Awesomenauts Patch: Ready To Go!

It’s been about two months since Awesomenauts launched on the Playstation Network, and we’re very happy to see that the community has grown to be active and vibrant. Teaming up with Sony to have Awesomenauts be a part of the Playstation Plus offer for May 2012 has really helped to get our multiplayer platforming-shooter off to a running start. But we’re probably most thankful to you, our community, for keeping the game going! And now, we’re almost ready to launch the first big update for our game!

With this update, we’ve addressed two key concerns that we’ve heard from the community: balance and content. After two months of solid playing, we can confirm that the balance in the original version is pretty good, but not perfect. With this patch, we’re taking a couple of steps to further improve this balance, and bring it closer to where we want it to be. We’ve given out a couple of buffs to some characters, and dealt out a few nerfs to those who deserved them. As a heads-up to insiders: some things that got nerfed include the damage of Voltar’s Drones against turrets, Lonestars’ missiles, and Leon’s Slowing slash.

But the patch doesn’t just bring boring stat changes, it also bring two exciting new characters! Announced over the course of the last few weeks, Coco Nebulon and Derpl Zork will join the original six Awesomenauts very, very soon. What we haven’t told you yet though, is that they’re going to be free! That’s right – you’ll gain access to an expanded roster of characters to play with, entirely for free!

First off, we have Coco Nebulon – our first female character within the Awesomenauts roster. She’s a space-surfing chick that came from the watery world of Okeanos. She is great at harassing enemies with her Ball Lightning, which moves through everything and can be detonated at the press of a button. Whenever the tables turn, she also has a great move against chasers: to leave a trail of slowing, damaging lightning particles. Basically she’s great against everything that moves (but weaker against enemies that stand their ground).

And that’s where Derpl Zork comes in: his primary special skill is to turn his Combat Walker into a static turret with a heavy cannon that deals massive damage. When this guy transforms into Turret mode, squishy characters better move out of range! Of course, he’ll be stuck in place until he transforms back – so running away from him shouldn’t be a problem. That is, unless Derpl uses his other ability – which places ensnaring traps on the battlefield. Derpl usually sits around in a field of traps, ready to blast anyone foolish enough to run into him.

Finally, Derpl has one last ace up his sleeve against enemies that try to get within range: the Trap skill actually changes into a Nuke-launching ability while in Turret mode. A large, homing Nuke that deals massive AOE damage – what’s not to love?

Coco and Derpl both are a lot of fun to play and they add a lot of new teaming possibilities with the original ‘Nauts. We hope you guys have a lot of fun devising new strategies and tactics with these new characters as well all of the skill and item changes that we haven’t had room to mention here. And for anyone who needed even more encouragement, we’ve added 5 more prestige levels as well for you to obtain!

We’ll see all you on the online battlefields soon!