Every multiplayer game we have ever admired made a quiet promise to the solo player: you can do all of this alone, it will just take longer. Alpha 5.6.0 of Zero-G breaks that promise on purpose, and we would like to explain why before anyone finds out the hard way.
An item that does nothing on its own
The release is named Shield of Souls, after the object at the centre of it: the Vinculum Aegidis.
It opens a channel from your ship to another player's ship and pushes your own shield strength across it. Your shields drop. Theirs rise. That is the entire function.
Fitted to a ship flying alone it is dead weight in the cargo hold: not weakened, not reduced, simply inert. There are two of them, and what you spend is time rather than ammunition.
- Minus. One unit holds the channel open for one second, and the two ships have to stay within five kilometres of each other.
- Maius. One unit holds the channel for five seconds, at up to twenty.
- Live cost. Units are consumed for as long as the channel is live, so the decision is never simply whether to help. It is how long, and how close you are willing to stand.
Two rules matter more than those numbers. The source has to absorb the whole incoming hit: if a shot arrives that your own shields cannot take in full, the transfer fails rather than partially succeeding.
And two ships can channel into each other simultaneously, in which case their shields pool. A pair covering each other is not two ships with a shared battery. It is a single, much harder target with two sets of guns.
Read the Minus against the rest of the release and the risk becomes obvious. Energy weapon ranges in Zero-G are now short, deliberately so, which means a Minus pair is inside the same fight, five kilometres apart, both of them in reach of whatever is shooting at them.
It is either reckless or the best thing in the game, and we are genuinely not sure which.
A mission one player cannot finish
5.6.0 adds three mission types: Absorb, Channel and Beacon.
A Channel mission cannot be completed by a single pilot. Not harder. Not slower. Not possible.
We know exactly what is wrong with this. If nobody is online, we have shipped an item that does nothing and an objective nobody can clear, and the pilot who bought a destroyer built around it is entitled to be annoyed.
Every instinct in game design says make it work solo at reduced efficiency and let co-operation be the bonus. That is what almost everyone does, and it is almost certainly the safer call.
We did the opposite because of what our own players keep telling us. The single most common complaint we receive is not about balance, or progression, or the interface. It is that there are not enough people online.
And we do not believe you solve that by making the game steadily more comfortable to play alone: at some point something has to actually require a second person, or everybody plays solo in a multiplayer world and then reports, correctly, that it feels empty.
"That's an immediate nope from me, I'd close the game and not return to it ever."
That is a fair reaction and we would rather publish it than hide it. It is also the clearest possible argument for the thing we are now building around it: making sure the pilots who meet that locked door are pilots who already have somebody to call.
Hundreds of ships, in a tab
For readers of this site the design argument is probably the interesting half, but the engineering was the hard half.
The headline problem for 5.6.0 was holding hundreds of ships in a single real-time engagement: player fleets plus alien drone swarms, each with its own physics, targeting and trajectory, inside a browser tab, without the client collapsing or the server falling behind.
No download, no installer, no native client to fall back on. The same WebGL context that renders a planetary descent has to survive a mass battle, on laptops and on phones.
The aliens made it harder rather than easier. Their jumps now predict where a target is going rather than where it currently is, so flying in a straight line stopped being a plan, and prediction for every hostile in a crowded instance is not free.
Alongside that, combat got an interface worth using. Your ships are listed down the left, the aliens down the right, and selecting one of yours opens a card carrying stance, per-cannon targeting, escort distance and special items on a single panel.
Double-click an alien and every cannon on the current ship switches to it at once: the one shortcut worth learning before anything else.
The swarm and the ships built for it
Minor Stingers are the new alien drones, and they do not arrive alone.
If you put every cannon on one drone you will lose the fight. The rest of the swarm simply keeps working while you are busy with one of them. Split your fire.
This is the first enemy in Zero-G that punishes focusing, which has been the correct answer to every fight the game has ever offered. The name is deliberate, incidentally. A Minor Stinger implies something that is not minor.
The Velite carries six cannons, 6 km of range, 5,000 armour and 12,000 shields. The Velite Custos carries eight cannons, 10 km of range, 6,000 armour and 15,000 shields.
Read those two numbers together rather than separately. A Velite carries more than twice as much shield as hull, and reaches six kilometres where a cutter reaches fifteen.
It has to close. It cannot absorb much once its shields are gone. And it is carrying far more shielding than any single ship fighting alone could ever use.
It is not a hull that happens to be compatible with a Vinculum. It was designed around one.
What changed, and what comes next
Alien ships in Zero-G carry a hidden property we call a Trait. It is visible in the combat simulator. It is readable. And as far as we know, no pilot has yet worked out what it does.
We are not going to explain it. The first correct account of it gets named in our next newsletter.
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