Update 0.5.0 Released + Patch Manifesto + Hotfix 0.5.5
Additions
Improvements
Changes
Bug Fixes
More Bug Fixes
Known Bugs
- There are bugs that made us not push forward with PROPERTY DAMAGE changes in this update. They still retain their 0.4.5 values.
Additional patch notes are done, now we'll welcome you to another chunk of texts giving out our reasons for decisions for the drastic changes we've made to the game with the 0.5.0 update. Let's start talking about the more obvious ones first.
Rebalancing of nodes and enemy statuses to provide smoother progression.
Let us first say that, since the first days of M.A.S.S. Builder's creation, we've designed and created a progression graph for players up until tier 7 of the game, which translates to around mission 26. The progression we've planned was to be quite exponential where early progressions start out slow and drastic increases in number happen later in the game. However, this has created a problem where older missions and bosses are unappealing to replay once players start using tier 3 and 4 nodes, while players will also need to grind a lot in order to progress their story mission. We've been collecting quite an amount of feedback regarding these matters for some time now but all the partial rebalancing we've made since 0.1.0 up to 0.4.5 did not provide as much help as we wanted them to be.
So in the 0.5.0 update, we've decided to just raise all the floor (tier 1) and lower the exponential curve to match what we think is a good level of ceiling of the current patch (tier 5). We've also reworked most of the enemy AI, giving them much needed aggression to compensate for their lower status. This should provide a much (and we meant it) better feeling to not have enemies be bullet sponges, and players can still have fun without much grinding over and over of the same stages involved. The difficulty will raise aggression to another level as well, and we think this will provide a more "fun" experience to everyone. Once again, we will monitor these over the first few days after the patch is out to see if any hotfixes or changes to the numbers are needed, so please provide us with your feedback, they are very precious to us and we cannot thank you enough for the help.
Playstyle Nodes on Tier 5
These are one of the most exciting changes we'd like to introduce into the game at some point, a method of "going all out" on a playstyle. Throughout this journey of development, we have been reading up on how you players have tuned your M.A.S.S. and how effective they were in dematerializing your enemies, but how you also wanted to solidify the playstyle and going full head-on while ditching another status. Our internal discussion also yields the same way, as our small team mostly had differing playstyles, some never used their Bullet Launchers and opt to remove them for aesthetic purposes.
We knew we had to do something to provide something that says "let's go further down that road then" but we weren't sure when we could work on it. With the rebalancing and prospect to change our nodes to a certain degree already, we decided to remove more generic ones up on the tree and replace them with these "alternate playstyle" nodes instead. Some of them might be too weak, some of them too strong, but if the end result means fun then hey, be our guest to have fun. If you're a player of a certain playstyle and felt that the nodes you're having fun with are too strong though, feel free to chime in and tell us how you feel after using it.
Addition of enemies that break the archetypes
In 0.5.0, one of the main content that we're also introducing here are the new M.A.S.S. unit enemies, alongside newer Quarks that behave differently than those of before 0.5.0. This was a much-requested content that we've been hearing since day 1 (with some even to the degree of removing Quarks and make this a M.A.S.S. vs. M.A.S.S. game solely) but we were only able to work on them this late into development. The reasons are simple, while we are developing the game, we are also trying to learn what would be the best way to put them into the game through the lens of our players.
We have always been using generic enemies (bipedal, the brutes, the rangers, etc.) archetypes to test the water on how players approach and fight each one of them, and how smart or aggressive our players wanted them to be when the M.A.S.S. they are controlling is that mobile. As we've collected a good amount of data and with the conclusion of Chapter 2 in 0.5.0, we think it's a good time to present these new enemies' behaviors, be it M.A.S.S. enemy units to unorthodox Quarks to you players so we can further iterate them when future approaches. Have fun.
Going beyond 0.5.0
We're sure that'll be a topic of interest for many, but this time, we'd like you guys to wait until we release our new roadmap in the coming weeks. For now, the recap from our AMA and how we're going forward shall be these first three things, in no particular order of priority
1. Repeatable Missions for players to be able to compete with each other through time records.
2. Accessories for more customization options.
3. Reworking energy launchers.
There won't be a WIP update next week due to how we're dedicating all our time to focus on upcoming bug fixes and hotfixes. That will be all from us, good luck and have fun! Also, just a shoutout for our community, our players are holding a M.A.S.S. building contest in their community discord server. You can join our discord through the link below and ask for an invite to the community server and participate!
- Added Tier 5 Nodes into the game.
- Added a small knockback on melee impact so players will less occur body overlaps when using close combat weapons.
- Added mission 12 and 13 and HG4. This now concludes Chapter 2 of the story. We'll prepare a manifesto next week to explain what we're doing next going forward.
- Added various new weapon parts for both close combat and ranged weapons, including new Claw assaulter parts.
- Added a new Bullet Shooter firing method: Detonator, slow firing pod that stick to the ground or your enemies and explode after a few seconds dealing high amount of damage.
- Added a new Energy Shooter firing method: Wave, a low damage full knockback weapon that pierces through every enemy it hits.
- Added new photography mode poses into the game.
- Added new photography mode backgrounds that can be unlocked after clearing some story missions.
Improvements
- Improved strafe-firing animations.
- Improved descriptions to specific nodes such as ones that unlocked new Quantum Break forms.
- Improved optimization on mission 11 "Tempestuous Sector"
- Sound effects upgrade for attacks. They now vary more from each other.
- Physics collider has been updated, players will now have a better time in close combat attacks with new modules that prevent players from accidentally moving into enemies' body. Animations have also been improved to reflect the module usage.
- Improved Quarks texture.
- Increased draw distance to display decals while in missions
Changes
- Reduced elite enemies' effective HP.
- Added shields to some enemies.
- Changed enemies' damage scaling and some behavior. Elite Quarks should now be much more challenging in Very Hard without higher HP or damage, but more attack patterns and aggressive AI.
- Lowered Empowering Void's Void Crystals Durability by around 40% in Normal and 25% in Very Hard difficulty.
- Reduced the health of most enemies to almost the same amount as their normal difficulty counterpart. This will also reduce its SHIELDS and thus will make the regenerated shields during bosses' "stagger" state not as annoying as before.
- ONCE AGAIN, enemies' and players' status are rebalanced. This is an experimental work that involves almost every node available in-game to provide a more consistent progression to players.
- Changed various tech nodes that provided damage or defense buffs to nodes that promotes a certain playstyle through drastic status changes. You'll mostly see these at the Tier 5 nodes.
- Changed more nodes to effect ACCELERATION balancing, it is now more difficult to reach maximum ACCELERATION without using dedicated ACCELERATION nodes, but those nodes will provide higher ACCELERATION as well.
- Lowered the number of lightning strikes in mission 11 "Tempestuous Sector"
Bug Fixes
- Fixed missing localization and missing texts.
- Some parts that have missing paintable sub-elements or sub-elements that don't work can now be painted. If you still encounter these, please notify us so we can fix it.
- Fixed a critical bug that prevents certain blueprints from dropping for certain players.
- Fixed texture bug that causes higher resolution textures to not load on settings other than ULTRA.
- Fixed a decal related bug that prevents players from applying decals #5-8 on various pieces of weapons and armors
- Fixed Slayer OS description to show correctly unless it decides to be sentient and not show up once again.
- Fixed a bug that forces the player character to jitter forward after a boost.
More Bug Fixes
- Fixed a bug where players can pause and still fire some ranged weapons, causing an instant burst of damage on unpause.
- Fixed a bug where players jitter awkwardly forward after ending boosts.
- Fixed a bug that causes Joint Sliders to reset to default in Photo Mode
- Fixed a bug that causes wrongly mirrored weapons when using as dual hands
- Fixed a bug that causes weapon alignment to be wrong when displayed in a cutscene
- Fixed a bug that caused your frame to disappear when using settings other than Very High or Ultra
- Bug Fix AI that stand still for too long somehow
- Bug Fix Wave firing method against flying enemies
- Typo Fix on some nodes
- Changed Composite Nanorobotics functionality a bit
- Fixed textures not loading properly
- Fixed player and item drop physics not calculating properly (visualization bug, does not effect gameplay)
- Fixed some sounds / BGMs not playing properly
- Experimental balance changes to Quantum break (faster gain/higher consumption per second/same consumption on attack)
- Experimental balance changes to some tech nodes
- More experimental balance changes to Full Metal Jacket and Binary Monarch. This change should make both of them have better downsides and upsides that match their characteristics.
- Fixed a bug that caused weapons to rotate weirdly after a short period of time.
- Fixed a bug that caused item drops to spill all over the place
- Fixed a bug that caused camera to zoom when shooting enemies in long range
- Fixed a bug that caused M.A.S.S. enemies to sometime get stuck in the ground
- Increased volume to warn players of mission 14 environmental hazard.
- Adjusted camera and lock-on system that is too sensitive to lose lock-on when there is an obstacle in front of players.
- Adjusted Binary Monarch and Full Metal Jacket sorting to match Energy Specialist and Bullet Specialist
- Final balance fix for Full Metal Jacket (actual numbers for decreased accel was -75%, now it is -50%, description was -25% now at -50% correct values)
- Final balance fix for Composite Nanorobotics (3% durability gain > 2% durability gain per hit), this should put it in line of not a "must have" for close combat players.
- Balance fix to Wave firing method, providing more damage and staggering potential.
- Balance adjustments to auto shooters' ammo counts and reserves (the UI to display more than three-digit ammo counts might still look weird).
- Balance fix to Reactive Armor node to provide less defense increase but higher chance to proc.
- Balance fix to Fortress Configurations node to provide constant 20% total defense increase when facing a lot of enemies and scale the number on higher levels instead.
- Adjusted Plated Walkers and Plated Boosters to Accelerated Walkers and Accelerated Boosters node that provide speed buff instead of defense buff to keep it in line of acceleration.
- Adjusted weight to armor calculation (weights now provide less armor).
Known Bugs
- There are bugs that made us not push forward with PROPERTY DAMAGE changes in this update. They still retain their 0.4.5 values.
0.5.0 Post-Patch Manifesto
Additional patch notes are done, now we'll welcome you to another chunk of texts giving out our reasons for decisions for the drastic changes we've made to the game with the 0.5.0 update. Let's start talking about the more obvious ones first.
Rebalancing of nodes and enemy statuses to provide smoother progression.
Let us first say that, since the first days of M.A.S.S. Builder's creation, we've designed and created a progression graph for players up until tier 7 of the game, which translates to around mission 26. The progression we've planned was to be quite exponential where early progressions start out slow and drastic increases in number happen later in the game. However, this has created a problem where older missions and bosses are unappealing to replay once players start using tier 3 and 4 nodes, while players will also need to grind a lot in order to progress their story mission. We've been collecting quite an amount of feedback regarding these matters for some time now but all the partial rebalancing we've made since 0.1.0 up to 0.4.5 did not provide as much help as we wanted them to be.
So in the 0.5.0 update, we've decided to just raise all the floor (tier 1) and lower the exponential curve to match what we think is a good level of ceiling of the current patch (tier 5). We've also reworked most of the enemy AI, giving them much needed aggression to compensate for their lower status. This should provide a much (and we meant it) better feeling to not have enemies be bullet sponges, and players can still have fun without much grinding over and over of the same stages involved. The difficulty will raise aggression to another level as well, and we think this will provide a more "fun" experience to everyone. Once again, we will monitor these over the first few days after the patch is out to see if any hotfixes or changes to the numbers are needed, so please provide us with your feedback, they are very precious to us and we cannot thank you enough for the help.
Playstyle Nodes on Tier 5
These are one of the most exciting changes we'd like to introduce into the game at some point, a method of "going all out" on a playstyle. Throughout this journey of development, we have been reading up on how you players have tuned your M.A.S.S. and how effective they were in dematerializing your enemies, but how you also wanted to solidify the playstyle and going full head-on while ditching another status. Our internal discussion also yields the same way, as our small team mostly had differing playstyles, some never used their Bullet Launchers and opt to remove them for aesthetic purposes.
We knew we had to do something to provide something that says "let's go further down that road then" but we weren't sure when we could work on it. With the rebalancing and prospect to change our nodes to a certain degree already, we decided to remove more generic ones up on the tree and replace them with these "alternate playstyle" nodes instead. Some of them might be too weak, some of them too strong, but if the end result means fun then hey, be our guest to have fun. If you're a player of a certain playstyle and felt that the nodes you're having fun with are too strong though, feel free to chime in and tell us how you feel after using it.
Addition of enemies that break the archetypes
In 0.5.0, one of the main content that we're also introducing here are the new M.A.S.S. unit enemies, alongside newer Quarks that behave differently than those of before 0.5.0. This was a much-requested content that we've been hearing since day 1 (with some even to the degree of removing Quarks and make this a M.A.S.S. vs. M.A.S.S. game solely) but we were only able to work on them this late into development. The reasons are simple, while we are developing the game, we are also trying to learn what would be the best way to put them into the game through the lens of our players.
We have always been using generic enemies (bipedal, the brutes, the rangers, etc.) archetypes to test the water on how players approach and fight each one of them, and how smart or aggressive our players wanted them to be when the M.A.S.S. they are controlling is that mobile. As we've collected a good amount of data and with the conclusion of Chapter 2 in 0.5.0, we think it's a good time to present these new enemies' behaviors, be it M.A.S.S. enemy units to unorthodox Quarks to you players so we can further iterate them when future approaches. Have fun.
Going beyond 0.5.0
We're sure that'll be a topic of interest for many, but this time, we'd like you guys to wait until we release our new roadmap in the coming weeks. For now, the recap from our AMA and how we're going forward shall be these first three things, in no particular order of priority
1. Repeatable Missions for players to be able to compete with each other through time records.
2. Accessories for more customization options.
3. Reworking energy launchers.
There won't be a WIP update next week due to how we're dedicating all our time to focus on upcoming bug fixes and hotfixes. That will be all from us, good luck and have fun! Also, just a shoutout for our community, our players are holding a M.A.S.S. building contest in their community discord server. You can join our discord through the link below and ask for an invite to the community server and participate!