Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[AzyWng]

This is a necro, but I don't think starting a new thread is entirely necessecary...

Heat Signature has released its Challenge Update Beta! You had to sign up to get the code that unlocks the beta test for Heat Signature, but if you ask me for it I'll tell it to you (the developer wants feedback for it anyway).

You have to own Heat Signature to participate, however - so don't mistake this for a free game giveaway. It's just a beta update for people who own the game.

The update introduces things like:

• Contractors - special enemies with abilities all intended to stop you from getting complacent. These abilities include knowing where you are all the time and having bullets that cannot be dodged, disabling your gadgets and causing glitchers (teleporters) to go fucky, shielding other enemies with a barrier that is literally immune to everything unless they're taken out, or just being a pulsating purple circle of impalement.
• Modifiers - I don't know what they're being called exactly, but they affect your characters - doing everything from making melee weapons unusable to giving you a ten-minute timer before you literally drop dead on the spot.
• Glory - Basically a score that starts at zero and increases as you complete extremely difficult "Glory" missions.
• Changes to Clients - Rather than unlocking the ability to take on bloodless missions, you may instead unlock special Clients like "The Thinker", who only offers missions have no time limit or alarm response, "The Soft Target", who only offers missions where enemies have no shields or armor, or "Gloria", who offers only glory missions. These clients will appear at stations you've liberated around the Drift, while stations that do not have special clients will have their normal set of missions.
• Changes to Alarm Responses - In addition to the "head for a station" or "do literally nothing" possibilities that occur when the alarm sounds, there is now a third - "Reinforcements". "Reinforcements" causes Contractors (the guys I mentioned earlier) to appear from a teleport pad somewhere on the ship. They will stop spawning, but it still means that sounding the alarm is a bad move.
• Daily Challenge - Every day, you get a character with some powerful kit, a pair of disadvantages, and a series of missions you have to complete. As you go through the mission series, you'll get score - if you buy items or mess up the optional objectives (so far I've only seen "Be seen as little as possible"), you lose score. Failing a mission causes the daily mission to end. Whether you succeed or fail, your score will be submitted and compared with others. Note that you only get one shot at a spot on the leaderboards - any subsequent attempts will be listed as "practice" attempts on ships of the exact same layout and item distribution, and will not have their scores submitted.

Probably a whole lot more changes I haven't remembered to add, but there's several of those - should help make the game more interesting for folks who understand what to do under ordinary circumstances.

[askovdk]

Thank you for sharing.
I took it up again a couple of weeks ago, and (again) had a great time. I put it in the same honorable category as ‘Invisible Inc’ with a gameplay about cheating with cool gadgets. 

For a while I thought it silly that you could so easily bring down an entire ship, but I guess we are not playing as deadbeat losers, but as the very elite of cyperpunk solos. Think about it, - a load-out of 8 orange gadgets would cost about 250 units, bringing an entire ship back may give a bonus of about 5, normal guns are worth so little that it’s effectively 0. Killing a high-ranking officer may cost as little as 20 units. In that context it makes sense (not that it’s really needed) that I can slipstream through a battle cruiser in seconds considering that my gear could buy a medium sized city.

[AzyWng]

So, what are your thoughts on the changes added?

How are you dealing with contractors? Especially Reinforcements and Predators - both of which are especially annoying/devastating. I personally try to take out Predators from a distance - but laying down Crash Traps or getting close enough with a Crashbeam or Subverter can also be effective - just stay out of that radius or else you'll get stabbed.

[Rolan7]

Woah!  I've been replaying this out of the blue recently (like someone mentioned, it's so fast to pick up and drop for a quick mission).  I was enjoying the familiarity, but that change list looks like just want I would have asked for, if pressed!

PTW I guess.  I shared some stories in other threads, but probably avoided this thread in fear of spoilers.  This is a good game, one with lasting replay value.  Mechanically it becomes kinda easy, once you've got enough of the galaxy...  But the defector missions are nice setups with clever twists, and some real curveballs.

I love Offworld Security, with their zealous no-kills policy.  Emphasis on zealous...  Their ships are definitely the easiest, since they seem to forgo armor as far as I remember.  So I almost always do them the courtesy of leaving them alive.  Wrench generally, with crashbeams or traps for their shields.  Appropriate force.

Yet I would not want to be captured by them.  I tend to go for the jobs to rescue people from their interrogations...  But it's interesting to see a faction that's brutal, yet values life over all else.
"The controversy over our our non-lethal weapons is a testament to how many of their victims survive to complain."
"Please don't murder yourselves on our shields while we're trying to save your lives."

Life isn't yours to take. When you kill someone, you override every choice they were ever going to make, all the good they could ever do. It's an irreversible loss of unknowable magnitude.
But it's OK to break their arms?
That's fine, yes.

[Egan_BW]

Ah yes, the conversations that you can have with ex-members of the various factions are surprisingly philosophical and neat. Sovereign is the closest thing to outright "bad guys", but they're still interesting.

In case you didn't know, you can get the features of the new update right now by selecting "nextversion" in steam. Right click -> Properties -> Betas.
Looking forwards to seeing us compare daily runs in this thread. :)

[Rolan7]

The update seems to be released now.  Lots of interesting changes.  I never went over the changelog carefully, but things I've noticed after a couple of minutes are:
An assassination target tried to teleport off-ship at the first alarm, with a 12-second timer.
New triangular "alert" markers, eeh.
The traits are amazing.
The "today's challenge" option, of course.
Stash tells you how many items are inside before you open it.

Also my current character started with 1 glory, but I started a new galaxy in light of the changes.
Ehe, sorry, I'm just really excited about how much some of these changes liven up the gameplay.

Edit:  People going on errands in pairs
People shouting more specifically than just "Intruder" when they notice something

[Egan_BW]

Hmm. I take it you haven't met the contractors yet, then?

[Rolan7]

I have now DX
Yeah I stopped updating at a certain point, there are a *lot* of new features here.  Quite an anniversary update, I'm very impressed.

[mocman]

Loving the Dailies and got 171 first day 0 second XD

[Rolan7]

Jeez, this daily is just mean.  High-capacity self-charging slipstream...  With technophobe.  50% chance to break on every use.
Let's calculate the statistically expected number of uses.  1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16... = ?
One, because we all know it'll break the first time

But at least all our guns are silenced...  Not *entirely* useless, despite the mission to reduce kills.  There's an armor-piercing concussive shotgun for $33, which I will probably buy for the third stage.  They get cheaper if you wait, so I like to try the first day without buying.

Ugh, I hate technophobe though.  It's worse than jammers.  Jammers can be crashed/ambushed, and subverting their devices with extreme range is a nice "Screw you I have money" trick.  Technophobe is just random, and that makes it a planning challenge...

Edit:  Haha, sure enough, all 4 gadgets I used (two visitors and two sidewinders) crashed on first and only use   All were looted from the mission ships.  I did end up buying the AP concussive shotgun for $11.  I flew over to check out the ship first, and the target was reasonably close to a window, but also in a cluster of 5 guys.  Spacing *only* the target would have been impractical, and there's no way to save nontargets from space yet ):
I wish the Angel did that...

Speaking of the Angel, heh, I kinda screwed up yesterday's mission on the third stage.  Fortunately I'd crashbeamed the teleporter early on.  I kept trying not to harm people (due to clause), but ended up hammering out 2 jammers and some glitch-react shmuck who shot me the 4th or 5th attempt.  Angel gave me plenty of attempts.  It was tricky with armored heat-scanners though.

[AzyWng]

I don't suppose we could post videos of us doing the daily challenge? I did so for like two runs, but I've kind of stopped because I keep getting distracted (and also since I don't know anything about video editing).

[Rolan7]

I had actually been thinking the same thing.  I haven't posted hardly anything to my youtube in a long time, especially if you don't count memes, but I'm 100% down to share vidruns here.

And now that I'm thinking about it, 76561197964141316's my profile code if anyone wants to friend contact me.  Bay12 is credential enough for my contact list, I'm basically never online for chatting anymore anyway.  And being an oldfriend, I have plenty of room.

I think I might play this game too much, and perhaps am too good at it.  I'd like to see you prove me wrong~

Er but yeah I might start making occasional videos.  Mostly to show off, haha.  and if someone learns something, that's good too...  I'd really love to help more people win against The (space) Man

[AzyWng]

Isn't Google+ shutting down soon?

EDIT: Welp, google didn't work - I don't actually know what the profile code is for or how to use it :/

[Rolan7]

Don't worry, for some reason they've decided to let Youtube survive rather than bring it down with

That's my Steam profile code, I'm just worried about spiders.
There's a good chance that searching Rolan7 Steam will work as well (it does for me, but... algorithms, maaan).  Ignore the *KB*, it's an artifact.

[KittyTac]

I took a Medium stealing mission. I got what basically amounts to a silenced rechargeable concussive gun. Aborted the mission so that I could keep my gun, it didn't pay much anyway.