Dev Log 63: Expedition DLC is Released!

After more than three years of development, it is finally complete. 

Whereas the base game began as a one man undertaking and slowly grew from there as people joined the team and steadily settled into their multidisciplinary positions to form the current core team of four, which gives it a recognizable progress of content quality and design; the Expedition is, from start to finish, the work of this, now more experience and skilled team, laid upon a more solid design foundations.

For those who haven't been following the development: Expedition DLC features a huge underground lake on which a secondary campaign takes place. This campaign becomes accessible during the normal course of the play sometime during the mid-game. Here is a more detailed list of features:

• Around 250 new areas
• Leveling character past level 25, up to level 30
• Ability to ride and upgrade many different jet skis that vary by speed, defense, firepower and utility
• Three new weapon classes - spears, swords, and shotguns; all of these can be crafted and there are also special unique ones
• New psi school: Temporal Manipulation
• Just under 80 new feats, some of which are special new veteran feats that get unlocked beginning with level 26
• Specializations - a new way to improve your character; starting with level 16, a character will gain one specialization point that they can use to improve their feats along one or multiple dimensions
• New consumables, tools, blueprints, and more

We all put a lot of effort into this huge expansion, and each member of the team really poured his heart out into it, in his own way – through visual, narrative or mechanical aspects, to make sure it's not only big, but also a recognizable labor of love. And because it's often the case that people think that Underrail is till a one man operation, I'll use this opportunity to familiarize you with the Stygian Software core team:

• Dejan "Styg" Radišić (myself) - lead developer, programming, overral lore and themes, some writing, a bit of everything
• Stefan "Phrygian Dominant" Čupović - level and quest design, writing
• Mario "Mac" Tovirac - 2d & 3d art, various design work
• Nikola "Johnny" Petrović - 3d art, mostly character and creature models

I also want to thank our dedicated fans that helped us thoroughly test the game for bugs and imbalances, as well as build up and maintain useful player resources (wiki, character build tool). Though you come at a price of occasionally having to read through your uncalled for suggestions and complaints, I must admit that all this would be much more difficulty without you.

Once the dust settles, I might do a more detailed piece about my thoughts on the Expedition development – what we did wrong and what we did right. I'll also talk more about our future plans then.

In the meantime, if you enjoyed the base game, please head over to your platform of choice and purchase the Expedition DLC.

If you are new to the game, you might be interested in the bundle option that allow you to acquire the base game and the expansion together at a small discount (on Steam; on GOG go the the Underrail store page and scroll down untill you find "Buy all series" option).

Also, the release will be pushing the new version of the base game (1.1.0.9) to the live branch as well. For the full list of changes see the previous dev log and add the items below to it:

Mechanics

• When returning to an area after fleeing it during combat, your initiative penalty will be -1000 (up (or down?) from -10)
• Cryokentic Orb can now counts towards fulfilling Hypothermia's psi ability requirement

Items

• Lifting belt now increases carry capacity by 30, but the mechanical damage reduction is changed to 5% (down from 10%)
• Changed the riot gear mechanical damage resistance and threshold bonuses against melee attacks to 100% (up from 75%). Will be applied retroactively.
• Riot gear will now receive flat mechanical damage threshold of 2. Will be applied retroactively.
• Tweaked the description of ballistic panels to better fit their use in different armors (will not be retroactively applied to already crafted items)

UI

• Listed starting action and movement points in the combat stats window

Bugs

• Fixed the bug that sometimes caused player to receive fear status effect (though it doesn't affect player in any way)
• Fixed the bug that caused the item immunity effects to appear as though they are not being applied in the tooltip (darkened label) even if they were
• Thermodynamic Destabilization no longer ignites targets on explosion when invoker doesn't have the Pyromaniac feat
• Chill and freeze status effects will now always properly remove burning effects
• Cryogas will no longer affect characters that are immune to chilling

That's all for now, guys. Cheers.