Second Extinction™ News

Hello Extinction Elites! 

It’s been a while since we’ve given you an insight into some of our dev practices here, so the release of Pre-Season 4 Man vs Beast seems like the perfect time to rectify that and run through the creation of a whole new character. Introducing Jack!

[h3]Character Brief [/h3]

Voiced by Star Wars, Home and Away star, and all-around lovely guy Jay Laga'aia, Jack marks our first new hero since launch and joins Rosy as our second Enforcer on the Extinction Unit roster. While Jack shares the same class as Rosy, allowing him access to the same heavy weaponry, we wanted to make sure that he supported a very different gameplay style while remaining true to the core of what an Enforcer is. 

With Rosy, the intention was to create a character that performs the Enforcer crowd-control role by fortifying an area and keeping enemies at a distance through the use of her Static Barrier ability. With Jack we wanted to do essentially the opposite, encouraging players to get right in the thick of the fight, and his toolkit was shaped around that. Charge gets him in the fight quickly, carving a path through the horde while his passive, Scrum Down, keeps him alive once he’s there and his Kinetic Converter acts as an explosive finisher to a fight.

Continue reading the full letter on how Jack came to life here.

It’s time to go even deeper into the Basic Training you’re getting during Early Access. Pre-Season 4 will launch on the same day Second Extinction becomes available on Xbox via Game Preview and Game Pass - April 28th.

The season highlights include a brand new Enforcer hero who brings his own repertoire of skills to the table in the war against the dinosaurs. We also have a new Tutorial mission, especially beneficial for new players and brand new Seasonal Contracts!

As always, the team has been smashing bugs and cracking codes to up the experience even more. A complete list of fixes and improvements will come alongside the update.

Suppose you run into any issues now or in the future, please report them directly to support here. We’re a small team, and as much as we try, we can’t have eyes everywhere. You helping us report issues means we can make the experience for you better faster.

We hope you enjoy the coming update, and don’t forget to give us feedback and share your ideas and wishes on our Discord server.

See you in the next Pre-Season!

- The Second Extinction Team

The Avalanche Publisher Sale is now live!

If you’ve been eyeing an Avalanche title, or want to gift one of our games to a friend so that you can go on adventures together, now is the perfect time to pick it up at a roarsome price.

Have the itch to go hunting? Battle robots? Or our personal favorite slay dinos?
Scratch that itch by going here!

Hello, Extinction Elites!

It’s time for another update. This time, I’m going to be a little more future-focused and talk about some of the exciting stuff on the horizon.

As always, the State of the Game letter’s goal is to provide an open channel between you and us. Feel free to reach out at any time in the Discord.

[h3]What we are (and have been) doing[/h3]
As you no doubt have seen, we will be coming to Xbox Preview very soon! Releasing on three platforms (Win10, Xbox One, Series X/S) at the same time is a very challenging task, so a lot of our development team has been focusing on that.

Once Xbox has been released, content for both Steam and Xbox versions will be on parity. This means that we will be sim-shipping everything on both versions as we go through Early Access/Preview together. It also means that game updates will take a little longer in between than what we’ve done in the past with our PC-only version. However, we will keep an eye on any PC-specific fixes that need to be made (such as addressing crashes).

With Xbox on the horizon, we also feel pretty confident in presenting the main features coming for this year - so take a look at our roadmap!



[h3]What we will be doing[/h3]
Our year will be pretty intense; the roadmap graphic doesn’t include all we are doing! In-game communications, a better tutorial experience, and gamepad mapping are some of the most requested features from our playerbase, so we’re happy to put them up there. Cross-play is another exciting feature that is a first for Avalanche Studios in general.

There is also a myriad of other suggestions, improvements, features, and tweaks that aren’t shown on the map but are things we are working on - we just don’t have an ETA on delivery yet. Also, we will keep looking at gameplay information and the community polls to help tweak a lot of systems. Having more things to do in Expedition Mode, as an example, is something we heard you say in our Discord poll a few weeks back.

Speaking of polls, we’re going to start with some more formal surveys about your feelings towards aspects of the game. We will be assessing the launch readiness of the title based on these surveys, so I would like to strongly encourage you to take the time to fill them out as best you can. They’re not long or scary, I promise! In fact, here is the link for the first one, where we ask you about our difficulty settings:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Pre-season3

It’s only open until March 18.

[h3]Seasonal Contracts[/h3]
This bears its own category! We goofed and put the wrong date as the deadline for Preseason 2 contract completion. We can see that some of you missed out on completing the contracts, and therefore receiving the rewards, including the very awesome Rosy Hornet skin.
We’re working on a resolution for this. The way the contracts were designed was that they would only be active during a certain time period. It’s not easy to just flick a switch, and they’re back. But we will find a way to allow those contracts to be completed and associated rewards to be earned in-game to a reasonable extent.

We’re also aware that Xbox players are wondering if they have missed out on the Preseason rewards that have already been released and will be released before the Xbox launch. Don’t worry; we have thought of this scenario, and we won’t be punishing Xbox players for waiting! We’ll have more information on how these rewards will be earned at a later date, but I will need to stress that these events will be Xbox-exclusive, as Steam players have already had the opportunity to do the Preseason content.

[h3]One Final Note[/h3]
As always, if you experience any bugs, technical issues, or problems, please reach out to our Customer Service team for assistance. We want to make sure the game is stable and works for everyone who has the requisite specs, and the more information we have, the better our game will be.

Thank you for being a part of our Early Access journey, and see you in Discord!

Cheers,
Julianne Harty
Product Owner


P.S. Take the survey!