Today is the day you and we have been waiting for - The Riftbreaker 2.0 Update is now live! After almost four years of development, the Online Co-Op mode for The Riftbreaker is now available to everyone in the form of this massive, free update. However, the 2.0 Update is much more than the addition of Co-Op mode - it is also a massive expansion of the original Story Campaign, which will test your building, combat, and logistics skills more than anything you’ve encountered before. This update also comes with a host of gameplay improvements, quality of life changes, and performance optimizations.
Gather your team and jump in!
Thank you all for your patience and support during the development process. It was a bumpy road. Over the past few years, we have refactored almost the entirety of the game’s codebase to make online play possible. Such a massive rework wouldn’t have been possible without your help. Thank you for the countless hours you spent testing the game during our Closed and Open Beta periods. Thank you for all the bug reports, improvement suggestions, and feedback. Today’s release is our mutual success.
Share responsibilities. Build bigger. Expand further. Conquer all.
FOUR-PLAYER CO-OP - Gather your team and conquer Galatea 37 together. You can play the entirety of the Campaign and Survival Modes, as well as the Prologue mission. You can play with your friends by setting up a server and inviting them to play with you, or you can join other Riftbreakers from all around the globe and find the perfect game through our in-game Server Browser. Our difficulty level scaling ensures that gameplay remains challenging but fair, requiring you to work together to reach the goals you set for yourselves. We have also implemented many co-op-centric features to enhance your online play experience. Use the in-game chat to coordinate your team. Teleport to other players at any time. Reactivate the mechs of your fallen teammates. Stick together and receive a temporary power boost. Most importantly, though, have fun together!
Our endgame content will allow you to build amazing structures, much larger than anything before. You can build them all over the world, or cram them all on one map. Which one will you choose?
EXPANDED ENDGAME CAMPAIGN - A brand-new story arc involving Megastructures - specialized buildings with massive resource and upkeep requirements that will test your planning skills and grant powerful passive boosts in return. The 2.0 update is fully voiced by Francesca Meaux and Ryan Laughton, reprising their roles as Ashley and Mr. Riggs. The new plot adds as much story content as each of our previous World Expansions: 40 minutes of new dialogues, giving you new insights into the world of The Riftbreaker. Expand your economy beyond what was previously possible thanks to the new outpost limit set to 15. Discover new planetary locations for resource gathering or exploration thanks to the new Orbital Scanner functionality (more on that in this article). Build up a massive mining operation, or cultivate resources to fulfill your needs. Whatever you do, don’t forget about defenses. Enemy attacks in the Endgame make the previous battles look like child’s play.
Omega-strain creatures hide everywhere. If you anger the wildlife enough, they will come knocking to your door.
NEW OMEGA-STRAIN CREATURES - These are new, more powerful, and tougher versions of the existing species. They are the new backbone of the enemy hordes, bringing destruction wherever they go. Defeating them will yield great rewards. Our artists had the opportunity to let their imagination go wild and have updated Omega creature models to command respect. Omegas also come in “elemental” forms, requiring you to vary your arsenal while fighting. In total, you will be able to encounter 73 varieties of these monsters! Each Omega creature receives additional abilities from a wide range of available options - we have explained all of them in this article. Given that the toughest Omegas out there can receive up to four of these special skills, the number of possible combinations is enough to ensure that no two encounters are quite the same!
The improved Orbital Scanner functionality will enable you to establish new resource outposts and explore never seen areas of the planet.
RANDOMIZED MISSION GENERATOR - After completing all of the main missions in any given biome, you will now have the option to look for new planetary locations. You can either look for hidden treasures and Bioanomalies in exploration-style maps, or you can set up new resource outposts in resource-rich areas. The Campaign is no longer limited to a predefined set of maps. The Randomized Mission Generator gives you access to countless variations of maps with unique characteristics. Utilizing this tool will grant you access to additional resources, equipment, and space to relocate your infrastructure if needed. Here's a more detailed article about this feature! As we mentioned previously, the new limit for outposts is 15, and with the ability to look for areas with lots of resource veins, you can easily boost your production to hundreds, if not thousands, per second.
Alternatively, you can give exploration missions a go. They serve as a great palate cleanser between planning and building your factories. You might even stumble upon some of our brand-new, unique encounters. They are special in-game events that happen on handcrafted tiles you won’t see often. When ‘rolling’ a new map via the Mission Generator, there is a chance that one such tile will be featured on your map. Ashley and Mr. Riggs will immediately notify you via custom-made dialog lines, tailored for that occasion. Each encounter stands out visually and narratively, and is guaranteed to never repeat in one Campaign playthrough. Once you see it, it’s gone forever (unless you set up an outpost to admire the view. It’s a viable strategy).
The more you explore the planet, the better the rewards you will find in the wild - they now range from decorations to powerful weapons.
LOOT SYSTEM REWORK - Crafting is not the only way of getting new gear anymore. You can now find weapons, mech upgrades, and other useful items as loot from enemy creatures, Biocaches, and Bioanomalies. The items you find have the potential to be much more powerful than those you can craft yourself - always check for upgrades! You never know what cool additional characteristics an item might have. As you complete research tree nodes, the lootable items will progress as well, increasing the pool of available items. You might even find ones that exceed your current level of research, making each find exciting. And if you don’t find what you want, you can always disassemble the junk and enjoy the extra resources. It’s a win-win. Read more in this article.
Even one mech is a force to be reckoned with. Given that you can now play with up to four, we had to give the Galatean creatures a fighting chance!
GAME BALANCE ADJUSTMENTS - We have rebalanced the entirety of The Riftbreaker campaign, taking all your feedback into account. The difficulty modes in version 2.0 have been redesigned to better suit the majority of players. Easy Mode has been toned down to allow for a more casual, leisurely style of play. Hard and Brutal Modes have been “intensified” to offer a greater challenge to those who want their skills tested. However, the game’s difficulty is not only about combat - the economy also plays a huge role here. With the new Loot System, the addition of Omega Creatures, and the increased number of outposts, we had to take a long look at how our buildings operate. We adjusted costs and production outputs and introduced other necessary changes. Also worth noting, difficulty levels are customizable both in single and multiplayer, meaning that you can adjust the game parameters exactly to your liking.
More weapons are useful now! We made sure that even the weakest weapons have a good use case. Not only did we tweak the stats, but we also introduced functional improvements to many of them.
WEAPON SYSTEM REWORK - We have rebalanced the entire weapons system to improve firepower scaling across the entire campaign. Weapons that were previously too weak have received significant upgrades, making more builds viable. We have also introduced functional changes to some weapons, like the Root Gun and Laser. We highly encourage you to experiment with all of them. You might discover a new favorite! We have also taken a good look at the weapon mods to make sure that everything you find and install in your guns has a meaningful impact on your firepower. We've discussed this process in detail here.
Researching new technologies will allow you to build even more complex bases.
RESEARCH REWORK - All research items in the Story Campaign will require both time and resources. Adding a research item to the queue will require you to pay a one-time resource fee. This cost will offset the extra resources that you will get during the new campaign. Survival Research tree remains unaffected. We highly encourage reading the article that we have written on this topic. You can find it here. It explains our reasoning behind this change.
You can now disassemble mods, mech upgrades, and weapons in multiples. Took us long enough, right?
QUALITY-OF-LIFE IMPROVEMENTS - We’ve added many features, such as mass item disassembly, research search bar, quick multiplayer teleports, and many other options to make your gameplay experience as smooth as possible. These tools have been added thanks to the feedback from our brave Beta testers, who suggested some brilliant solutions. Thank you to everyone who participated!
You will notice performance increases in the face of large hordes and in map-wide bases.
MASSIVE PERFORMANCE GAINS - Since this update required us to rework the entirety of the engine, you will now be able to enjoy The Riftbreaker with much smoother performance, able to handle truly massive bases and enemy numbers.
While we won’t be able to create a comprehensive changelog (the update is simply too big and it spans several years of changes), here are the most important changes coming to you in this build in a nutshell:
You can play in a group of up to 4 players over the internet or using LAN. The game dynamically adapts to to the number of players.
You will have the chance to start the endgame after activating the Rift Portal. Two important pieces of info: 1) the endgame is entirely optional, but highly recommended, and 2) you can start the endgame on a save from your old campaign if you wish to do so.
Most important change: there is a dancing emote. Activate the emote wheel by pressing "H" by default.
We're not laying down arms. Job's not done!
This is a lot of changes already, but we are not slowing down one bit. Here’s just a couple of things that we are still working on that we aim to add in the following weeks:
With a good team behind your back, no horde will be able to stop you.
We've been testing this update with the Riftbreaker community for more than a year - since the start of our Co-Op Playtest. At first, it was a closed test, with a couple hundred invites going out every couple of weeks. By the end, we have reached truly staggering numbers. 88 140 people took part in the testing process via our Multiplayer Playtest app alone. They spent more than 280 000 hours playing the game, reporting bugs, and suggesting improvements. We have also received incredible help from all of you who participated in the Open Beta via the Steam branch. While we don't have the exact numbers in this case, you can rest assured that they helped us immensely with Campaign Mode testing. With today's release, both the Multiplayer Playtest app and the Open Beta branches will be closed. They have done their job - it is time to rest now.
If you would like to "relive" the process of the Co-Op mode development, we have compiled all our 'Co-Op When?" articles in Linktree format. You can check them out here.
If, for any reason, you would prefer to play the 'old' version of The Riftbreaker, we are keeping it live on the legacy branch on Steam. You can find it by right-clicking on The Riftbreaker in your Steam Library, choosing 'properties', then 'betas'. You can choose the legacy branch from the drop-down list. No password is required. This version will no longer receive any updates.
We would like to thank you once again for your patience and support that kept us going through the years. We hope that the results of our work will bring you hours of joy spent in the company of your friends. We don’t have much else to say, except for maybe one thing…
