It’s only been a couple of months since Abiotic Factor’s Dark Energy update cascaded out of its Black Mesa-ish science lab. But developer Deep Field Games is already heavily into production on the game’s next block of content. This week, it provided the first look at the new update, titled ‘Cold Fusion’, and it’s shaping up to be another substantial addition to the Half-Life inspired survival game.
Cold Fusion primarily introduces a new area to the GATE research centre, the residence sector, which is suffering from an unnatural cold snap. “Something is causing residence sector to fall well below optimal living temperatures,” writes Deep Field in its Steam update. “The important thing is you must science your way through it to see this journey to an end.” The update doesn’t specify what challenges you’ll face in the sector specifically, but mentions that you’ll experience “cold snaps, rolling blackouts and a mysterious black fog” throughout the facility, so I imagine these will factor into exploring the residence sector as well.
From the handful of screenshots Deep Field has shown, the residence sector looks heavily inspired by my favourite part of Half-Life, Office Complex. Half-Life’s fourth chapter showed players Black Mesa at its most mundane, which was precisely what set it apart from the phobos labs and slipgate dimensions of shooters like Doom and Quake. I hope Abiotic Factor’s residence sector can replicate that everyday, humdrum vibe, and the tiled corridors and tree-lined courtyard shown in Deep Field’s work-in-progress screenshots are a promising start.
Alongside this new area, the Cold Fusion update also brings a new upgrade system. Crafting an enhancement bench will allow your survivalist scientists to upgrade weapons, armour, and “a few other item types”. The possibilities will be, not endless, but substantial, with Deep Field games declaring “for weapons alone, we have about 15 to 20 permutations in the works.” The update will also introduce a new tier of weapons to wield, and allow players to reset their character specs during a game.
Finally, Deep Field is planning some big changes to how enemies will attack your base. “We’ve heard a lot of feedback about base assaults and how they just… Kinda stink,” the developer writes. “Portal Storms are working largely as intended, but there are several cases, mostly non-Pest related assaults, where they will simply spawn inside your base or in the same spot over and over.”
To address this, the team says it has “done some major overhauls to how bases are detective”, with the game’s AI now looking for “gatherings” of furniture and “things that seem to constitute your outer walls.” The upshot of this should be better, more interesting base assaults. “While this will never be absolutely perfect, we expect assaults to feel a lot more unique and varied, and starting, generally, well outside of your base.”
Deep Field doesn’t provide any info on when the Cold Fusion update will release. But given the frequency of updates to the game, I reckon it’ll arrive sometime in the summer. Moreover, while the studio doesn’t specify this, use of phrases like “the road to 1.0” and “see this journey to an end” does make it seem like Cold Fusion will be one of the latter major updates before Deep Field begins preparations for a full launch. No doubt we’ll hear more about both Cold Fusion’s progress and the plans for 1.0 soon.
