FTL: Advanced Edition
We’ve been working hard over the summer and are excited to finally officially announce a free expansion, FTL: Advanced Edition! FTL: AE is a huge content addition that includes new weapons, drones, augments, systems, enemies, and more. Here are some details on just a few of the additions visible in the trailer:
Mind Control System: Temporarily turn enemies into allies. Force a boarder to repair the damage they just did, or have the enemy pilot sabotage their own helm.
Hacking System: Lockdown and disrupt enemy systems. Unique effects for each system, ranging from forcing a teleporter remove boarders to making the medbay damage instead of heal.
New Sector and Events: Our writer Tom Jubert (
http://tom-jubert.blogspot.co.uk/) has returned along with special guest writer Chris Avellone (of Planescape fame), who managed to find some time for us between his work on Project Eternity and Wasteland 2. They’ve been helping us add a new sector and scatter new events throughout the rest of the game.
New Weapons and Effects: Many new weapons that take advantage of new mechanics: overcharging to increase the number of volleys, stun effects to freeze crew, and area effect targeting, to name a few.
And more systems, drones, augments, enemy ships, enemy layouts, and hostile environments. All of which we’ll be sure to talk about more in the coming weeks!
In addition to new content, we’ve continued to polish FTL and add some of the most requested small features. As a few examples: you’ll be able to save your crew positions and send them back to battle-stations, save and quit during combat, and find more items for purchase in stores.
For the purists out there, FTL vanilla will still be available. All of the new content can be disabled from within the hangar before starting a new game.
FTL on iPad
We’re also very excited to announce that FTL is coming to the iPad! We’ve redesigned the FTL interface to be optimal for touch devices. It plays beautifully on both the full size iPads (2nd generation or later) and the iPad minis. And of course it will include all of the new additions of the FTL: Advanced Edition expansion.
But many of you might be asking “What about Android (or Surface, etc.)!?” For now, the answer is that we hope to get it on all tablet devices but do not know for sure. When we first released FTL, we did so on three operating systems simultaneously and it was a gargantuan task for a two man studio to accomplish. Learning from the difficulties of the past, we’re trying to preserve our sanity by focusing on one system at a time. Expanding tablet support will be our next highest priority, but we don’t want to make any promises (or rejections) until we’re 100% sure of the outcome.
Similarly, some people might be asking “What about phones!?” Unfortunately, FTL will not be coming to phones. From repeated testing, we have determined that it’s just not possible to achieve the quality of gameplay we want on such limited screen space.
When?
We plan to simultaneously make the iPad version available for purchase and update the existing PC game early 2014!
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