Fred from Interceptor here.
First of all, I want to thank all of you for buying Bombshell. We're extremely grateful for all the feedback and support. Running a small indie studio, trying to make big games is not always easy, but we remain committed to keep leveling-up as a team!
We've been going through every single review and comment about Bombshell we could find. What we’ve noticed is that users generally like the game, while career reviewers generally dislike the game. And within those two groups, there’s some really valid overlap in criticism that I think we definitely could have done better.
Where it went wrong and what we're doing about it!
Below is what we're going to be working on the next 4 weeks. We already have the first hotfix ready, which should auto-download for those of you who own the game right now.
Expectations: Some reviewers were expecting to be playing a “Diablo in space.” Ever since previewers started comparing us to some really great ARPG’s, we sort of ran with that comparison because of how flattering it was. But our RPG elements are super lightweight by comparison to most other ARPG’s, and so moving forward we’re going to work harder to set expectations more accurately. This is an action-shooter with weapon progression.
Difficulty. For 1.1 we're going to unlock Hard mode right from the beginning, while making the Normal mode slightly more forgiving. Hopefully this will allow more people to get past the first boss and experience the other 2/3'rds of the game! :slightly_smiling:
"Filler". We wanted to create huge environments, and massive worlds. What we ended up with instead were too few missions with too little variety, presented in a manner that ended up feeling too monotonous at times. It’s clear we have a fun little action game in here, but it’s bogged down by a lot of this unnecessary “filler.”
Boss Battles. They’re are either too hard, or too easy to exploit. In this hotfix, the Abomination has been tuned a bit to be more balanced and fair. Let us know what you think. And in 1.1 we're completely overhauling the bosses to be more more fun, and less frustrating in general.
One-Liners & Executions. In this hotfix, we've removed some of the more obnoxious one-liners, and we made executions happen less frequently.These things are supposed to feel fun/funny, special, or memorable when they happen. But when they happen too often, it’s just annoying.
Achievements and general bugs have now been fixed as well. Achievements that didn’t work previously, will unlock automatically when you load your profile (if you unlocked them during gameplay). The total changelist from the review copies up until this patch, has more than 200 bugs fixed and implemented. We're still doing our postmortem, and as soon as we have a detailed list of what we're going to do for 1.1, I'll update you guys in here.
Thank you for the support guys! This is the most ambitious title our small team has undertaken to date, and we’ve learned a LOT! Your kind messages and constructive critiques go a long way toward making Bombshell better, and we love you for it!
Bombshell 1.01 Changelog:
- Reduced health for Abomination boss battle in Phase 1 and 3.
- Reduced damage and acid range for Abomination boss battle in Phase 3.
- Reduced number of creature spawns in B5.
- Fixed stats saving on player death.
- Fixed wobbly camera in character/shop menu.
- You can not "over-upgrade" powers, stats and weapons anymore.
- Some achievement fixes. If any of the past achievements are not unlocked, they will be recovered from saved save stats and unlocked when you load your profile.
- Execution chance is lowered to 10%.
- Bugfix for B3 Firerain (fixed glow).
- Quest rewards for "Find Holloway" quest in A1 now activate after the conversation is over (to avoid the level up message interfering with the dialog).
- Fixed default keybinds restoring dev commands.
- Depth of field is enabled by default.
- Disabled dev messages popping up.
- By default, textures/characters will be set to "high quality" instead of "medium/low".
- Fixed effects for two explosions.
- Got rid of glowing grid from occlusion mats, now it's a simple dither.
- Fix for subquest in C1.
- Texture and material tweaks for White House assets.
- B5 Boss battle - Alternate falling rocks in Phase 3 + respawning ammo.
- C5 - Fixed hidden pickups between phases & pickups now respawn.
