Hello everyone!
After the release of the Summer Patch and subsequent hotfix, we’re shifting gears towards our summer vacations. Our team will be taking some time off in the coming weeks, so we will be a little slower to respond on social platforms. We’ll be back in full force in ...
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Our second post-1.0 patch is coming next week, with more improvements and fixes as well as some entirely new additions. The patch is now playable in the Unstable test version, available to everyone who owns Barotrauma on Steam,...
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Thank you sailors old and new for joining us over the past weeks to celebrate our 1.0 release. We hope you’ve had fun diving into the depths; we’ve been overjoyed to see how many of you there have been!
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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.
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 ...
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Time is running short: as we announced earlier this week, Barotrauma is coming out of Early Access on the 13th of this month, so it’s time to sneak peek our way through the rest of the faction overhaul!
In previous weeks, we’...
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Last week, we published the first of three blog posts detailing the upcoming faction overhaul in Barotrauma 1.0. In these posts, we will elaborate on the new features and additions, and give more insight into the different factions of Europa. The first post focused on the Europa Coalition, so now let’s delve deeper into their rival, the Jovian Separatists.
...Hello everyone!
One of the most long-awaited changes coming in our full release version will be an overhaul of the faction system and everything related to it: missions and events, reputation system, faction-specific perks and rewards… There’s a lot we want to write about, so we’re going to go over the upcoming faction overhaul in not one but three posts.
We’ll be shedding some light on all the overhauled systems and new content as well as the various factions. Who are they really? Let’s start with the perhaps obvious one: the Europa Coalition, the governing body of Europa.
...Hello everyone!
The time has finally come to start introducing all the new additions coming in our full release update. Over the following weeks, we will be taking a good long look at the upcoming faction overhaul and the stories of all the different factions.
After that, we’ll also be shedding a little bit of light on what the campaign ending will look like. Only a little bit, though, because it’s better in person, so we want you to experience it for yourselves when the time comes – this March. We will announce an exact date soon!
Before all this, however, we’ve one more early access update to make. This 1.0 pre-patch is coming next week, and it will have some bugfixes left over from last year, and more importantly, some new additions that we want to get into the game before our 1.0 release. These additions have to do with two things: status effects and how poisons work.
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.
Hello everyone!
Besides the talent overhaul we talked about last time, the December update wraps up the tutorial rework introduced earlier this autumn by adding tutorial features integrated into the singleplayer campaign mode. This additional early-game guidance should make it smoother for new sailors to get into traversing Europa’s ocean.
The basic idea of the campaign tutorial is to walk players through a simplified version of the usual campaign loop, explaining the key objectives a bit more than we have in the past. The tutorial is enabled when you begin a singleplayer campaign on the lower difficulties, and can be disabled in the settings when you feel properly trained.
...Hello everyone!
We’ve still got one more update coming this year, and while a lot of it has to do with overall balancing, small improvements and under-the-hood things, there are also a couple of bigger changes underfoot. One of them is a complete overhaul of talents.
While we have m...
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The next update is almost here, so let’s take a final look at everything in it – from performance improvements and submarine changes to overhauled game tutorials and more.
We’re updating Barotrauma’s .NET runtime to a new version to improve overall performance, and we’ve also been working on a number of optimizations to address specific problem areas, such as large numbers of items, talents and physics. These put together should result in significant performance gains.
We wrote more about the .NET update and related things a few weeks earlier on Steam. ...
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The next update is getting closer, and a large part of it has to do with submarines. As part of preparing for our eventual 1.0 release (which is not terribly far anymore!), we’ve been evaluating and reworking the vanilla submarine roster to make sure each sub has a part to play in getting you from the Cold Caverns to the Eye of Europa.
We’re also improving the submarine upgrade system, giving it some new complexity and depth, and adding new submarine-mounted weaponry. Let’s take a better look at all the sub-related changes coming in the next update!
...Happy anniversary!
The weekend before the last, Barotrauma turned three… well, our stay in early access on Steam did. We of course are much older than that already. Even then, now’s a good time to reminisce and look ahead. How has Barotrauma changed in the past three years, and how is it going to change after today?
Barotrauma was quite the different game on June 5, 2019, as you can still see in our original feature trailer that dates back to our early access release:
Below is a list of some of the more memorable things we’ve added or changed since then and until today, in order of appearance!
Hello everyone!
In addition to the modding refactor we introduced before, we’ve been working on colonies, the top-tier outposts, lately, to make them feel more alive and meaningful.
Colonies are a part of the location evolution system that does its own little part in creating a sense of progression in the campaign game mode. With a little help from you, outposts can evolve into specialized outposts, and those in turn may become colonies, real Europan sub-aquatic cities.
The problem with that has been that colonies didn’t actually look very different from regular outposts, and they didn’t entirely surpass the usefulness of specialized outposts at all times. (In some cases, you might even have been headed for a research outpost to access some service it provides… only to have it evolve into a colony that didn’t stock that service while you were still en route. Sorry about that...
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Barotrauma development is rolling along, and it’s time to lift the veil on something that we have been working on for an extended time, behind the scenes and under the hood: a complete overhaul of the codebase for modding.
That may sound alarming – what about all that player-made content already on the Steam Workshop? The modding refactor should not affect most existing mods adversely. More importantly, it will make it a lot neater and more intuitive for you to use mods and for us to update the game without breaking them too often.
As we are soon three years into Early Access, it may seem that this is coming very late. Shouldn’t we have taken care of it in 2019? Well, in 2019, we rewrote just about the entire networking code and made other big changes that, in hindsight, we would ideally have done even before releasing on Steam. It was then that we also got our first real, post-release player feedback...
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The next Barotrauma update has been quietly cooking since the beginning of the year, and it’s almost ready to be served – we’re planning on releasing it on the last week of this month. The update is medium-sized, with new content and fixes… and it’s ready to be tested by all of you right now.
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