Commanders, report in for our first Early Access roadmap outlook.

With “Welcome to Waste Land” (0.9.7) we brought you our first content update for Survivor Mercs, including the new Waste Land map and its unique boss, GriftLift.

You reported a ton of great feedback and provided us with great insights into what you enjoy and don’t enjoy about the game at the moment. Thanks a lot to everyone who reached out to us on our Discord, via the Steam forums, or in countless private messages. We really, really appreciate it and couldn’t work on improvements without your valuable feedback! ❤

For the next updates (0.9.8 and beyond), we are currently working on these highlights and many smaller improvements we won’t be listing explicitly:

We are improving the loot distribution, building costs, and visualization of rare & common building components.

Soon, you will find more and rare loot in Loot Crates and on mini-bosses in the later phases of your Operations (runs). Our goal is to remove some of the randomness when going on a loot run to find missing components for your building upgrades, and to make it more fun and rewarding to survive longer and extract later.

The rare building components will be highlighted both on the ground and in your inventories. This will be a first step to try and do more with item rarity.

Building costs for rooms will receive a major balancing pass to bring them in line with the new loot distribution and reduce the number of component types you need for each upgrade, so it’s easier to keep track of them. We know there is more we can do to improve that, so please consider this a first step.

The Treasury room will work differently to become much more useful and desirable as a BD storage across multiple runs to save up for mid-to-later game upgrades and purchases. The individual upgrade levels will also become more impactful.

We are currently testing a new feature to recover your lost loot from a previous Operation where your Commander was killed-in-action. You will get a second chance to grab your precious loot but if you fail, it will be lost for good.

Maybe one of the most requested features, a Dash ability, is currently being tested and refined. You should get the Dash as a default ability for all Commander clones. It’s meant to be upgraded with more “charges” to chain dashes consecutively, and we want Traits to be able to modify it and add secondary effects like knock-back or damage.

Some Commander Talent Traits may override the dash in exchange for a different ability that provides a different way to evade enemies, defend against them, or clear a path ahead of you.

Generally, we’re also working on allowing you to upgrade your Trait-given abilities with your level-ups, and potentially change some of them to give you more active control.

The new Dash ability and these other changes will have a big impact on the game experience. So please allow us some time to get it right and adjust the Operations, boss patterns, and enemy wave configurations to make it balanced and fun! Which leads us to…

This may be our biggest and most impactful improvement for the game in the near future. And it creates the foundation for new maps, bosses, Mercs, and other content and mechanics after that.

We cannot share all the details, yet, because this is an ongoing work-in-progress at the moment of writing this blog post. But you should know that we hear and incorporate your feedback into the game.

Our goal for this overhaul is to create an even “deeper” game where meta-upgrades and level-ups matter more and feel more impactful, especially for the Mercs and the generic stat upgrades during a run.

Current and future maps shall offer more distinct challenges that encourage different squad builds and increase the usability for more situational Mercs. So one map may focus more on lesser, but tougher enemies countered by crit damage and movement speed, while another may be more about swarms and AoE damage, or shooty enemies vs. longer-range & tanky HP builds (illustrative examples).

To achieve this, we want to introduce more unique mini-bosses and scale the challenge more in the second half of your Operation, so meta-upgrades from Bunker rooms will have a more substantial impact on your runs.

Mercs, enemies, and the final bosses receive some love to improve their behaviors and patterns. You should have more control over the Mercs and see their unique patterns and strengths more clearly, although they still act autonomously. Few Mercs (*cough* Hail *cough*) may even see more drastic changes, laying the groundwork for more interesting skill tree choices and synergies in the future.

Please understand that this is a big chunk of work which requires a lot of testing. It may not be perfect from the start. But we strongly believe this will be a massive step for the game into the right direction for our Early Access development plans.

Last but not least, some Traits and Gear will be adjusted to align with the aforementioned improvements. We’re already in the process of replacing some of the Traits that are widely disliked, e.g. “colorblind” or “deaf”. Other Traits and some Gear items will see changes to become more interesting and helpful with better, less negative trade-offs.

The following list of items is neither complete, nor final! They will most likely not be part of the immediate next updates, but build on top of them.

We still like to share it for additional context on WHY we are focusing on the stuff we mentioned above now.

• We want to add an Armor system for Commander and enemies to model more interesting challenges and add variety to your squad builds and future synergies.
• New and improved bunker rooms will add additional options to aid you in your runs, e.g. revive your Commander once, or store some loot in a Safe Box instead of extracting.
• The mechanics of researching Traits in the Genome Lab will be revamped to remove randomness and to make researching better Traits more rewarding. Also you’ll be able to configure Commander traits in the Clone Bay to reduce randomness in the mid-to-late game.
• New Operation Types like Elite or Endless runs are planned to deepen the game further to get rare items and special achievements.

We can’t promise exact dates for these updates, yet. They need thorough testing.

We’re currently aiming to release them over the course of the next weeks in November & December.

Please join the discussion on our Discord server and let us know which of these new features or improvements you are most excited about.