Post-launch greetings and about the future of Barotrauma

Hello again!

On Wednesday, we only wrote a quick announcement here, thinking we would have the time and space to talk to you like we do via chats and forums. Little did we know we would get new messages faster than we could read the ones already in our inboxes! Additionally, there have of course been technical issues – wouldn’t be a proper launch if it didn’t keep the programmers busy straight after…

So we’re sorry if we haven’t returned your message; we promise we are going to read it, however. And most importantly, thank you for every review (the negative ones too, we really read them all!), purchase and wishlist addition – our first days post-launch have been amazing, if also crazily busy. Now we wanted to take the time to go a little deeper into what we actually released two nights ago.

And in particular the big question: what’s the difference between the game that everyone played for free for years and this one that we now have to pay for?

First, we should probably admit to having lived in a bit of a bubble here: since we’ve worked pretty openly with our community, with fairly frequent blog posts, our source code public on GitHub since 2017 and all new commits being automatically posted on our Discord, we didn’t actually anticipate this question! Like, of course everyone goes through these things with a fine-toothed comb, right? Well, of course you don’t. So here’s the short version.

Why can’t we play the free version anymore?

Barotrauma Legacy version
Throwback…Friday.

Barotrauma started as a pet project of Joonas “Regalis” Rikkonen, AKA Undertow Games, and a few other hobbyists. You can read more about the history in this other blog post. Around the end of 2017, Baro became a full-fledged professional project, jointly with FakeFish. FakeFish are, in the broadest sense in the context of Barotrauma:

Aku Jauhiainen, founding partner, CEO and executive producer

Joonas Rikkonen, lead developer of Barotrauma

Ez Jämsen, lead designer of Barotrauma

Pekka Saari, creative director and art lead of Barotrauma

Eetu Pitkänen, founding partner and programmer

Daniel Asteljoki, founding partner and designer

Lauri Härkänen, programmer

Juan Pablo Arce, programmer and Discord favorite

Roni Kovaniemi, QA engineer

Iiro Enges, senior artist

Namanh Lê, artist

Tuan Anh Dinh, artist

Jussi Elsilä, founding partner and audio designer

Vilma Savolainen, community manager

Kimmo Kari, consultant and business developer

Alex, Otto and Oskari – programming and artist interns who have also lent a hand in the development.

We work full-time to make games for a living. We’re particularly passionate about making survival horror games with editors and other tools that allow players to expand the game and create their own content. We’re also really into procedural generation and iterative design together with our players. Barotrauma is our first commercial release.

The Barotrauma team
Some of us in Prague last year. We can never seem to squeeze everyone in one photo!

Around the time FakeFish boarded Barotrauma, the free legacy version stopped receiving major updates. We didn’t take it down, though, because we wanted continuity for those surprisingly many people who were playing and enjoying the far-from-complete early development version. However, it had always been the stated goal of the project to launch it as a commercial release once it was ready to see the light of day.

Now we have finally arrived to where everyone, not just our handful of community testers, is able to get their hands on the Steam version, and thus the legacy master server has been taken down. So, what should you expect to find in the Steam Early Access version of Barotrauma?

Changelog highlights

Over the last two days, we have been absolutely swamped with messages, and saddeningly many state that the game isn’t worth its price tag. Many say the opposite and have written wonderful things that have made us smile, and still many others find themselves somewhere in the middle. This is to be expected of course, and rather than try too hard to talk anyone over, we want to shed some light on our own position by listing some of the things we’ve done over the past 18 months or so. (You can find the complete changelog here, v0.8.2.3 being the last legacy version.)

  • A full graphics overhaul: Almost all of the sprites have been polished or completely remade.
  • Improved random event system to keep the overall difficulty of the game at a certain level, delaying additional monster spawns if there’s already a lot going on, or spawning more when there’s a more quiet moment
  • Improved difficulty system: The difficulty level has a much more noticeable effect on gameplay.
  • General difficulty balancing all across the board: We’ve tried to make the difficulty curve more approachable to new players while still keeping things challenging for more experienced players on higher difficulty levels.
  • More varied levels, environmental hazards (volcanoes, water currents, organisms that disrupt the sonar, floating ice chunks…)
  • A new and more detailed health system, with limb-specific injuries, addictions, overdoses, mental issues… The system is also highly moddable, and makes it much easier to implement things such as hunger mechanics, more varied poisons or stat-boosting items, which have been very popular in mods before (a big nod to BTE here).
  • Completely redesigned in-game HUD (the inventory, crew command interface, chat, etc)
  • Redesigned crafting system: There are many more raw materials and ways to get them, and more things you can craft. It’s also now possible for all members of the crew to craft anything, although characters with insufficient skills will take much longer to do it.
  • Added minerals scattered across levels that can be used for crafting
  • A command/report system that can be used to communicate with your crew more effectively (in both single player and multiplayer)
  • Tons of additions to alien ruins (traps, puzzles, non-flooded rooms)
  • Improved, functional AI for both crew and enemies, although this is still a work in progress
  • NPC dialog (including random chatter and context-specific lines that make it easier to keep track of what the crew is doing)
  • Redesigned most of the device interfaces to make them more intuitive to use (and a lot nicer to look at!)
  • Many additions to the campaign mode, although it is currently still a work in progress
  • Overhauled the skill system: Now every character can generally do anything (repair devices, fabricate new items, apply medical treatments), but characters with higher skill levels will do things more efficiently.
  • Skill progression in the campaign mode: Characters’ skills increase gradually, making them more valuable with each completed round.
  • A whole soundtrack of new music composed specifically for the game
  • Completely remade audio
  • New monsters – types and behaviors, not just skins
  • New mission types
  • New items (weapons, tools, medical items, alien items, crafting materials, signal components, etc)
  • Completely remade tutorials, with tutorials or guides for the editors still in the works
  • Improved and much more stable ragdoll animations
  • Additional tools for modders (character editor, sprite editor, level editor, additions to the submarine editor)
  • Steam functionality, of course: full Workshop support, achievements, banning Steam IDs from servers…
  • In-game VOIP, although it still needs some more work
  • Too many bugfixes to count.
Barotrauma public GitHub
Really, too many.

What each of us expects from a game of any particular price point is of course fairly subjective. We thought the price suggested to us by our publisher seemed reasonable when coupled with regular discounts during the Early Access period. Barotrauma is currently available at 15% off; this is for only one week, as per Steam standard launch discount duration. The next discount is planned to kick in as soon as we can, again playing by Steam rules, to offer regular opportunities to purchase the game at a reduced price during EA.

Where we made a genuine mistake with the pricing was in letting the original estimate hang around our FAQs for too long, let alone if it was ever quoted as a fact. This has been a valuable lesson: it’s hard to give estimates and make sure they are seen as such. We want to apologize to everyone who feels mislead by what we have said before. The final price was hammered out (and raised somewhat) only fairly shortly before launch, but as we were slightly unsure for an extended time about what the eventual price tag would be, we should have withdrawn our estimated price range much sooner to avoid false impressions and been clearer about the fact that the price was still subject to change.

What’s next?

Business as usual! Tonight we’re going to live stream again on our Steam page and Twitch channel, now at a time when we hope our US followers are going to be around to see it. So tune in starting around 1 AM CEST, or late afternoon/early evening stateside. On the topic of Steam, we’re also trying our best to react to the sudden explosion in the volume of Discussion posts, and there will be more sensible subforums soon.

Barotrauma gameplay live stream
More of this coming up tonight!

And of course, it’s back to work for us with the game as well, with much planned to be implemented during the Early Access period. Here are a few things:

  • More monsters, new mission types, more items. So far we’ve mostly been focusing on polishing the core gameplay, but now we’re starting to gradually shift into adding more content.
  • Explorable outposts: you will be able to actually go inside the outposts, interact with NPCs to hire new crew members and purchase supplies, learn more about the game’s lore and so on. There will also be outpost-specific missions (for example, defending an outpost from an attacking monster or exploring an outpost overrun by sea creatures).
  • New location types (e.g. explorable natural formations)
  • Expanded traitor mode (more complex multi-part objectives)
  • An overhauled karma system that should remedy the griefing issues
  • Ways to upgrade the submarine during the campaign
  • Built-in NAT Punchthrough to make server hosting a lot simpler
  • An item and structure editor (so new items can be created without having to go into xml files).

Beyond these, we will be reading both the Steam forums and our dedicated forums, chatting with our players on Discord, and continuing to stay informed every way we can about what you think would be good to see in the game. So, as always, let’s be in touch!

Comments

  • June 8, 2019
    reply
    K

    $30 is too much at this stage of the game

    • June 8, 2019
      reply
      K Counter

      I think he emphasized the discount thing quite clearly and you can expect it to have a discount for as much as possible, as stated. So count that as 25$, which is only +5$ of what was guessed the price to be.

  • June 9, 2019
    reply
    nope

    I bought the game. It’s not worth 30 dollars. Buyer beware, wait for actual proof of active development and sales.

    • June 10, 2019
      reply
      Dynamoon

      Active development can be monitored directly in our GitHub, which you can find linked in this blog text 🙂

      As a general notice to everyone who leaves comments, please be aware that there may be a slight delay in your comments becoming visible due to our counter-bot measures. This does not mean your comment has been deleted, and we do not delete comments simply because they express a negative opinion. However, comments by suspected alt accounts or with offensive language and tone will be deleted.

  • June 13, 2019
    reply
    Drake

    So far I’ve enjoyed the game. Issues aside (given it’s early access) the game has a lot of potential. The main way people want to play is probably campaign mode. Since the missions by themselves can get repetative as there is no sense of progression (either character or crew based). The concept of traitor mode is interesting… though there is way to many ways to easily destroy the sub and/or kill much of the crew so there needs to be some way to counteract that other than just having the security officer. The traitor should have a ridiculously hard time trying to destroy the boat. Mainly so when he does its is ultimately rewarding for him, secondly so the other 8 players on your sub don’t feel as bad when it happens since it took a lot of effort. Currently 1 traitor basically ruins the play experience of the other 8 players too easy and feels like there was really nothing you could do to stop him. Playing without a traitor and just having a crew work together is probably the most enjoyable part at this point. Looking forward to seeing how you guys progress in development and see how the campaign shapes up.

  • July 19, 2019
    reply
    Jared Sottiaux

    By chance, do you guys plan on porting it to consoles? The games looks like a lot of fun, but a gaming PC I do lack. Plus split screen co-op would be a blast.

  • July 26, 2021
    reply
    Keith Reeves

    I’ve played 8.3 hours on this game and if you want to make the game more interesting and fun i highly suggest looking into a game mode called Zeus in Arma 3 it would be perfect if you guys and girls could implement a way for a single person to dynamically make the game more intense by spawning modded enemies or spawning husks infront of ships stiff like that could make this game so much better in my personal opinion (btw i love the aesthetic of the game)

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