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Upcoming Events:

Recurring Developer Event! - As a new tradition, one of the development staff is going to run an in-game event every Saturday at 9pm Central (7pm Pacific, 10pm Eastern). We're going to experiment with different game-event styles, working towards possible story-driven structures that build week-after-week. The first of which will be..

Saturday May 17th - Major capacity test battle. Help us stress-test the new server software! We'll be putting together some large-scale experiences, with prizes available at the end.

We've seen some major changes take place over the last few months, briefly listed below:

Standing with other major nations is now capped at Respected, mutually-exclusive factions equalize at Neutral. Many factional ships are now only available to native nation members (a huge, and long-awaited change).
New Raptor UDV added to UIT stations, a unique multi-role ship for UIT players.
Many optimizations and bug-fixes, reducing lag and "no-hit" problems during large player battles.
Player-owned Tridents now have shields!
Players with Tridents can now launch in fighters from their own capships. Capships are displayed with custom names, and persistently remain for 5 minutes after player log-off.
New updated assets for angular asteroids, specific to Windows, Mac and Linux (not released for mobile).
Self-defense in Guarded and Monitored space is now an option, without factional penalty, for up to 15 minutes after any given attack, or when the attacker dies for any reason.
Mines persist for 30 minutes. New Drain Proximity Mine draws 250 units from power cells within range of its explosion.
Added support for Oculus Rift HD, plus improvements to OUYA and other console-type game experiences. Launch support for the Amazon FireTV!
Many, many other tweaks and bugfixes.

Looking Ahead

Beyond this, I want to reveal some of what we have cooking for the future, including some of the concept art for new massive space station components. These will allow players to safely store their capital ships at a much wider variety of locations, and will herald an entirely new level of shipping traffic, as well as injecting many of our major trade hubs with a far grander and more awe-inspiring sense of scale.

Keep in mind that these concepts only explore some possible usages of various designs, we intend to have a lot of varied "looks" to different regional stations, along with faction-specific component designs down the road. We're also still aiming to create some "rough-and-tumble Station Cities" for the UIT, but these large Government components will still appear in cases that require them.

Similarly, we're looking to "evolve" some of our older graphical assets in new ways, like these rough concepts for possible future Hornet designs. Much how we re-interpeted the original Vulture-class vessels into a new form, something similar can be expected of many of the other ships.

The Universe Redux is right around the corner, and we've been working on a whole new client-server architecture to make it possible for us to generate massively dense sectors of unlimited scale, which were also the subject of my session at this year's Game Developer Conference. These new sectors will make for more intriguing places for battles to occur, while also creating stunning vistas with graphical changes coming to the engine (advanced lighting, shadow, volume effects, and more).

Completion of the Universe Redux, along with a few other features in the coming months, will mark the debut of Vendetta Online 1.9. This launch will also herald the online release of the design plans for our truly major release, Vendetta Online 2.0. This concepts that underpin this release are really too expansive to be boiled down into a brief newsletter paragraph, so I'll ask that you await the complete design.

For what it's worth, Vendetta Online 2.0 (which will have a different "Expansion" title) will represent the goals that I set out to build back when we started on this crazy "Space MMORPG" development journey, over sixteen years ago. Needless to say, I'm really excited to see this come to pass.

Vendetta Online has been Greenlit for Steam!

Thanks to the enthusiasm of our ever-supportive userbase, our game has been approved for release on the Steam digital-delivery platform. We're currently working with Valve to come up with the best approach for releasing our title on there, which should not be expected immediately, as we're planning to launch after more of the upcoming changes, as well as a significant amount of SteamWorks integration.

Long-Term Subscribers

Many thanks to all those who have joined our Long Term Subscriber program, announced in the last newsletter. We expect to see more exclusive content appearing for these players, as well as some "early release" content, giving them the "first crack" at new ships and other gameplay concepts.

The program is basically "free" to all existing premium subscribers. Simply log into the website with your game account, and visit the page for more information:

https://www.vendetta-online.com/x/pledge

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