We have stalled long enough!Its all starting to come together. Krater will finally get it´s coop update – free of charge!
October 23 there will be a massive update to the game on Steam that will add not only coop but updated visuals, game play tweaks, new content, new maps, more songs to the soundtrack, improved user interface and much more.
We will keep you posted on our progress and more details about the release further on…
We are closing in on the second big release for Krater, namely the long awaited coop. The exact release date is announced on Tuesday, but its less than a month away now.
Prior to that the Polish version of Krater will be released. ETA is October 18. We are also currently putting in the final touches on the Portuguese, French, German and Russian versions of the game (some via publishers, others via the heroic efforts from the community).
Hi,
First of all – thanks for your patience and support. I know the process of getting coop out there for you is taking time, longer than we hoped and wished and I thought I should shed some light on our current status of the coop.
With coop we are reworking large part of the game code. Areas such as the level creation systems, save and load system, animation and combat state managers and not to mention the whole network part. Basically everything that needs to be changed to facilitate cooperative gameplay with a client-server solution is now changed. But we will not press the button just yet. Not until we are 100% sure that the new features:
- will not destroy peoples save files
- crash frequency is reduced to an absolute minimum on most hardware setups
- offer enough new content to feel worth it to buy for those that so far haven’t both the game.
- builds a solid foundation for us to continue work and add stuff to the game (this means a large player base, a code base and tools that caters for easy addition of more content and a game design that is modular in the sense that new features can be added without beraking old ones
and most important…
- is good enough to get your approval and not being written of as a piece of junk produced without passion
Right now we have positive but still not absolutely totally certain answers on all points listed above. Until we have that we wont be able give you a release date or start an open beta testing (but keys are handed and the test group is growing).
And oh – for you who play Cyanide’s online version of BloodBowl. Krater is sponsoring the next Crunched Cup, a tournament organized by the site www.bbtactics.com.
We have a couple of fanatic BB-players in our team and are thrilled to see Kraters name appear in such an event 
.
A new hot fix for the crashes on the build uploaded yesterday evening is deployed to the test_version beta now. If it turns out ok it will be deployed to the main game tonight.
The introduction of coop have made us re-think how we would like player abilities to work in Krater. We can’t really go into details right now but we are working on a design that will put more emphasis on synergy effects when using different abilities together. We are also preparing for a new race that will be introduced as the first major gameplay update after coop.
/The Fatshark team
Time for our weekly status write up. We will divide it into the different areas we are focusing on right now:
We currently have a internal rough version of the coop game mode where we try to remove CTD’s and game breakers. This is to allow external testers to focus on functionality, difficulty and fun level rather than crashes.
How it looks like? Well at the moment it mostly looks like a single player game with twice the amount of characters. We have added some notes of how we are going to get adjust the user interface.
The coop release plan as it stands right now (still subject of change) is:
End of August – External testing of the coop core mechanics is started (number of testers will be increased to reach sufficient numbers beginning of September.
Beginning of September – build iterations of the coop game play will be published on the coop beta until we (based on test feedback) deem it good enough for release.
Release - exact release date is determined by the tests in above post, and when Steam have an available slot.
Since we with the main release created a solid base for the RPG experience to stand on the updates that comes around the time for the co-op (prior, during and directly after) will be more dungeon crawler oriented to better cater for the coop release.
This means that we will focus on more weapons, items and ways to customize them. We are also planning rather extensive overhauls of how abilities are distributed to the classes where randomness (and more important, more abilities) will be added.
Enemies also need an overhaul – we will add new behaviors to the enemies (and new types such as spawners)
The work on the Mac release of Krater has now started and it is proceeding according to plans. The delay we are experiencing are due to the fact that the PC-post release support took more resources than initially planned for. We will give you an more exact release date once we have a better picture of the work and any difficulties we might encounter.
Cheers!
/The Fatshark team
