Bombshell v1.01 Patch Released, Future Plans Outlined

Considering the title is currently hovering around the 41 mark on Metacritic (user reviews are even less kind and award the title a score of only 3.6 out of 10), I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the developers of Bombshell completely abandon the action-RPG/top-down shooter. Fortunately for those that have purchase and perhaps enjoyed the maligned game, however, Interceptor has just released the first patch for it on Steam.

The post on the Steam announcements section is accompanied by a statement from one of the developers, who attempted to explain what went wrong with the project and how they intend to respond to the criticism and improve the title in the future.

First, though, a look at the changelog:

Bombshell 1.01 Changelog:

• Reduced health for Abomination boss battle in Phase 1 and 3.
• Reduced damage and acid range for Abomination boss battle in Phase 3.
• Reduced number of creature spawns in B5.
• Fixed stats saving on player death.
• Fixed wobbly camera in character/shop menu.
• You can not “over-upgrade” powers, stats and weapons anymore.
• Some achievement fixes. If any of the past achievements are not unlocked, they will be recovered from saved save stats and unlocked when you load your profile.
• Execution chance is lowered to 10%.
• Bugfix for B3 Firerain (fixed glow).
• Quest rewards for “Find Holloway” quest in A1 now activate after the conversation is over (to avoid the level up message interfering with the dialog).
• Fixed default keybinds restoring dev commands.
• Depth of field is enabled by default.
• Disabled dev messages popping up.
• By default, textures/characters will be set to “high quality” instead of “medium/low”.
• Fixed effects for two explosions.
• Got rid of glowing grid from occlusion mats, now it’s a simple dither.
• Fix for subquest in C1.
• Texture and material tweaks for White House assets.
• B5 Boss battle – Alternate falling rocks in Phase 3 + respawning ammo.
• C5 – Fixed hidden pickups between phases & pickups now respawn.

Secondly, I’m going to post an excerpt from the developer’s statement. Interceptor’s “Fred” seems to blame at least part of the bad reception to the fact that reviewers and players expected an action-RPG and got a twin-stick shooter, though he also admits that the developers marketed the title incorrectly pre-release. Either way, many of the game’s flaws are acknowledged, and the developers seem to have a plan to correct at least a few of them:

Where it went wrong and what we’re doing about it!

Below is what we’re going to be working on the next 4 weeks. We already have the first hotfix ready, which should auto-download for those of you who own the game right now.

Expectations: Some reviewers were expecting to be playing a (Diablo in space.) Ever since previewers started comparing us to some really great ARPG’s, we sort of ran with that comparison because of how flattering it was. But our RPG elements are super lightweight by comparison to most other ARPG’s, and so moving forward we’re going to work harder to set expectations more accurately. This is an action-shooter with weapon progression.

Difficulty. For 1.1 we’re going to unlock Hard mode right from the beginning, while making the Normal mode slightly more forgiving. Hopefully this will allow more people to get past the first boss and experience the other 2/3’rds of the game! :slightly_smiling:

“Filler”. We wanted to create huge environments, and massive worlds. What we ended up with instead were too few missions with too little variety, presented in a manner that ended up feeling too monotonous at times. It’s clear we have a fun little action game in here, but it’s bogged down by a lot of this unnecessary (filler.)

Boss Battles. They’re are either too hard, or too easy to exploit. In this hotfix, the Abomination has been tuned a bit to be more balanced and fair. Let us know what you think. And in 1.1 we’re completely overhauling the bosses to be more more fun, and less frustrating in general.