endgame and faction overhaul, as well as everything else in the update, are backwards compatible with old saves, meaning you should not need to start a new campaign to access the new content 1.0 brings. To get your campaign map to update properly, you will only need to travel to the next outpost. Some mods may need updating (particularly Lua, which will need to be updated whenever the game updates).

Welcome to Europa

Rarely does one look forward to a Monday as much as we do today, and hopefully you do too! We are excited and nervous in equal measures, and very grateful to have made it so far with Barotrauma. Did you know that our original plan was to reach 1.0 the same year we entered early access – that soon proved too optimistic a plan, and fortunately, we were able to keep working on the game for a longer time.

Thanks to your incredible support and enthusiasm over the years, we have had the luxury of making Barotrauma into a much bigger, and hopefully better game than we ever imagined. We’re not done with it even now and will continue making updates post-release, but for now it is time to say: Thank you, and see you on the other side.

P.S. If you missed it before, take a look at this behind the scenes video about making Barotrauma!

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