Good morning, afternoon or evening everyone. Today we will be answering the most frequent questions we have been getting for our announcement of SYNTHETIK 2.
Keep in mind that while we mostly talk about things which are clear at this time, plans can always change.
Table of contents:
SYNTHETIK 2 release
When will the full launch be?
S2 will fully launch in 2022. We have a lot of plans for the early access period but a lot of things will be adjusted based on your feedback. Our goal is to provide the highest quality game possible prioritizing a fantastic gameplay experience above all else.
On what platforms will early access be available on?
Right now there are only plans for early access to be accessible through PC on Steam.
Will S2 be released on consoles?
We are primarily working on getting the PC release right. Once that is done we can consider a release on consoles, earliest date for this will be the full launch.
Will S2 have a hard copy release?
No plans for that at the moment.
What will the pricing be?
During early access the price will be 19.99 $/€. At full launch it will increase to reflect the added production value of the game.
Will there be a special edition?
As with the first game, we offer a bonus Supporter DLC for everyone wishing to support us further. Within the early access we do not offer any further bonus content as we are working on the core game at the moment.
Will S2 have a season pass format?
No and specially not during early access.
Will S2 have any add-ons at launch?
Larger expansions are interesting but if we were to have them it would be after the full launch.
Will there be an Alpha or Beta?
Yes! It's going to happen soon. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter, follow us on twitter and join the discord to stay tuned.
Where can I contact support?
You can reach out to our email support@flowfiregames.com, post in the forums, let us know on twitter or through our discord.
S2 Gameplay and Content
Will S2 still be roguelite?
Yes! Though the outer game progression will be different and the levels are a bit more handcrafted as seen in S1.
What does S2 offer above S1?
There are many many points to talk about here, as such we will reveal more details in a future post!
How does the out-game progression look like?
For the classes, there will still be class levels, like in S1, but the item and module loadout will be swapped for different systems, one of them being the new specializations system.
In S1 development we toyed with talent-trees and thought about bringing them to S2 but have never been super enthusiastic about them and they have become a "AAA formula".
In general they are good however we always favored a system that encourages players to experiment with different options and want to try something more fresh.
We will soon reveal our new and innovative modular mainboard system that will replace the perk system from S1. Stay tuned!
How does the difficulty system look like?
This is still work in progress, we will reveal more of this later. Stay tuned.
Will S2 bring back the classes from S1 or will it have new classes?
S2 will bring a mix of new and revamped S1 classes; some of them are fresh takes on the ideas of classes from the first game, others are completely new altogether. We are excited for you to see them and to try out their new progression systems. It is not certain yet how many classes will be at EA launch, but we are trying to get around 4-5 including 2-3 of the new specializations for each class (more info about the new classes will come in a separate blog entry).
What is the design behind the S2 weapons?
The weapons in S2 are now no longer a random assortment of all kinds of different weapons but we are now having faction arsenals with common themes, gameplay fitting the faction traits, design language, technologies and more. For the machine factions we are doing more unique weapon designs, for the human weapons we are still using real life ones as a basis, although we try to take inspiration from more alternative designs (or non-adopted designs), like using a TKB-0111 instead of a standard AK-74 for example, as we feel like a large amount of games use the same weapons over and over (every game having a Bizon, an M16, AK74, etc).
SYNTHETIK 2 will try bring back many of the fan gameplay favorites over time but in a revamped visual design style.
Will S2 have new enemies?
Yes. Similar to the weapons, S1 used all kinds of enemies mixed together, but now we are fighting specialized factions/subfactions, starting with the Machine Military Forces and the Police Faction.
What are factions?
The new SYNTHETIK Universe is built around all the different factions within the world, human and machine, which all have their own lore, units, strengths, weaknesses, doctrines and technological arsenals. In S2 you play as part of the human defiance and (at EA launch) will encounter both the Machine Military and the Police with their respective sub-factions. Items, weapons and all sorts of things are no longer "generic" but are always affiliated with a certain faction.
Each sub-faction, while based heavily on the main faction, will have some different units, traits, weapons and specialties and you will always face one of them. Per example the Police Chrono Squad fields a couple of special teleporting and hover units which the other Police sub-factions don't have.
The player classes are based on stolen machine faction technologies, so they will inherit traits of their respective faction. For example, the Riotguard class would be based on the Police faction.
We are planning to add one more major machine faction within early access, but there will also be some human items and weapons sprinkled around. The human factions will be expanded in the future in our universe, S2 focuses mostly on the machine factions.
How will items and weapons drop now?
You will still find all sorts of varied faction gear from chests and shops but the chance of getting things from the faction you are fighting is significantly higher.
Will there be melee combat?
We now have enemies that wield dangerous melee weapons! We also like the idea and will likely try to make melee work in the future for the player.
Will S2 have dual wield weapons?
Yes! Some weapons will be in a dual wield configuration. To be clear, the weapon is always a dual wield weapon, not two random regular weapons.
Will there be a story mode in the game?
Similarly to the first game, the story will be told while playing the game. We try to add more flair and some voiced interactions which are told in a way that doesn't interrupt the core gameplay. We are also aiming to add flair text to all items and weapons for further world-building.
What is the SYNTHETIK Universe?
The SYNTHETIK Universe is a complete rebuilt design for varied games within the SYNTHETIK world with consistent lore, factions, gameplay ruleset and ideas. Many ideas of S1 remain but it is a strong refactoring given S1 was a very mixed bag of ideas and trying out as many things as possible. More info about it in a separate blog entry.
Will the story be continued from the first game?
No, it will be a retelling of S1 more or less, but more fleshed out and consistent with the foundation of the new SYNTHETIK Universe. The goal is similar but you are no longer contained in a tower from Kaida Corp but taking missions across the world.
Engine Change
Which engine will SYNTHETIK 2 be using?
Going forward our games will use the Unity Engine with the new HDRP Rendering Pipeline for high quality graphics. Unity is a great compromise between ease of use for the developer and state of the art techniques. While all engines have a lot of up and downsides, Unity is the perfect option for our team size and especially given our plans with UniversEdit Framework / modding.
Why did you move away from GameMaker?
GameMaker is mainly geared towards a specific kind of 2D game and is designed more towards novice developers. Back when we started to work on SYNTHETIK it was a good choice, allowing us to release the game, however, we have grown greatly over the years personally and in team size and want to work with state of the art 3D graphics, the much more powerful C# programming language and the many other tools and possibilities to extend the engine.
Is SYNTHETIK 2 still 2D or 3D?
SYNTHETIK has never been really 3D nor 2D. The gameplay was technically 3D but some of the rendering was done in 2D. While this brought an interesting visual result we felt that this confusion brought a lot of limitations in what we can do. So as you can see S2 is now fully 3D. It does not change the core gameplay as we calculated that in 3D in the first game as well.
What other features will the new engine bring?
The new engine coupled with our much larger team size and a way better designed code and tool foundation should be very noticeable in many areas of the game, including new and improved features, much better tools for debugging, stability, better multiplayer options and generally a ton of other things.
It also allowed us to concept our new UniversEdit Framework which is extremely powerful, allowing creation and balancing of content within the game and will later easily allow modding. Our new framework is very modular and extendable, and makes things possible like giving enemies weapons, items, perks or do many other things that were previously impossible.
What is modding going to be like?
Modding will be very easy to do with our new UniversEdit Framework. Creating new content and balancing will be easy from within the game main menu, Plans are still in conception. Watch our for our coming blog entry!
Multiplayer
We will reveal more about multiplayer soon! Stay tuned
Will S2 have multiplayer?
Yes, S2 will feature Co-op similarly to the first game.
It will have a much better implementation and we are also looking into providing dedicated servers which can scale based on need. It will feature up to 4 players online coop.
Will the multiplayer be implemented in the early access?
Yes. We'll try to make it happen for the early access launch but can not 100% guarantee it at the moment.
Community Hub and Forum
What is the Community Hub?
The SYNTHETIK Universe community hub is the place for all games from Flow Fire and their community. We have many cool things planned and more content is to come, so stay tuned! The Universe Hub also marks the start of the SYNTHETIK Universe as a shared
world with consistent gameplay ruleset, factions and lore between our new games.
What is the difference between the Community Forum and Discord?
The community forum allows for different discussions to be tracked and not be lost in a flood of messages, it allows threads to be continued in a easier way than before and they can be archived and revisited better in the future. The forum is great for longer discussions which are not possible on discord but is clearly not a replacement for discord, both should complement each other.
Why have another Forum?
As previously stated the forum allows conversations to continue off in their own threads without being lost to newer or different messages. There is also a much easier historical access and future users can find these conversations easier and contribute to them.
We will see over time for which type of content the forum works best and then push more in that direction.
Where can I upload my fan art?
You can casually upload it to our discord fanart channel or make a thread on the new forums
Where can I upload my gameplay recordings?
You can upload them to youtube and link them to us through any of our social media.
Do you need Moderators for the forum or discord?
Yes. We are always looking for moderators for our community. If you are interested please contact us but know that we prefer active members of the community with a proven track record of being nice, friendly and respectful.
What are all your social channels?
What is your newsletter for?
Our newsletter is to keep you up to date on all important developments of SYNTHETIK 2. When alpha access opens up, you will be informed! We'll try to ramp up content through the newsletter in the near future.
SYNTHETIK: LEGION RISING
Why didn't you just continue to make content for S1?
We are very proud of what we have achieved with S1 and have worked on the game for a total of 5 years at this point. In the beginning a lot of our thoughts were "Hey, this sounds cool, let's just put that in". Of course over time this made everything more complicated and a lot less fun to work with. Doing a clean restart gives us the opportunity to apply all the lessons we have learned with S1 and grants us the opportunity to try new things.
At this point we are far beyond a healthy point regarding the complexity of the project and the codebase is not half on the quality of S2, making it very easy for things to fall apart.
Update 24 introduced a nasty engine bug for example breaking the multiplayer experience for many people causing us months of pain, requiring us to make a big engine upgrade which was still in early access (generally you never want to do such things in a game's lifecycle), causing more issues to the point that update 24 or 26 was a negative for many people, negating hundreds of lines of patch notes in effort done by us. For some people, the huge 24, 25 and Ultimate updates were not a benefit in fun as a cause, making further development on such a big bloated project questionable even if you disregard the long time we have been already working on it.
Will you keep working on S1?
We've spent the last 5 years working on and providing support for S1. Even while working on S2 we have provided patches and worked to solve issues that have come up. We've enjoyed our time with S1 but we will officially stop providing updates and patches for this game after the release of S2. Maybe there will be some anniversary patch from time to time or such but for now the focus is fully on the future.
We are working on solving the GameMaker engine issues that have caused crashes recently and will provide another patch soon as they have just released the 2.3.2 version which is on Beta branch right now.
Miscellaneous
Are you still two guys working on the game?
No, over the last one and a half years we have increased the development team to 20 developers, all with game dev experience. We are still refining our development processes and growing together as a team. But these added capabilities open completely new possibilities going forward!
Are you working other projects/games?
Yes, originally after SYNTHETIK launched, we began working on a different game within the universe but in another genre. Because of the continuously increasing requests and the added challenge of the current pandemic we have decided to pause Game 2's production and fast track SYNTHETIK 2 to make sure we can continue to support the experience of SYNTHETIK. Once S2 is in a good spot in a few months, some of the team members will go back to work slowly but continually on the other to be announced game.
Do you have any job openings at the moment?
Yes and no, we are always happy to hear from experienced developers but are focused mainly on making S2 work right now. Check out our website for opportunities!