Survivor Mercs News

Commanders, lock and load - this update gives you an Arsenal of weapons!

Update 0.9.11, codename "Arsenal", gives you complete control over the action:
equip EVERY Commander clone with a weapon of your choice, take aim, and fire!

Mark enemies for your Mercs to direct their fire, create defensive perimeters, and break out of tight situations with deadly force - or not-so-deadly abilities.



IMPORTANT NOTE: Airstrike and SMG weapons do not fully work as intended, this will be fixed in an upcoming hotfix patch!

Read on for all the details, but first...

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[h2][color]⚠ SAVEGAME WARNING ⚠[/color][/h2]

This Major Update changes various core systems around abilities, and brings adjustments to Bunker Rooms, Traits, Level-ups & Skill Trees, balancing, and meta-progression.

We RECOMMEND you reset your savegame with this update.

The first time you start the game after the update, you will get a popup message that asks you to reset your savegame. If you do reset, you will start fresh and a backup of your last savegame is created in your local game folder.

You CAN continue with your old savegame.
Our tests did NOT show any issues. But the game is still in development, so bugs may occur, hence the recommendation to start over.

You can find a guide on how to restore savegames from older game versions here: How to access & restore savegame backups (Steam Forums)
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Let's get into the details of Update 0.9.11 "Arsenal":

[h3]Active Commander Weapons[/h3]
Every Commander clone can now wield a weapon you can actively control.

Go to the Genome Lab, clone your next Commander, and choose your loadout from an arsenal of starting weapons, independent of Traits or other variables - for now.

The weapons are built in a classic twin-stick shooter fashion: aim & fire with your mouse or controller.



Each of the new starting weapons has a unique profile, behavior, and individual synergies with various stats. Some weapons evolved from Traits that used to give you an active weapon.

Weapons exist in parallel to your Dash, so you can combine them in creative ways with your Mercs, Traits, and Gear items.

With the new active Commander Weapons we separate Dash, Traits, and Weapons into distinct systems to prevent confusion and enable more fun squad build strategies.

The Dash is your default active ability based on your current movement direction.
Any other ability you can actively aim and trigger is now a Weapon.
From now on, Talent Traits will grant you passive abilities, or modify your Dash or Weapons by adding, removing, or changing effects and rules for those.

All Weapons are currently available immediately from the start:

• Leafblower - swoop enemies out of your way and mark them for a short while
  
• Marksman Rifle - fire high-powered projectiles to mark enemies for extended periods
  
• Riot Shield - block projectiles and enemies and clear a path with your shield bash attack
  
• Crippling Mines - drop multiple mines to damage and slow down enemies
  
• Melter Beam - decay armor and mark your targets for a short period
  
• Singularity Launcher - create black holes that pull enemies in and mark them
  
• Quaker Hammer - deal melee AoE damage and knock enemies away
  
• SMG - fire bursts that can punch through armor
  
• Airstrike - cut a swath through the horde
  

Traits that formerly enabled active weapons are now giving passive abilities or modifying your Dash, e.g. the Defender Talent modifies your Dash to shatter enemy projectiles into shrapnel.


[h3]New Effects & Emergent Synergies[/h3]
The primary purpose of Commander Weapons is NOT damage but giving you ways to control your Mercs and manage the horde more effectively. The Weapons scale various parameters with different stats and partially use the new "marked" status effect.

Your Mercs stick to their individual movement & targeting behavior until a "marked" enemy comes into range - then they are focusing on the marked target.

The new "marked" effect and stat-scaling on the Commander Weapons add to the options to create Emergent Synergies. Our goal is to not only to create systems to stack & scale stats, but provide fun ways to control the frantic action.

We're exploring more ways to combine procs & status effects with active & passive abilities and rule modifiers, so please leave us your feedback and show us how you use the new weapons.

[h3]Level-up & Merc Skill Specialization Improvements[/h3]
Update 0.9.10 "Bootcamp" introduced a new level-up system. This update adds refinement and adjusts the Merc's skill trees and specializations to have a more pronounced impact on your squad builds.

Mercs now use a unified structure for their Skill Trees, offering 1 base lane and 2-3 specialization lanes. The spec lanes are exclusive to one another, offer one additional choice for refinement, and result in an Elite Skill as the final upgrade.

The default choices for each level-up are now the Generic Upgrades. Every few level-up rolls will give you the option to pick an upgrade for your Commander Weapon, Mercs, or Gear items.

In turn, the upgrades for Mercs, Weapons, and Gear are more impactful and need fewer level-ups to max them out in total.

One of our main initiatives is building a more intuitive & accessible structure for the various game mechanics and systems.

The data and insights we gained from your player feedback shows that we over-complicated certain things in the game unnecessarily. This update is another step into building a cleaner mental model so you can focus on the action and your squad build strategies instead of digging through and remembering too many different variables.

We started work on two new Mercs since we removed specializations from a few existing Mercs where they weren't providing a competitive alternative to the other skill lanes. The new Mercs are meant to synergize much better with your squad and weapons with a unique profile.

[h3]Additional Languages & Community Translations[/h3]
The game is now available in these languages, in addition to English, German, and Chinese:

• French
  
• Spanish
  
• Italian
  
• Brazilian Portuguese
  
• Polish
  
• Turkish
  
• Korean
  
• Japanese
  
• Ukranian
  
• Russian
  

These new languages are available as a work-in-progess and aren't fully proof-read. We want to invite you to support us and are planning to offer the translation files publicly as part of a Community Translations Project.

You will receive exclusive access to that project via our Discord server to improve translations or add completely new languages to the game. In turn you will receive exclusive benefits, e.g. access to playtest versions and a direct channel to our dev team.

We are sharing more details soon!


[h2]More Additions, Fixes, Adjustments, Improvements & Details[/h2]

• The Gym & Armor Workshop rooms grant multiplier bonuses instead of flat increases to HP and Armor. In turn, various Traits provide flat bonuses to Armor & HP instead of multipliers.
  
• Fixed an instance where pressing Esc just at the right moment before a screen animation started was locking up the game.
  
• Fixed aiming indicator snapping back to default position when releasing the input (e.g. on controllers), instead it remembers your last aiming direction.
  
• Fixed some rare instances where upgrades did not show the stats they affected.
  
• Fixed an issue where Charger enemies were leaving an invisible knockback zone behind after dying.
  
• PhenX should no longer clip out of its arena or push you through the walls when dashing around.
  
• GriftLift shrapnel projectiles can be blocked.
  
• Mammoth should collide with environment objects and Commander correctly.
  
• All enemies should show VFX for currently active status effects correctly.
  
• Scorch's flamethrower uses a more robust system to damage enemies and apply status effects & DoT correctly.
  
• Added "Radar" generic upgrade to increase View Range and Objective Reveal Range.
  
• Rooms have new build & upgrade animations alongside some idle animations.
  
• Info popups for Traits in the Clone Bay should show immediately.
  
• Fixed an issue where right-clicks could prevent other inputs for a few seconds in various circumstances.
  
• Fixed an issue where "missions" (unlock conditions) were resetting unexpectedly.
  
• Added a first iteration of the new dialogue screens with high-fidelity illustrations of Conduit.
  
• Improved performance in various UI elements and the shader for rendering the Commander in UI.
  
• Fixed various instances of VFX clipping with the ground.
  
• Fixed various typos and inconsistencies with UI texts in all languages.
  
• Adjusted the button UI sounds to be less annoying.
  

[h3]Known Issues[/h3]

• Airstrike weapon does not fire multiple bombs as intended.
  
• The game's performance can potentially degrade heavily when playing at very high screen resolutions (UHD+), please lower the resolution to a maximum of 1440p if you encounter this. We are still trying to find the root cause of this problem.
  
• Menus may sometimes scroll erratically when the game falsely selects a UI element at the top or bottom, e.g. in the Bunker menu or the Awards room (anywhere you have scrolling lists). We already identified the root cause within the automatic input device detection and fixed some cases of that, but few occasions remain erratic.
  
• Automatic input recognition is still causing some nuisance with the mouse cursor sometimes interfering with controller input and vice-versa.
  
• Gear items sometimes show the same "utility" icon twice. They also don't show any damage type icon that may be affected negatively, e.g. Napalm buffing fire but nerfing other damage types.
  

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[h2]Requesting Support![/h2]

[color]Commanders, we need your feedback![/color]

Although we test and adjust the game balancing constantly, you have proven more than once that you are the GOAT when it comes to finding OP squad builds and exploits.

Please share your findings with us. Help us spot where something is hopelessly underpowered or breaks the game in the not-fun way.

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[h2]Moving Forward[/h2]

"Arsenal" marks our 5th major Early Access update for Survivor Mercs.

There is much more to come, so "Follow" the game to be notified when the next Early Access Roadmap Update drops Soon™.

Our plans for the next updates include:

⏩ More emergent synergies and squad-build options between Commander, Weapons, Mercs, and Gear, specifically:

• additional proc effects, e.g. things that happen when combining different status effects
  
• adjustments to dashes, projectiles, or attacks to behave differently
  

⏩ Map & Operations overhaul to provide more varied challenges, new Objectives, and better tactical and strategic squad-building

⏩ a visual overhaul to improve UI, readability of the action, and immersion in the game, including high-fidelity illustrations for more characters

⏩ Story missions framing your operations and fight against the M.E.G.A. Corp. goons, and other narrative elements to highlight the Mercs' personalities.

⏩ Better performance and settings for input mapping and other accessibility options.

And, of course, we're always looking into adding new maps & bosses, enemies, Mercs, and other content as they fit in with future updates.
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Commanders, we are really grateful for every one of you who is supporting us with input and feedback during Early Access.

[color]Please don't forget that the game is still under development. All your feedback helps us make a better game![/color]

Even after this update there will be rough edges and bugs here and there. The balancing is a constantly ongoing process, and will change more over time.

We hope this update proves once more our dedication to listening to you and building Survivor Mercs into an outstanding game. Please, help us grow the community with a positive review and participate in the development by leaving your feedback, insights, and ideas on our Discord server.




Let's make a great game, together ❤

Lock, load, and loot, Commanders!

Commanders, tune in and watch us play the upcoming major Early Access Update 0.9.11 "Arsenal"!



🔴 WATCH NOW!

We are excited to release our next update soon while the game is [color]20% off during the Snail Games USA Publisher Sale![/color]

[h2]What's in 0.9.11 "Arsenal"?[/h2]
The upcoming update is going to put the control over your squad in your hands - with Weapons!

Every Commander clone is now able to wield a weapon, no matter what Trait configuration you're choosing.

Weapons can be aimed and fired manually. But it's not just about dealing damage, it's about controlling the engagement:

Use the new "marked" effect to focus your Mercs' fire on individual targets. Decay the armor of specific enemies, create defensive perimeters with mines, bomb or bash your way through the horde, or hammer your enemies into the ground.

Your Arsenal is all about creating emergent synergies and managing the frantic action around you!

The 5th major Early Access update is also bringing new languages and various improvements to level-ups, Merc skill trees & specializations, and meta-progression.

Stay tuned for the update to drop any day! As always, we will share all the details with a major news post here on Steam alongside the release of the newest game version.
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Join the discussion on our Discord server and let us know what you are most excited about.



Lock, load, and loot, Commanders!

And there’s nothing more important to the resistance than camaraderie with your fellow Commanders. With only a month left until we swing into autumn, reminisce with us and share your favorite summer memories! Whether that’s going on family vacation, having an adventure with your closest Commanders, or extracting good loot out of your favorite bullet heaven roguelite game (wink wink), we want to hear about what made this summer so special.

Post your favorite summer memory to the Community Events forum in the Wandering Wizard Discord and don’t forget to use the tag Summers End! We will close submissions off for this event on the 2nd of September. Our top 3 favorite memories will each win a Survivor Mercs key to keep or giveaway to friends/family.

[h3]Submission Rules:[/h3]

• Post your favorite summer memory to the Survivor Mercs Community Events Forum in the Wandering Wizard Discord
  
• Use the forum tag Summers End in your submission
  
• React to other submissions to support your fellow Commanders
  
• One submission per user
  

[h3]Submission Details:[/h3]

• In the upper right corner click New Post
  
• Select the tag “Summer’s End”
  
• Type out your favorite memory, attach a picture for bonus points
  
• Click Submit and watch the reactions roll in
  

[h3]Rewards:[/h3]

• 3 winners will receive 1 Survivor Mercs Key each
  

We can’t wait to see your special summer memories, Commanders! It’s looking to be a very busy autumn for us, so keep your eyes peeled on Steam and Discord for our latest game updates! Until then, keep it cool Commanders

- The Survivor Mercs Community Team

We want to Congratulate @derzwo and @The Games Detective for winning 1st and 2nd place respectively in our Summer Games Survivor Mercs Community Event!


[h3]@derzwo has completed ALL 128 ACHIEVEMENTS IN THE GAME[/h3]
Talk about a world record. That wins them a 1st place Gold Medal! (And check out their uproarious tale about them in the ⁠👋│community-events-survivor-mercs forum)


[h3]@The Games Detective has completed 70 out of 128 achievements![/h3]
Not to shabby from your favorite give-away having detective. That wins them a 2nd place Silver Medal!

Great job Commanders! Very impressive efforts on the side of the resistance. The Evil M.E.G.A. corps won't know what hit them!

Don't forget to message Mod Mail in the Wandering Wizard Discord for your free key to give away to the person of your choosing! And keep an eye open for future community events for the game. For those of you who still need to join the Wandering Wizard Discord, you can do so here.

[h2]Road Map Update[/h2]
And for those of you who missed our announcement last week. The developers have just published a brand new road map that outlines their plans for the future! Included are details about the next major update, new operations/challenges, and a possible storyline???

Find more information below
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2141520/view/4362382965820954113?l=english

We salute you Commanders,
- The Wandering Wizard Community Team

Commanders, a bunch of major updates is coming over the next months as we continue evolving the game throughout Early Access!

We are excited to bring you more features, improvements, changes, and new content, so read on for the details:


[h2]Public Roadmap & Closed Playtests[/h2]
In the future, you will find this roadmap on the Steam page for the game, pinned in the Steam forums, and on our Discord server to discuss the upcoming changes and improvements:

[expand][/expand]

We are taking the game to the next level!
Survivor Mercs should become a truly unique [color]"horde survival squad-builder"[/color], so we're focusing even more on roguelike elements and squad-building mechanics.

Join the community and let's make the game better, together!

We are hand-picking community members who will soon get access to a Playtest Version of Survivor Mercs to test and provide feedback on pre-release versions of the game. Apply now on our Discord server if you want to join!

We aim to roll out this Playtest over the next weeks and expand it over time with more of Commanders as we learn and improve.

[h2]Upcoming Major Updates[/h2]
With the last update and its subsequent patches for "Bootcamp" (0.9.10) we introduced new operation types, new synergies, improved onboarding and progression systems, added a ton of Achievements, and introduced the groundwork for more narrative content.

[color]Now, Commanders, get ready for the updates 0.9.11 and beyond![/color]

[h3]Commander Weapons[/h3]
Our topmost priority is the introduction of Commander Weapons to grant more control over your squad of Mercs.

You will be able to equip one of multiple default weapons for any Commander clone. These weapons go hand-in-hand with new procs and synergy effects based on damage types and status effects.

The weapons are not replacing your Mercs as your primary damage source!

Instead, you can actively aim and shoot these weapons to apply certain status effects or set up powerful procs for your Mercs. Three examples to illustrate the idea:

1. "Mark" enemies with your sniper rifle: Mercs prioritize marked targets, so you can indirectly control your squad to focus fire to get out of tight situations or clear the area to capture an objective.

2. Throw poison grenades to apply a light poison DoT. If a Merc with a fire attack hits these targets, it will cancel the poison DoT but in turn double the fire damage or create an explosion.

3. Attack your enemies with a high-powered laser to melt their armor and apply a decay effect your Mercs can exploit to deal massive damage to armored targets.

We are planning to roll out this feature in the next major update 0.9.11, codename "Arsenal", with a starting set of weapons. Once we have more data and insights - not only from the Playtest - we plan to expand this feature with more Commander Weapons, synergies, and additional systems & challenges to find and change weapons during a run.

[h3]Map & Operation Overhaul[/h3]
We started working on a massive overhaul and improvement to the Maps & Operations.

Right now, the game feels too overwhelming at times, especially with lots of enemies and objectives, managing your extraction, watching out for the next miniboss, hoarding loot, all while deciding your next upgrade choices.

Our goal is to break up the 20-minute runs into multiple shorter stages.

With these stages, we introduce more variety to the maps and objectives, focus on the frantic combat action, and improve the progression during your runs with more tactical depth and more meaningful choices.

It is important to us to keep the essential core of the game intact!

So, we will be sharing more details as we progress on this massive feature and make sure to test our design and assumptions before committing to any changes permanently.

Based on this new map structure, we are planning to introduce new Operation Types and completely new Maps that look and play differently from the current ones. Of course, each Map will come with a new Boss and its custom music theme.

And once we get closer to the v1.0 release, you can expect an official Survivor Mercs OST.

[h3]Story Missions[/h3]
We all want to learn more about the Mercs and the war on M.E.G.A. Corp.!

One of the next updates will introduce Missions and more narrative content.

The goal is not just adding fluff & flavor, but tying more of the progression to actual missions instead of having only the current "unlock conditions". This is partially dependent on the new map & operations structure, but we will try to already introduce more narrative elements with each update.

The Missions will be wrapped in brief dialogues with various characters. For this, we are working on additional high-res illustrations of various characters like Conduit:



But the Mercs and the Bosses will also get a chance to shine in high-res with individual Missions:



[h3]Settings, Languages, Input Remapping[/h3]
We want to make sure the game can be enjoyed by as many players as possible.

Please post your wishes for settings and features you would like us to implement in this forum thread:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/2141520/discussions/0/4299321616496946128/

With one of the next updates, we are offering the game in more additional languages, specifically Spanish, French, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, and Ukrainian.

We expect the translations to be imperfect at first. Therefore we want to involve you and the community to work with us on improving the translations by offering direct access to the language files. If you would be interested in getting involved, maybe also with a language we don't have yet, we'd be happy to hear from you on our Discord server.

Once the Commander Weapons & new Map System are available, we aim to dedicate more time to settings and options like input remapping.

[h3]Our Modding Plans[/h3]
We can't share exact details - yet - but we have plans to open up the game to enable various degrees of moddability.

The first step will be Custom Skins. We want to enable you to replace the pixel sprites for characters, items, and weapons in the game to customize them to your liking and share your creations via Steam Workshop. We don't want to stop there and also allow changes to game data and potentially even ways to add new content.

This is more of a long-term feature. If you are a modder, we already want to hear your thoughts, wishes, and ideas so we can try and build a system that is comfortable and fun to use.

[h2]Other Improvements & Closing Thoughts[/h2]
The "Battle Plan" shows many more improvements and features. In this news post, we wanted to focus on the updates in the near future. We're going to share more details about these additional items on the menu as we progress further in Early Access.

In general, we're constantly working on improving performance and audio-visual quality of the game. The upcoming updates require work on various subsystems and we aim to optimize these with each iteration to move closer towards a stable 60 fps. The current bottleneck is the CPU since a lot of our physics simulation can be heavily optimized. Now that the core of the game is more and more feature-complete, we know what impacts performance the most and can tackle these optimizations.

Many improvements further down the road are expanding on these core systems, e.g. by introducing more Mercs, items, enemies, challenges, or synergy effects.

As we move forward, we plan to upgrade our Twitch integration and look at integrating CrowdControl. Enjoying a game with others is always great and we want to give back to the amazing community of streamers and creators by offering ways to engage with their audience while playing our game.

And speaking of playing with others: we have plans to add a co-op mode to the game where a friend can pick up a controller and take control over any Merc on your squad at any time. This feature is currently still at a design stage. Once we get the basics to work for a local couch-coop, we will also look at Steam's Remote Play Together feature, but we don't want to promise anything at this stage as the game is not built for online multiplayer functionality.


So, Commanders, expect more Major Early Access Updates for Survivor Mercs over the next months! And of course, many more news & information about these planned features and content expansions.

Join the discussion on our Discord server and let us know what you are most excited about.



Lock, load, and loot, Commanders!