Preparing for the free weekend

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As you might already know, starting tomorrow Nuclear Dawn will be free to play for the weekend, until Monday the 19th, on Steam.

In preparation, we released our most ambitious patch, a monster update that introduces several new and interesting game concepts and features to Nuclear Dawn, bringing it all the closer to the level of polish and refinement that we set ourselves.

We added single player interactive tutorials that award special achievements to those who complete them. The Commander Graduate achievement, for example, gives players priority in the Commander election system over those who don’t have it, and the ability to try out most manoeuvres and buildings against bots will doubtless cure stage fright for a lot of budding Commanders. There is a whole new class, the deadly, building-wrecking Stealth Saboteur who uses remotely detonated grenades to put the fear of the dark back into infantry.

We snuck in a new weapon, the P900 pistol for those with an itchy trigger finger, and implemented a complete Squad Bonus system, so that players who actually stick together with their squad mates will receive substantial (very substantial) bonuses to their score. Then, there’s a slew of bug fixes, feature updates and UI refinements, along with a whole section dedicated on tracking your player progress and achievements.

Reception seemed to be generally positive, and as with all things related to software and game development, a whole lot of new bugs that never reared their head in testing showed up on public servers. Starting from the wonderfully mysterious randomly disappearing weapons (which seems to be related to certain rendering settings – we’re still investigating), down to glitches with players being able to join (and crash their client on join) running Tutorial sessions… those are the things that make life interesting!

So, this week, it’s fixage and pimpage: as the coders and developers dive into the bug-infested jungles of deep code and do valiant battle against the hordes of anomalies that would keep you from enjoying the game, the rest of us are walking the beat, standing around street corners, and lurking on every forum and public board spreading the word that come tomorrow, you will be able to try Nuclear Dawn out for free, and if you like it, purchase it at a strongly discounted rate.

Get ready for the coming weekend, and stock up on gaming fuel, because we have every faith in Nuclear Dawn, and its ability to convince you all that FPS gaming doesn’t have to be the same old thing over and over again.

You’ll love it, trust me, we’re not lying