We’ve been talking about it for awhile, but Ships 2.0 is almost upon us! As a studio we’re incredibly excited to bring you an updated next month so you will be prepared to see those changes. If you want to get straight to that, then skip to the bottom. 3z732z
The Backstory
About a year ago, we embarked on what we thought would be the relatively easy task of making a ship PvE table. This was intended to go with the “Coming Soon” Hardware Abilities. Our engineers put in the appropriate connections and code, and our designers sat down to begin the process of making Ship PvE content. But as we players were not really engaging with Ships.
And so we asked ourselves a tough question – could Ships be better? And to make Ships better, should we hold off on making PvE content? The answer we came to was yes on both s. So we thought about what could accomplish the goals we were hoping to achieve with ships, and decided to introduce – Reinforcement On Enter Battle Effects.
Reinforcement On Enter Battle Effects means that all ships, when brought in to battle from Reinforcements, now do something new to the battlefield. The allure of the mechanic is that Battle Effects were originally supposed to be the Hardware Abilities that were “Coming Soon”. As stated above, from what we saw in the wild, along with our intuition, we knew we needed to refactor them significantly.
So, with the move to the “new” Reinforcement On Enter Battle Effects, it meant that we needed more ships were balanced for a 5v5 experience where there were no On Enter effects. And in doing all this, we fundamentally changed the overall experience. Ultimately, we think the experience has shifted from where 5v5 felt like a Naval Battle Simulation to 3v3 feeling like an intense aerial dogfight. And so Hardware Abilities became Reinforcement Abilities.
Why are we telling all of this to you? As you look through the update and start playing with the new version of ships, you can get some insight into why things are different. Fundamentally, it was driven by us having made something, Ships, that you didn’t play with or like as much as we had hoped. In an effort to make it better, we meaningfully changed the Feature. Our hope is that you find the experience as interesting and compelling as we do.
The Ship 2.0 Roll Out
Finally, we want to level two of their Reinforcement Abilities. Additionally, we are going to be taking a Cantina Table node and adding Ship Reinforcement Material to it, so that players can start farming to power up their ships. We will be also releasing two bundles, so that players can bolster their fleets to engage in the new mode.
In this live we will retire the Cantina Table node that supplies Reinforcement Materials.
