14 DAY TRIAL // Developer Chucklefish has unveiled the contents of the Winter Update coming to its 2D Minecraftesque video game, Starbound.
The 2D sandbox is a blast to play for fans of survival and building games, especially those with a certain affinity for old-school pixel art. The title was released on Steam Early Access around a year ago, and it has made huge improvements since then.
The upcoming Winter Update is the culmination of a ton of work, to be released next week through the game's "unstable" branch, adding the stuff introduced through several months' worth of nightly builds.
If everything goes smoothly on the unstable branch, the developer aims to release the Winter Update for good sometime in January, adding all the exciting features for regular players to enjoy.
Instead of compiling a changelog, Chucklefish decided to put together a nice trailer and showcase all the new content, ranging from a new playable race to hundreds of new items and completely new areas to die in.
The video is very informative and does a very good job of showing what the developers have been up to the past months, so if you haven't logged in in a while, you might as well give it a look.
You're not really bound by anything
Chucklefish reveals that players will get to venture through four new biomes, titled Gnome Village, Zen, Hive and Bioluminescence, ominous and intriguing names that foreshadow some of the events of the future.
The randomly generated worlds of Starbound will benefit from a ton of new features and will introduce many new enemies, but you'll also have a few new tricks up your sleeve.
The combat system has been reworked, in order to add 360-degree melee aiming, parrying and shield-breaking. In addition to this, player characters will no longer receive damage from simply touching enemies, and knockback has been removed from the game.
The change to combat is by far the biggest, enabling you to put your action platforming skills to good use against a slew of new enemies, including powerful bosses that hide untold riches.
There will be hundreds of new items for players to craft and utilize, from deadly weapons to completely useless stuff to faff about with.
The ships have a brand new artificial intelligence in charge, and matter manipulation upgrades will allow you to cause poltergeists all around the scenery.
Ships are bigger than ever and the new technology advancement system will enable users even more freedom when combining various perks.
