Greetings, Wastelanders!
We've been hard at work refining the core experience of Afterglow. Here's a brief description of the new features and improvements we released in October.
Tutorial Overhaul
Starting a complex MMORPG shouldn't feel overwhelming. We've streamlined the new player experience with redesigned quests, better rewards, and contextual help throughout the game. Now you'll get clear explanations of core concepts exactly when you need them. We hope this guidance makes onboarding easier.
Refugee Integration Program
The RIP system has been updated to recognize and reward different playstyles. We added several additional stats to track and reward, including crafting by item type, gathering by resource/safety level/tier, and market activity.
All RIP tasks now have 4 completion levels, expanding the total count of tasks to 144. There are still many placeholder rewards that need to be replaced in future builds, but overall we're happy with how the system has taken shape.
New Items
We've added more than 40 new items.
New Gear:
- Tier 1 heavy and hi-tech armor sets
- Tier 1 blunt weapon
- Several Tier 0 items to serve as starting gear for new players: improvised armor set, sharp melee weapon, and a belt
- Complete manufacturing chains and blueprints for all new items
New Systems:
- Junk items now drop from NPC enemies, with the sole purpose of being vendored to NPCs for caps
- Containers that players can open. The first is Strange Rock Formation, which may contain rare gems used in advanced crafting
Hi-tech armor is expensive to craft but provides a lot of protection against
ENERGY attacks
Quality of Life Updates
We continue iterating on our UI, improving user experience and making game mechanics more straightforward.
Notable Improvements:
- Dialogue UI now displays quest/faction task rewards in the new interface
- Better notifications: quest completion, item acquisition, currency transactions, and more
- XP gains are now visible during gathering and crafting actions
- Actions screen displays total remaining time for all queued tasks
- Several improvements to the item information popup: now includes a buy action, new "Industry" tab showing crafting uses, and viewing history
- Market search functionality
- Redesigned character skills UI
Coming Soon
In the upcoming month, we'll continue iterating on existing systems, adding more content, fleshing out user experience, and balancing progression.
- Continuing work on the map to make it not only look better but also more readable
- Skills progression rewards for armor and crafting: both passive bonuses like +1 AR and more substantial improvements like the hi-tech armor skill level 6 perk "System Override" (25% chance to stun robotic enemies with each attack)
- Welcome back screen with new design and UX
- More balancing
New map will feature animated vegetation and other details
These updates make Afterglow more accessible for new players while refining the core experience. You can find information on how to access the latest build on our Discord.