Is it just me or is the website busted? Both on phone and desktop nothing but white background and the text.
Yep, we're aware of the issue. :/ The site is getting an abnormally high amount of traffic at the moment and we're suspecting it's triggering the hosting provider's DDoS mitigation system. We're looking into it, but I doubt we'll be able to do much about it during the weekend.
Added a new storage item: Backpack, essentially a larger variant of the toolbelt with a small speed debuff to help you move things around. Can be obtained through the new assistant talent “Bag It Up”, and purchased in stores around mid-way through the campaign.
...I'm not sure that reducing movement speed to 70% is a "small" debuff, but lemme do some math here:
If I'm going for full pack mule in hauling my stuff between a wreck and my sub, I have the following options:
- In the toolbelt slot, I have either a toolbelt (6 slots) or a backpack (12 slots, but 30% slower movement).
- In my hands, I can bring either two storage containers (24 slots) or a cargo scooter (11 slots, but speedy). I could bring a toolbelt or a backpack instead of either of those options, but considering how much they hold, just one storage container would be better than either of them.
- In the outerwear slot, an exosuit would provide me 10 slots but it would also drop my speed by 60% (and my scooter speed by 75%).
Looking at both options here, I could bring 46 slots back with me, but at an incredibly slow pace no thanks to either the backpack or the exosuit, or I could bring 17 slots with me and do it much more rapidly. If you include the 10 slots of personal inventory, it's now 56 and 27, respectively.
...maybe it's just me, but that debuff seems like it's too strong here.
TL;DR Backpack not worth it in current state.
I think you're overlooking the fact that diving suits reduce movement speed too. The suits' speed debuff don't stack with the backpack's, so the difference isn't that drastic. :) The backpack leaving both of your hands free is also a huge plus.
For the future, please keep into additional consideration that people using github are usually at least interested in coding/development, and represent a vocal minority of the community. I've found the (2) ish posts responsible for the oxygen changes and they're from the same user with between 10-20 comments.
Which isn't a whole lot of discourse for a game with such a large playerbase. Casual players usually won't complain until change is imminent or already enforced.
Can't the change instead be an optional difficulty option to tick? I'm certain that would be far less controversial.
You're right, the GitHub users are a very small (but vocal) part of the player base, and most of them are very long-time players, many having played the game since the legacy version. So we are well aware we need to take the discussions on GitHub with a grain of salt, and consider the perspective of the more casual and newer players as well.
However, I do need to point out that the one discussion I linked wasn't the reason we decided to do this change, I just feel many of the points raised there summed up well why we feel the change to oxygen tanks was necessary. Those points have been raised by tons of players during the years though, not just in GitHub, but also in the Steam discussions and Discord.
It's important to us to take both the more "casual" playerbase and the veteran players into consideration, and it's often been difficult to find a middle-ground that works for both. I feel in this case we managed to find a good middle-ground though; with the increased tank durations, you can still carry enough oxygen for a very, very long EVA mission, but you need to put a little more thought into how much oxygen you want to bring, as opposed to being easily able to carry an almost endless supply of oxygen.
It could be worth considering to make it optional, although personally I'm not super keen on the idea. I feel like being able to disable it would in a sense allow you to practically remove an important challenge (oxygen management) that's supposed to be a part of the core gameplay. It also seems that the feedback from people who've tried the changes in the unstable branch (including more casual players) has been almost entirely positive, so I'm not entirely convinced that many would even want to go back to the old stack sizes. But we'll see how it goes, further adjustments can of course be made in future patches, and modding the old stacks back is also always an option if only a small portion of players feel like they want them back. :)
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