We told you about the new Omega Class enemies that will spice up your Campaign and Survival runs a couple of weeks ago. In a nutshell, they are more powerful strains of Galatean creatures. Not only are they more durable and deal more damage upfront, but they also come with a range of special abilities that require you to change up your strategy and find an individual approach to each of them. Fighting Omega creatures has quickly become one of our playtesters' favorite elements of the Co-Op Beta. We’re pleased with how the Omega ability system turned out. Naturally, we investigated if any other areas of the game could use it - and we think we found the perfect candidate.
The first nest you find in the game is in the Prologue mission. Although we won't be making this one any different, it portrays the issue with the event altogether - shooting at an immobile, defenseless object is not that engaging.
There are many randomized events that can take place during any Riftbreaker mission. They range from weather events to all-out assaults by enemy creatures. One such event that can happen in any Galatean biome is finding a creature nest in the wild. They can either appear alone or in a group of three. If left unchecked, the nest will keep spawning creatures that will happily eat a hole in your defenses. The only way to stop that from happening is to take a slight detour from your current plans and eliminate the source of the problem. That’s where the event has been a bit underwhelming. Creature nests are immobile and largely defenseless. Destroying them was an unrewarding formality for most Riftbreakers. We want to change that, so we decided to explore some options.
Things change a little when there are a couple of nests involved, and the difficulty level is a bit higher. Some creatures try to stop you from wrecking their homes, but they are no match for your firepower.
All biomes in The Riftbreaker have their own nest model that spawns creatures appropriate for that biome. However, some are slightly different. In the Metallic Valley, the nests take the form of an X-Morph Biofactory, heavily defended by loads of Alien Plasma and Artillery Towers. Destroying each of those defensive structures yields resources and makes the fight much less one-sided. We continued with that idea in the Fungal Swamp biome. Over there, the nests have an acid-spitting maw on top of them, also leading to much more engaging fights. We realized this made the entire event much more interesting, especially if multiple nests were involved. It made us think: what means of defense can we give the other static creature nests to make them more similar to the ones in the Metallic Valley and Fungal Swamp biomes? As an experiment, we decided to try some of the Omega strain abilities.
After giving them an HP boost and some abilities, the nests are a much bigger problem now! The ones you can see here have one ability each: one shoots fireballs from the sky, another sends bursts of lightning, and the third keeps healing the other two. While we won't be spawning the nests so close to one another, this gives you an idea of what we wanted to achieve.
We started small, applying a moderate HP boost and one randomly chosen skill from the Omega skill set. The event immediately felt much better - not only did it take some time and actual firepower to destroy the threat, but the nest could fight back and destroy your mech if you weren’t careful. However, not all the abilities we prepared for our bosses made sense on a static object. Let’s take the ‘waller’ ability as an example. It is completely illogical for the nest to ‘wall you in’ and essentially protect you from the creatures it spawns, all the while you’re blasting your most potent weapons at it. We left in those abilities that can deal direct damage to you or buff the surrounding creatures. Thanks to this, fights became more engaging and rewarding, giving us a good reason to provide you with chances for more loot! All defeated Omega nests will have the chance to drop a fountain of resources, mods, and unique items.
More nests, more chaos! Again, this is a testing situation, and the nests won't ever be this close, but the chaos is glorious! Drones, pattern attacks, healing - they have it all. Prepare your best gear!
Next week, we'll unveil the full range of Omega creature abilities and how they work together. Some combos are so powerful that we've had to ban them from ever appearing together in the wild, ensuring fair and balanced gameplay. In the meantime, we invite you to sign up for the Closed Beta playtest. We've increased the number of invites we send out with each update, and we're eager to test the strengths and weaknesses of our game with a large player base. We promise that everyone who signs up will receive an invite before the end of the beta period. And remember, getting a key will also allow you to join our Co-Op streams, which happen every Tuesday and Thursday at https://www.twitch.tv/exorstudios at 3 PM CET. We look forward to seeing you there!
