Winter Holiday Seasonal Event
To celebrate the Festive Season, we're bringing back the Winter Holiday event that we added to the game during Early Access... a year ago... How time flies!
For the duration of the event, Pilgrimages will offer an optional "Priority Presents" side objective - it pops up randomly, with a 20% chance whenever you jump into the Void, so look out for it on the Astral Map.
Priority Presents
In Priority Presents, Ectypes are tasked with blowing up a Barge Freighter that's been infringing on METEM's domain. Completing the Objective rewards a [i]Festive Gift of METEM[/i], which contains a collection of new (and returning) Winter Holiday cosmetics. The Festive Gift has maximum "duplicate protection," so it'll only reward things you don't already have, until you have everything it can offer! There's 31 Winter Holiday items to collect this year (which includes everything that was available during Early Access).
A Freighter!?
For those of you who just had a minor heart-attack at the prospect of needing to kill a Freighter, there's some additional good news. We revisited both the "normal" Freighter encountered in Ambush and this Festive variant, and made some significant tweaks that should make them way more manageable... The Missile Turrets have been relocated to the top of the Freighter, and are now individually targetable. This means Pilots can target lock them easily, making them easy prey for Gunner and B.R.A.I.N.s. Once the Missile Turrets are gone, the Freighter is much more manageable, so you can deal with the Escorts before you blow it up - As written in the Codex of Strife: "Before you fight your opponent, take away his arms."
Holiday Hub
To emphasize the Festive Season, the METEM Command Hub has been dressed up for the occasion - complete with jingling bells, holographic snow, and a new look for the Ectype known as "Steve."
Why a Seasonal Event?
The Winter Holiday event was something we did during Early Access because we enjoy those types of things in other games, and wanted to try out and see how it would fit Void Crew. When bringing it back, it is an added bonus that it involves the Freighters, which did require some tuning difficulty wise - and it's a good opportunity to add some new variantion for the Jetpack and Jetpack trail unlocks. In other words, it was a low-hanging fruit to re-enable it, and didn't stop us from spending time working on the actual pains and issues revealed by the 1.0 launch.
We're hard at work on our first major bug-fixing patch
... which will be coming out in a couple of weeks, filled to the brim with community most-wanted bugfixes! Once this major bug-fix patch is released, we're going to turn our attention on the next Content Update. More info on that one will be coming later.
We hope you'll continue to have fun with Void Crew, and that RNGesus will bless your haul of Festive Gifts of METEM.
If you are having issues, don't hesitate to share them with us on our Discord!
Sincerely,
// Laurids, Lead Game Designer
and The Hutlihut Games Crew
