Responders, get ready for a big one.
REANIMATION (Update 0.4.0) is now just a few short weeks away, an update that compares in size and scope with NMRiH2 Early Access launch back in October.
Reanimation includes the new Pottsville map, a new radial inventory, a revamped combat system, a character roster,
a big surprise, and a host of other big items as well as impactful bug fixes across the entire game.
Our team has looked forward to this update as our opportunity to finally release a huge pile of features and content, a great deal of which has been in the works for months (and in some cases years), but wasn’t able to make it for last year’s initial Early Access launch.
Reanimation to us is more than just another one of our monthly game updates - it’s quite special, and we see it as a big moment for the game to show itself off as a far more playable content and feature-packed version of No More Room in Hell 2 in Early Access.
Early Access development will continue beyond April, with more updates to come as we work towards its 1.0 version.
If you’re just joining the community, we invite you to look back at the release roadmap up to now:
Now, let’s look onward to what’s coming in April…
Surprise Major content
We’re still holding a big card in our decks so that we can truly blow players away once we get closer to the release of REANIMATION.
A few hints as to what April’s surprise content may be:
- It's something we've been working on for a long time (and we haven’t been shy about it either!)
- It's going to give players a lot more to do in the game.
- We think it's the main thing the game needs more of right now!
We’re confident that players are going to be happy with the surprise major content coming in April (alongside everything else in the update) - but there’s a lot more to talk about besides it…
Map 2: Pottsville
The first new map since October 2024’s Early Access launch is nearly here!
Pottsville, a brooding suburban small town full of claustrophobic encounters with the undead at dawn, is a new urban-set map for No More Room in Hell 2.
Inspired by classic zombie movie settings and scenes, Pottsville is smaller and far more dense than the big rural open map, Power Plant. It'll play very differently, with more claustrophobic encounters against the undead, as players creep down foggy alleyways and roam through neighbourhood houses and downtown buildings, as they explore a blend of suburbia and city environments.
Pottsville will see players more rapidly group up (compared to Power Plant) as they explore a neighborhood teeming with the undead, before descending deeper into the map's city streets and urban centre.
"With Pottsville our main goal was to create a suburban horror experience mixed with a new flow and intensity. Players will still spawn alone but we hope to surprise you with how the match plays out from there. Power Plant was a rural setting and more open, whereas Pottsville is a suburban small town and feels more dense. With this density we’re able to create new moments where the zombie pressure is more immediate.”
“One of the big changes we’ve made is to develop some new zombie spawning tech so we can more reliably put pressure on the player when we want to. We then designed our layouts to try and support this new tech and it's really cool to see it come to life!"- Luke Shelswell, Level Design Director
This new map is just one of the many new chunks of major content coming in REANIMATION, one of our studio’s largest single game updates ever.
Character Roster
New to REANIMATION will be a character roster that allows you to manage multiple permadeath characters at once. Prefer to leave your level 50 veteran back at base while you venture forth with a lower level responder? Now that’s an option.
On the character tab, players will now have three character slots.
Clicking a filled slot will make that character active. Clicking an empty slot will bring up a character selection pop-up. Once a player starts matchmaking, character selection is locked.
We’ll plan to continue to iterate on the Character Roster feature beyond April.
Weight-based Radial Inventory
The new radial inventory harkens back to the first No More Room in Hell, allowing you to move your mouse into quadrants of your screen to quickly select between inventory items.
New to No More Room in Hell 2’s inventory will be a weight system for items you pick up. Weights are reflected in the size of each "slice" of the quadrant of the radial inventory. So, a 2 handed sledgehammer or wooden planks will take up a great deal of more "weight space” than a kitchen knife does. The earlier inventory in NMRIH2 was not weight-based but simply had a limited number of slots, regardless of the weight of things you were carrying.
The radial inventory will also allow players to assign keyboard hotkeys (1-9) by pressing the desired hotkey while hovering over an item.
We expect that the new system will create a more fast-paced inventory experience while also forcing players to make more strategic decisions about what items they collect and use. Players will have to make smarter choices about what to take with them, give to other players, or leave behind.
Combat 2.0
April’s new Combat 2.0 system aims to bring the game’s melee experience much more in line with feedback we’ve heard from the community, which means closer to the core of a No More Room in Hell game. Combat should feel more like desperate and gritty survival, and with more uniqueness between weapons than before.
We last spoke about the new melee system in our recent blogpost:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/292000/view/534342772300186602?l=english
As combat designer
Nicolas Lince described in our livestream earlier this month, Combat 2.0 is focused on allowing players to stack melee actions together for more creativity and better interplay with your co-op allies during fights. It’s now much more important to measure your strike distance, decide on the direction of your attacks, keep an eye on your stamina - and juggle all of this with allies at your side. One player may take a more “crowd control” role, knocking back multiple zombies with heavy attacks and kicks, while another player more carefully disperses enemies with precision, as zombies make it through the crowd.
New melee weapons are also on their way to complement the revised melee system - but stay tuned for those details.
[h2]Plus much, much more, including Performance Improvements and Bug Fixes[/h2]
What we’ve described here is just part of what’s coming in April’s major REANIMATION Update which includes a host of other features as well as that huge surprise chunk of content.
A sampling of more to expect in the April update:
- Riot police zombies
- Zombie spawning improvements (essentially, a new spawning system entirely) to bring core improvements to enemy density and scarcity across all maps
- Modified loot spawning to create a more rewarding experience as you search for gear and supplies
- Performance improvements
- Hundreds of bug fixes
Stay tuned through the rest of the month for more info about the April update, coming in just a few weeks.
[h2]What else we’re working on:[/h2]
[h3]New map:
Waldoboro Lewiston[/h3]
Waldoboro is another urban setting map that we also have deep in development, that longtime followers of NMRIH2 would remember as a map being worked on by the Lever team before they joined Torn Banner.
As one update on the narrative side - we’ve now changed the name of Waldoboro to
Lewiston to better reflect its real-world setting within the state of Maine. In this upcoming map, Responders find themselves further afield from Pennsylvania as they work to secure the safety of survivors across a ravaged city at golden sunset.
We’re excited for NMRIH2 to continue to tell the story of an active and evolving apocalypse as more maps come to the game on the road to 1.0.
Stay tuned for more details about Lewiston, which we also dived into in
our recent livestream for an in-engine walkthrough of the map courtesy of longtime NMRIH dev Jon Wiley (aka Cenelder).
If you want to join in on the discussion,
please join our Discord. You can also leave feedback in-game, or at
NMRIH2.com/support.
