Project Stray - Tonight marks the night for big changes to the core game.

I am currently in the process of backing up the entire game and making a playable public build. This is a fairly normal practice for me as I do this process at least once a day.

But today is a bit different...

I am about to rip out and heavily modify some functionality that has been inside of the game for almost its entire existence. There will no longer be any standard melee weapons in the loot lists. Your melee weapon will be a part of your character from now on. When you level up, from now on your melee weapon will also level up with you. This change makes it so melee weapons are no longer a loot item but rather just a last resort side aspect of your character. I need to go into all loot lists and remove all existence of melee weapons in the entire game. The only melee weapon you get will be the one that is part of your character.

Action points and special abilities will become the new standard while I completely remove all existence of health kits and boosters. Special abilities will consume action points to provide a wider variety of different kinds of actions. This means self healing ability can also provide buffs now as well. You will have an unlimited number of times you can use an ability but your action points will recover at a fixed rate.

You will now have to decide if you want to use a self healing ability or perhaps call down that orbital strike to smite your enemies in a single blast. You might use the ability that provides you with a speed boost with a very weak health regeneration or the ability that gives you a large damage increase for a short time. I feel that removing the health kits and boosters from the game with the goal to roll those features into the abilities system will be a much more robust design.

Abilities will act very much like other equipment and weapons in the game. They will exist within loot lists and they can be dismantled, dropped and even upgraded at a fabricator.

This will be the single largest change to the games overall balance since its inception.