The Riftbreaker News

Last week, we told you about the changes to the weapons system in the upcoming Riftbreaker 2.0 update. Thank you for all the healthy discussion that took place in the comments section of that post. It’s great to see you so engaged and full of ideas to make the game a better experience. Fear not - we’re not going to sacrifice fun for the sake of mythical balance. We’ll report back to you when we have some more results from our testing. In the meantime, as we promised, we will tell you about the second massive change in RB 2.0 - the upgraded loot system.

The most basic example of the new system in action. The Biocache dropped a unique item and some resources for good measure. The higher the rarity of the Biocache, the better your chances for more advanced gear and even more resources.

With all the exciting additions coming to The Riftbreaker in the upcoming updates, we have been looking for some new ways to encourage our players to explore the maps further than before. Sure, we’ve already had our Bioanomalies and Biocaches. Still, if you have unlocked all the unique items for your profile and do not need some resources, they might stop feeling rewarding after a while. After a while, when a new map opens up, most players would just complete the objectives and move on. It’s not wrong and might suit your playstyle - more power to you! However, we wanted to make exploration more meaningful, so we decided to best approach it through looting opportunities.

The weapons you find as loot have unique properties, like cluster projectiles, for example. They are tuned to be meaningful and trigger often, so that it's not just a "paper" chance for a bonus effect.

When you look at the best action RPGs, they give you plenty of opportunities to get new gear and a power spike by simply playing the game and exploring the world. Every chest you open, or monster you kill is a new chance to get an item. While most of these items are usually in the “straight-to-vendor” tier, the possibility of getting an upgrade drives players forward. It adds a new layer of meaning to the never-ending monster-slaying quest. For a very long time, we were hesitant to take this approach. “How can a Canoptrix drop a minigun? That doesn’t make any sense!” we thought. After playing through some of the most recent big aRPGs, something clicked in our heads. If a goblin can drop a halberd twice its size, and nobody bats an eye, then what’s the problem?

Unique drops are plentiful, but not guaranteed. Worst case scenario - you get a resource fountain. Biocaches are guaranteed to drop Carbonium and Ironium now, in addition to other resources.

We realized that we’ve been wrong about loot drops this entire time. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense in the real world. The game isn’t the real world - it’s a fantasy, and we should give you as many fun things to do in that fantasy as we possibly can. We analyzed loot systems in many games, both old and new, and came up with a simple version that should work for The Riftbreaker. After some trial and error, we arrived at the first version of the new system. Here’s what we came up with - but please, bear in mind that this is just an early idea, and it is likely to change a whole lot as we work on it:

• Until now, the loot pool in The Riftbreaker consisted of resource shards, a couple of unique upgrade blueprints for your gear, some additional player skins, weapon mods, and decorative elements for your base. We decided to expand the pool with actual, complete weapons - not blueprints. You can use them, you can hold on to them, you can disassemble them for resources - the choice is yours.
  
• The weapons you get as loot will be more powerful than those you can craft yourself. The rarity tier of the weapons you find will depend on your current research level, and you will have the chance to get a weapon that is one tier higher. This means that if you have access to Advanced Shotguns, for example, you can find a Superior Shotgun in the wild. It’s not guaranteed, but there is a decent chance!
  
• Looted weapons will also receive additional properties that are not available for regular, crafted weapons. We’re talking about piercing, multi-shot, cluster projectiles, homing, etc. The higher the tier of the weapon, the more additional properties it gets. We will mark the items with those extra properties in your inventory so that you remember to check them out.
  
  It is entirely possible to fill out your entire inventory without touching the crafting menu even once, but you have to rely on RNG to get what you want. The choice is yours!
  
  
• You will have plenty of opportunities to get new gear while exploring Galatea 37. All Bioanomalies, Biocaches, Omega creatures, underground treasures, and creature nests can drop a unique item for you. On top of that, all regular enemies have a chance to reward you with a unique item, but that will happen on a much more rare basis.
  
• Some of you might ask, “Won’t all these weapons clutter my inventory?” Well, yes, but also no! We are working on a new mass disassembly system that will allow you to get rid of the gear you no longer need on a larger scale. This system will let you select multiple items at once and disassemble them in bulk, saving you time and effort. It will also allow you to get rid of your surplus mods, guaranteeing a new income stream.
  
• This new system will apply to both campaign and survival modes in single-player and co-op. The rarities will be tweaked individually for all those modes, but you can get a decent power-up during exploration whenever you play.
  
• It is important to stress that the new weapons will not replace the existing unique loot rewards. You can still collect all the skins, decorations, and gear upgrades. We will adjust each reward type's weight individually, so it doesn’t take 1000 years to complete your collection, either.
  

Since Omega creatures are the guardians of Bioanomalies, you can get often get two rewards for the price of one! Here, we got a Mortar from the Baxmoth Omega, and a Repeater from the anomaly.

The purpose of the new system is to make exploration in The Riftbreaker a worthwhile investment and an exciting adventure on its own, but it’s not the only thing we’re planning. The 2.0 update will give you more opportunities to discover new areas of the planet thanks to the Randomized Mission Generator. It will let you go on new missions and set up additional outposts in the biomes you have already conquered. That will, in turn, allow you to complete the mega-endgame mega-objectives which we’re mega-working on right now. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves - all in due time.

The underground treasures also give you a chance for a unique item - and that's in addition to other loot inside. We're not removing anything for the sake of the new system!

As always, we highly encourage you to sign up for the Closed Co-Op Beta Test. We test all the latest changes on that branch, and its highly experimental nature means we are very open to suggestions and changes. This gives you an opportunity to influence what the final version of this update turns out to be. We hope you’re going to like it!

[h2]To sign up for The Riftbreaker Multiplayer Beta please fill in the following form:[/h2]
We reserve the right to contact only select participants.



EXOR Studios

We published a series of patches for The Riftbreaker Closed Co-Op Beta a couple of days ago, featuring some experimental changes in many areas of the game. Massive overhauls of the weapon and loot systems were a significant portion of these updates. These reworks are something we have been planning for a while now. The experimental nature of our Closed Co-Op Beta makes it a perfect environment to test and consult these changes with our community, whose feedback is invaluable to us. Today, we want to tell you more about this process. We will explain our philosophy behind the reworks, what the process looked like, and how we are working with our community playtesters to ensure we are moving in the right direction.

There's been a lot of testing going on lately, both in and out of the studio.

Let’s start by talking about the reasons behind these changes. The weapon system in The Riftbreaker has never been perfect. The lower-quality weapons were often underpowered, while higher tiers shredded through everything the game could throw at you. You could fire some weapons with seemingly no end, while others would run out of ammo after only a few seconds. Moreover, the weapon mod system was more complex than it should have been, with some mods being outright useless in the grand scheme of things. On top of all that, some of our guns simply lacked their identity and did not encourage players to try them out, as they were likely to already have better alternatives.

Co-Op on higher difficulty levels is going to throw some difficult Omega creatures at you. We want you to have an arsenal that is ready to tackle them.

We knew we wouldn’t solve these issues overnight, as the scope of the necessary work extended far beyond tweaking some numerical values in the weapons database. Clearly, the ammunition system, mods, and crafting also had to be improved. Based on the results of multiple gameplay sessions, we decided to examine each weapon individually and determine the proper course of action. We inspected each weapon, examined mod interactions, and asked our community on Discord for their thoughts and conclusions.

Working together is important - both when playing co-op AND developing it. This is why we pay a lot of attention to what our community has to say about the game.

One of our community members, wzysb, went above and beyond this call to action. Wzysb is a high-level player with extensive experience in strategy and action games and a deep understanding of the systems that make them run. He produced a 40-page document with his own analysis and thoughts about the weapons in The Riftbreaker. Wzysb’s conclusions offered us a different perspective and highlighted some issues we wouldn’t have considered otherwise. While we did not agree on all fronts, it was a great resource that helped us considerably.

Since we're giving Omega creatures more abilities, we can't leave our players behind!

Once we started testing in detail, we realized that the vast majority of the standard-level weapons were either fine or slightly underpowered. We boosted the weaker weapons, as we wanted to keep the damage output consistent across all variants. Please note that we are not going by DPS here, as this stat is often quite misleading. For example, the Flamethrower deals a little bit of direct damage, but the burn damage over time does the heavy lifting in its case. It is also worth noting that weapons are created with specific use cases in mind. A Lightning Gun will shred through Canoptrix and do very little against a Gnerot. Once we were happy with the baseline, we moved on to more advanced weapon tiers.

Tweaking weapon stats is not an easy task - here's just one screen of our Weapons Editor. The table goes much further, both horizontally and vertically, and each value has the potential to completely mess things up. Boy, am I glad I'm not in charge.

When you crafted higher-tier weapons, they received additional characteristics on top of their regular properties, such as piercing or multiple projectiles per burst. We quickly realized that these additional abilities had the potential to mess with the weapon’s power level by quite some margin. Certain combinations of stat rolls could double the weapon's damage output, but on the other hand, they could also increase the ammo consumption to very high levels. On top of that, the crafting screen DPS calculation would take into account the absolute worst and absolute best rolls, neither of which were actually possible, throwing the numbers off by a country mile. This situation needed some radical steps.

One of the complaints we often got was that the Corrosive Gun felt like a tool to destroy the magnetic rocks in Volcanic Zone. This is no longer true. More projectiles, more splash, more firepower will solve all your Volcanic Zone issues.

We decided to remove the extra characteristics from the craftable weapons to combat the inconsistencies. To compensate for that, we adjusted the base stats, like damage, rate of fire, and ammo consumption. Thanks to these actions, we removed the extreme outliers from the craftable range and ensured that the power level remained consistent across weapon tiers. The additional properties can still be added via mods, allowing you to still get truly devastating combinations. However, managing the power level of weapons stat-wise is not the only thing we have done.

No trickery here - this is a basic, crafted Advanced Laser, with no cheats or unlimited ammo, dealing with 40 Hammeroceroses. There is a delicate auto-aim going on to help you keep the beam on target and not lose the bonus damage.

We have also introduced some functional changes to those weapons, which didn’t see much use for one reason or another. Two great examples of this are the Laser and the Root Gun. The Laser used to grow in power the longer you managed to keep it on a single target. However, the bonus damage was immediately lost after you lost track of the creature you were firing at. We decided to change that. Now, the Laser will gain extra damage as long as you keep firing at enemies. You can switch targets freely, and as long as you keep hitting an enemy, you will retain the damage bonus. The laser is now very effective against single targets and groups of enemies. We hope you like it.

Two Superior Root Guns vs a pack of 50 Flurian Alphas. The weapon is much easier to use thanks to its high fire rate, piercing, and unlimited ammo. Perhaps a bit too good, but we'll iron that out at some point!

The Root Gun arrived in the game with the latest World Expansion but did not amass a huge fanbase. The leading cause was that the weapon utilized high-caliber ammo - a very valuable resource used by some of the most reliable weapons in the game, like Burst Rifle and Shotgun. The Root Gun simply did not deliver the same kind of firepower you could get from other weapons using the same type of bullets. To address this, we decided to take a radical step to improve its effectiveness - we removed ammo requirements from this weapon altogether and gave it a bit of a boost. This means that players can now use the Root Gun without worrying about running out of high-caliber ammo, making it a more viable alternative to other more established weapons in The Riftbreaker arsenal.

You can still do some crazy damage using weapon mods. Cluster Projectiles and a Minigun are a match made in heaven!

We hope it is pretty clear that the purpose of our weapons rework is NOT a nerf. It is not in the best interest of our players to decrease their firepower. The DPS stats on the newly crafted weapons will most definitely be lower than before, but that is mainly due to us correcting the calculation algorithm. The gameplay impact is negligible at best, while the weapon line-up is more straightforward for us to control. That last part is essential because The Riftbreaker 2.0 update will also include an overhaul of the loot system, allowing you to find unique, more powerful versions of weapons in the wild! We are committed to bringing you more exciting updates in the future, and we can't wait to share more details about the improved loot system in next week’s news.

You will get to know more about finding unique loot items in next week's article, stay tuned!

We hope you’re as excited about the upcoming updates as we are. If you want to try them out early, sign up for our Closed Co-Op Beta. We treat it as an experimental playground where anything goes, so you always have the chance to play with the latest developments and shape the game going forward. We encourage you to join our streams on Tuesdays and Thursdays, where we share the new developments and answer your questions live.

[h2]To sign up for The Riftbreaker Multiplayer Beta please fill in the following form:[/h2]
We reserve the right to contact only select participants.



See you there!
EXOR Studios

We've just updated the co-op beta playtest version of the game. The latest build features improvements for all weapons to adapt them to the new loot system. It also fixes multiple issues that you helped us discover. Thank you!

[h3]The Riftbreaker Closed Co-Op Beta Update, January 29th, 2025. DATA: 83 EXE: 9965 Changelog:[/h3]

• Additional weapons have had their stats and properties reworked to match the new loot drop system: Charged Bomb, Crystal Gun, Floating Mines, Heavy Plasma, Bouncing Blades, Insect Gun, Cryogenic Atomizer, Corrosive Gun, Acid Spitter, Cryo Spitter, Flame Spitter, Chainsaw, Laser Sword, Flame Blade, Root Gun, Laser, Railgun. All weapons are now adapted to the new system.
  
• Unique loot item drop frequency has been reduced. The previous values were a result of a numerical typo. The frequency is reduced, but you will still get plenty of loot.
  
• We also introduced individual adjustments to loot drop probabilities for lower rarity Biocaches. You are now less likely to get a unique item from a White or Blue Biocache, but you are still guaranteed basic resources.
  
• Skills found as loot drops do not display the "unique" icon, as they cannot receive additional properties.
  
• Higher-quality Skills will now correctly replace lower-quality ones in your inventory after picking up a Skill as a loot drop.
  
• Laser beam behavior has been improved. Previously, the beam would get stronger the longer you kept it on target, but you lost the bonus immediately after you stopped shooting at the target. Now, the beam will retain the damage increase even if you switch targets - as long as you keep hitting enemies. You only lose the bonus damage if you miss completely. We believe this change will make the Laser a better weapon overall.
  
• Increased the base creature difficulty for Hard and Brutal difficulties. Players will now encounter stronger ambient and Omega creatures earlier in the game.
  
• Increased the wave intermission time for Easy and Normal difficulty from 6 to 7 minutes to match the single-player mode. This will make the game easier.
  
• Flammable Gas Vents and Geothermal Vents that are being actively mined will now be marked as used on the minimap.
  
• Buildings icons will now show up on the minimap the moment the constructions starts instead of waiting for the building process to complete.
  
• Increased the ammo consumption of the Insect Gun.
  
• Increased the base damage for the basic Sword to always be able to kill Arachnoids in one hit.
  
• Fixed the streaming integration by switching the Oauth token generation from an external website to www.riftbreaker.com.
  
• Increased the armory consumable manufacturing rate to compensate for the decreased number of armory buildings.
  
• Brought back player name labels that hover over the player pawns.
  
• Increased the radius of the Radar Size Power Well.
  
• Removed the nuclear explosion effect from Power Rod and Floating Piercer towers.
  
• Fixed issues with minimap icon visibility if the icon doesn't have an assigned "layer_group".
  
• Fixed a dead loop in Loot Container System.
  
• Fixed some issues with the display of chat messages.
  
• Introduced some additional network optimizations to the Nav Mesh System.
  
• Fixed issues with animation states of the Arachnoid Omega.
  
• Fixed an issue that prevented players from accessing the chat when the player pawn is dead.
  
• Fixed an issue that prevented players from entering the menu in the spectator mode.
  
• Removed the additional projectiles from Spewer weapons.
  
• Fixed issues with the display of Wind and Solar Power values on the HUD, including changes during weather events.
  
• Fixed issues with the Research Queue not updating in real time.
  
• Fixed a bug that prevented building explosions from damaging nearby structures.
  
• Players can now connect to the selected server by double-clicking on the server list.
  
• The 'unknown' icon on the minimap is now smaller.
  
• Adjusted some of the weapon icons to have more contrast and color saturation.
  
• Adjusted text sizes and fixed several typos in the chat box.
  
• Fixed anti-aliasing issues with the "remove research" icon on the research screen.
  
• Fixed an issue that caused the chat box to break after opening the build menu.
  
• Fixed issues with player pings not always being replicated for all clients.
  
• Fixed issues with network replication of interactive components.
  
• Fixed a crash in the EquipmentSystem when an inventory item is missing.
  

EXOR Studios

Welcome to 2025! We’ve had a good break, returning to work refreshed and ready to tackle the challenges ahead. As mentioned in the Year in Review 2024 article, we are focused on The Riftbreaker 2.0 - a massive, free update that will expand the game's features and give it a new level of depth. If you missed that news, give it a read, as it will give you a good idea of what our plans are this year. Starting with this article, we are coming back to our series of developer blogs, giving you a peek behind the curtain of development.

It would be a bit difficult to portray the story of this article in pictures - it would mostly be a series of photos of us in various stages of despair. Instead, we'll show you the model that caused us all this hassle, and the improvements we've been trying to implement all this time.

The Hammerocerros was one of the first creatures modeled for The Riftbreaker. The other two were the Canoptrix and the Arachnoid. The model dates back to 2018. We've learned a lot since then, so it feels a little dated, especially compared to the new creatures.

The story we want to tell you today is multi-layered and will show you the unpredictability of the game development process. As we told you a couple of months ago, we decided to introduce a new strain of creatures into The Riftbreaker: Omega creatures. They are much beefier and larger variants of regular Galatean creatures. They also come with a suite of extra abilities, such as damage auras and calling in meteor showers on demand. To make Omega creatures extra special, we decided to give them custom models that reflect their unique nature and extreme danger level.

Omega creatures are larger than their regular counterparts. This increase in size wasn't kind to the Hammerocerros. Even this big, it still looked like an amorphous blob. We decided that the Omega variant needed significant improvements.

While modeling creatures is a gratifying task and one of the most pleasant parts of a 3D artist’s job, animating those models is a complex task that involves the work of several people - a designer to come up with all the creature’s states, an animator to create the animations, and a programmer to put them all together in an Animation State Machine. Any changes made after all this work is done may generate potential bugs and require a new round of tweaks. We wanted to avoid that, so our artists would create new, enhanced versions of the existing models that could still use the same skeleton, animations, and animation state machine. It worked great for the vast majority of creatures. The problems began when we reached our good old Hammerocerros - one of the first models purpose-made for The Riftbreaker.

The first Zbrush sketches of the Omega strain. The armor on the back is much more pronounced. A pair of large horns are meant to show you that this guy means business.

Our game’s development started in 2018. Back then, we used 3DS Max for modelling, rigging, and animations. We had been using that program since Zombie Driver days (fun fact: the level editor for ZD was made entirely using the 3DS Max scripting language). When we started prototyping The Riftbreaker, we still used 3DS Max and gradually moved to Blender. While most in-game models have been created using Blender, a few of the oldest meshes are still in the 3DS Max format. You can see where this is going - Hammerocerros is one of these models. To modify this creature, we had to open the old source file.

After cutting down on the horns a little - at least the ones on the back - we put this model next to the Ultra strain to see how they compared. We liked the results, so we moved on to texturing.

In theory, Blender should be able to open a Max file and convert it to the new format, but there is no guarantee that everything will work right out of the box. At first, things seemed promising - the model and its materials were imported successfully. However, one crucial part was missing - the animation rig. No matter what we did, we could not make Blender read the rig from the Max file. This would force us to recreate the model’s skeleton and create all the animations once more, which was far more work than we were willing to accept. We had to come up with an alternative solution.

We still wanted to retain the color palette of the original creature. However, we used the colors in a more structured way, which allows you to see shapes and details with much more clarity.

Our first instinct was to fire up 3DS Max and export the model in a more compatible format. Luckily, we bought a perpetual license all those years ago (remember when perpetual licenses were a thing?), and the CD was somewhere in our storage space. We went treasure hunting, found the box, plugged in an external CD drive, and began the installation process. As you can imagine, things did not go smoothly. As it turns out, the version of 3DS Max we had access to was so archaic that it refused to work on newer systems… Windows 8.1.

Here's a high-detail render of the "regular", physical damage Hammeroceros Omega...

...and here's the fire damage elemental variant. This model receives additional particles to emphasize the 'elemental' aspect.

Up until a couple of months ago, this wouldn’t be a problem. We try to keep at least a couple of machines in our office on older hardware and software versions to test for compatibility issues, so we had a PC with that system in our office. However, when Microsoft stopped issuing security updates for Windows 8.1, it was no longer safe for us to keep it online. The machine got a slight hardware upgrade, and we switched it to Windows 10. That meant we had to find a workaround and try to run 3DS Max elsewhere. Our first idea was to set up a virtual machine with Windows 8.1 and run Max there. It was relatively quick to set up but failed just as fast - the software refused to install on a VM. We had to bring out the heavy guns.

We liked the new version so much that we decided to use a slightly more 'polite' version to replace the base strains of the creature.

We dove into our storage space once more, grabbing all the PC components that bordered on being classified as “electro-junk,” and put together a period-accurate PC to give it the best shot at working right out of the box. We constructed the grandpa-PC, installed Windows 8.1 again, and attempted to get 3DS Max running. We entered our perpetual license software key, hit enter, and… nothing happened. We tried several more times but to no avail. When we called support, they were shocked that somebody was even trying to use software this old. Upon investigating our issue, it turned out that validation servers for this program version were turned off several years ago.

Here's the full Hammeroceros family with a bit of foliage to see how they blend in with the environment. We're quite happy with the results!

All hope seemed lost. After all, it felt like we couldn’t run away from remaking the animation rig for Hammerocerros. Then, we had one last idea. What if we didn’t have to authenticate the software after all? Was it possible to use the program's trial version and export our model that way? Turns out that it was! The trial version of Max had a time limit but no functionality limit, meaning we had bought ourselves a couple of days to open all our old models, reexport them, and save ourselves from all this trouble in the future. Our saga has finally ended, and you can enjoy updated Hammeroceros family models in upcoming Riftbreaker updates.

Obligatory xkcd. The original work can be found here. Shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

If there's one lesson we've learned from this misadventure, it's this: never let any part of your project be entirely dependent on external software. We often hear about the importance of backups and the best practice of having redundant copies. However, backups won't save you if the crucial software needed to open the files is missing. That's why we've decided that if there's a software switch in the future, we'll re-export all our work ahead of time. It's a small step that could save us from a lot of trouble in the future.

Now the other "old" creatures are asking for a rework... Should we? We've got the tools, after all.

That’s all for the first Riftbreaker blog of 2025. We hope puzzles like this won’t happen too often this year and that we will be able to focus on delivering all the promised content updates as soon as possible. If you want to receive daily updates on our progress, join our Discord server at www.discord.gg/exorstudios. You will get to see what we are currently working on and influence what the game looks like in the future.

See you next time!
EXOR Studios

- Replaced broken Twitch streaming authentication with a dedicated authentication service on www.riftbreaker.com