Hello friends!  Last time we hinted a little at some changes to abilities and how you’ll be able to customise your playthroughs.  Let’s dive into that a bit more!

From the pause menu you’ll be able to check out unlocked abilities and the Battlesuit’s current stat layout profile.  Currently we’re breaking things down into three overarching categories: Defensive, Utility, and Offensive.  Figuring out exactly what these will link to is still a work in progress, but fans of the genre can expect some familiar abilities with fun new twists.

At certain points you’ll acquire have to choose which part of the suit to upgrade.  Choosing these stats according to your personal style is going to be important to how your run progresses.  Here we have Offensive currently selected, which has a nice little visual touch of corresponding highlighting around the arm cannon to signify more pew-pew power.  Nice!

At a more granular level you’ll be able to modify specific abilities with individual stat-related effects to better equip yourself for particular challenges and environments, switching between the three categories to suit you.  Adding an Offensive modifier to the Shield ability might give you some…explosive results, for example.

The upgrade system and abilities are being developed in tandem with the levels, which hopefully means we should be able to tweak the balance of both as we go along.  The first Zone, Coria, is already dramatically different from the Alpha testing build and we’re pretty excited by the changes our new camera system has made to the overall atmosphere of the game.  That’s been a really good example of how feedback and problem-solving lead us to a vast overall improvement to the game: initially the cameras were changed to try and optimise a bit better for older-gen hardware.  UE5 is notoriously difficult to retro-optimise, so we can’t promise this will fix all the problems some of our testers were having, but this solution has bettered the entire experience just by being aware of it.  So thanks again to our Alpha testers!  There’s still plenty of time to muck around with the Alpha build if you have it and submit further feedback.  At any rate, keep it as a time capsule to see how far Van-14 has come. 😉

This log’s sign-off teaser is a mysterious figure…are they a friend, or a foe disguised?  What do they want from Van?  Stay tuned for further logs to find out, and make sure to visit the Discord as well!

See you next devlog,

The Van-14 Dev Team