FTL merged a space-based roguelike with elements of a choose your own adventure book and, when it was released last year, it stole a lot of the hearts of the team here at PCGN. (We’d like those back, Subset Games. There’s blood everywhere.) It’s set to do it all over again next year as Subset have announced they’re releasing a free update.
FTL: Advanced Edition will bring new weapons, drones, augments, systems, enemies, and missions. In a hookup that’s a little dreamlike, Chris Avellone – yes, that Chris Avellone – has supplied his writing talents to the new update.
Here’s a video of some of the new features:
In an attempt at investigative journalism, here is a tweet from Chris Avellone revealing an interest in FTL as early as 24 November, 2012:
FTL’ing
— Chris Avellone (@ChrisAvellone) November 25, 2012
It could of course be someone masquerading as Chris Avellone. Or, FTL’ing could mean Fighting Tall Lemurs’ing. We may never know.
The update’s due out early next year. Though, Subset haven’t provided a firm date. They did supply a short bullet point summary of the new features coming in the update:
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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.
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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.
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New Sector and Events: Our writer Tom Jubert 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.
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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.
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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!
As good as all those additions are, my favourite change is a minor update. In the Advanced Edition “you’ll be able to save your crew positions and send them back to battle-stations.” How good is that?
Other changes include the ability to “save and quit during combat, and find more items for purchase in stores.”
You’ll be able to switch off the new content if that is your want and play the game in a vanilla mode.
In separate news, somehow we didn’t notice that FTL may be turned into Lego.
An FTL Lego project was voted through Cuusoo not too long ago. That means the project will go before Lego’s design board and be assessed for marketability and all that stuff. Fingers crossed it’ll be approved.