What Happened to Season 5? [SPOILERS]

[TheZaikman]

A number of people have expressed their confusion or dissatisfaction with the way that GALAK-Z concludes in our recent content update, The Void. I wanted to shed some light on the development process and our reasoning behind the decisions that were made.

Firstly, to clear up any confusion, The Void IS Season 5.

The only reason it's not labeled as such is because we wanted it to be accessible to players of all levels, even those who haven't yet finished Season 4. The Void is available immediately after completing the first Season of the game, once you've unlocked all of your ship's abilities.

Story

As a team, we spent a lot of time considering what we wanted to deliver in the final chapter of the game, specifically with regards to the story.

As you discover upon completing Season 4, with the Raider King eliminated, nothing is standing in the way of the Baron zipping straight through the Void Raiders’ territory and making a beeline for planet Earth. It may be a straight shot but it's still a long distance to travel, which gave rise to the idea of utilizing a part of the GALAK-Z fiction we had often alluded to but never shown explicitly: The Void.

As The Void's intro cutscene reveals, the Void is a neverending loop of alternate dimensions that compresses both time and space. It's a nightmarish realm whose otherworldly energy is what drove the Void Raiders crazy. During the race to Earth against the Baron, Crash gets sucked into a nearby Void wormhole while out on a scouting mission. To the rest of the crew on board the Axelios, he's only been gone for lunch. To Crash, it's been twenty years. He manages to find a way out, but his usage of the Void wormhole is detected by the Baron, who sees the Void as a shortcut to Earth.

The Baron's fleet launches a surprise attack on the Axelios as the Baron jets off into another Void wormhole to try and beat our protagonists back to Earth. During the ensuing attack, Beam is M.I.A and Admiral Akamoto appears to go down with the ship, offering A-Tak and Crash one last sagely bit of “advice” before the duo chase after the Baron and enter the Void hot on his tail.

The events depicted in the intro to The Void take place immediately following the end of Season 4. It is a direct continuation of the story laid out in the first four chapters of the game.

Gameplay

We had originally intended for Season 5 to take place in the Void with the same episodic mission structure as the previous seasons, culminating in a final boss fight against the Baron. In the wake of GALAK-Z’s release, we listened to a lot of feedback from our player community, the press and colleagues in the game industry. One frequently recurring sentiment was that the mission objectives in each episode were too similar and uninteresting.

In short, there was too much filler and not enough emphasis on the core gameplay of GALAK-Z: intense space combat. This was a tough pill to swallow, because it was such a huge departure — structurally speaking — from everything we had done in the first four seasons. But as soon as we embraced the idea that Season 5 should be more combat focused, a lot of other pieces started falling into place.

Our other big concern was the lack of replayability in GALAK-Z. We're a small team with a relatively modest budget and as much as we love GALAK-Z we can't afford to keep making the game forever. We wanted to ensure that if we could only deliver the one promised update to the game, then it had better be something that people could keep playing for a long time to come.

It was a combination of both of these ideas and a lot of internal discussion amongst the team that led to our decision to make Season 5 an endless score-attack mode with Leaderboards and Daily Challenges. After more than three years of working non-stop on the same game, I can tell you that The Void is hands down the most fun I've ever had playing GALAK-Z.

Summary

Season 5 was always intended to take place against the Baron in the Void, but we saw this endless mode as a way to bake all of our ideas and the story for Season 5 into a new way of playing that would give GALAK-Z more long-term replayability in the form of Leaderboards and Daily Challenges.

In a perfect world, we might have crafted Season 5 in the same format as the previous four Seasons and created an endless mode as a separate, standalone way to play the game. Unfortunately, we’re a small team on a tight schedule and a tighter budget and we did not have the money or the time to accomplish both, especially after taking the time to add in Arcade Mode to address some players’ difficulty finishing the game in Rogue Mode.

As for the crew of the Axelios? A-Tak and Crash remain (for now) trapped in the Void, hunting down the Baron. As hopeless as things appear in The Void’s intro cutscene, Beam is nowhere to be found on board the doomed Axelios as it comes under Imperial attack. And Akamoto? Well, the Void has been known to project some...ghostly apparitions, and this wouldn't be the first time the Admiral had to make a mad dash to the escape pods...

[Pixelfetish]

Outstanding work.

[Goodguy3]

Thank you for clearing this up.

[rarien]

Uh, okay.
So, retooling internal resources and franchise and/or refresh possibility (if it happens) - check. I get it. As a game; the writing must have been good to have pissed off people after chapter 4 (spoiler evaded, I think), we already know the game is good, so I think 17-bit should have been a bit more forthcoming about chapter 5's change of pace.
Besides that, the game is good.

HEY 17-BIT: Sequel please. Let's end A-Tak's story, huh?

(I'll be upset when I finally get to the end of chapter 4 and realize that the story doesn't go much further from there like everyone else)

[Ravenwatch]

I really enjoyed the Void mode. Great job on that but it would be great if we can get some sort of closure on the story.

[Lord Villain]

Any chance the latest version of the game can be made available in DRM free form on humble bundle? The current DRM free version on HB is missing the void and seems to date back to 2015.

[TheZaikman]

MarkMark,

That's strange, the Humble Bundle version should contain The Void. Leaderboards and Daily Challenges will be disabled, but the normal Void run should be accessible.

I'll look into that and make sure that they have the latest build of the game!

[Lord Villain]

When I downloaded the DRM free version everything seemed to be from 2015. The main exe file has the following properties

file version was listed as 5.1.2.18539 product version 5.1.2.6637675 size 15.3mb date modified 29/10/2015 10:02.

The opening screen also doesn't mention the void at all. I only noticed it because I wanted to see if the DRM free version would work on my crappy old laptop for when I was travelling.

[TheZaikman]

Thanks for the information. Yeah, it sounds like it wasn't updated properly on HB's side. I'm going to be kicking out a new build in the next few days with some bug fixes and we'll make sure that the Humble Bundle store gets updated as well. Sorry about that!

[Lord Villain]

I dunno what you have done specifically between the old HB DRM free build and the version on steam,but the new one just feels smoother. I can't put my finger on it as to what it is but keep up the good work.

[An Atheist Jew]

I really hope your next game is a success, so you'll have the resources to come back and release a proper final season to the game, at some point.

From a strictly selfish standpoint, I don't care about endless replayability, or scores, or leaderboards, or competing with friends. I care about single-player story content, and I was dissapointed when I just now finished Season 4 to find that the last piece of content for the game has been devolved from a final series of story-driven episodes into an endless score-hunt with no real outcome to the story. With games like Fallout 4 and Witcher 3 and others requiring *hundreds* of hours to play through entirely, endless replayability is not something I need or want, and I find score-hunting and leaderboards to be incredibly trivial, next to story content.

I'll be sure to buy whatever your next game is, as I'm sure it'll be excellent, but I hope a part of whatever profit you're able to raise from that goes back to Galak-Z.

[Rack]

I'm hoping the right lesson is learned from this which is "finish your damn story". The game comes with a ton of content that's really tightly balanced and fun. Then they added two additional play modes for free in response to player demand.

But because the last cutscene on season 4 ended on a cliffhanger the game just feels incomplete. The devs clearly put a lot of work into making the game great and improving it based on player feedback but it's still really hard not to feel shortchanged because there's a flashing neon sign still in the game saying "insert content here".

[alexbax86]

wonderful this game, I play the void mode everyday, I hope you guys will continue to support and develop new modes for this game before moving onto a sequel or different IP, but yeah this is one of my favorite games on steam! :)

[clarkeveritas]

You know you're doing a good job when the main complaint seems to be "I want more." Only a few hours into the game but absolutely LOVING it. I'd been wanting to pick it up for a long time and thrilled that it actually lived up to my lofty expectations.

[sifonys]

Originally posted by TheZaikman:

In a perfect world, we might have crafted Season 5 in the same format as the previous four Seasons and created an endless mode as a separate, standalone way to play the game. Unfortunately, we’re a small team on a tight schedule and a tighter budget and we did not have the money or the time to accomplish both, especially after taking the time to add in Arcade Mode to address some players’ difficulty finishing the game in Rogue Mode.

i am sad to hear it
i realize that making a choice is difficulty
in fact, i agree absolutely the void is the correct choice in so hard circumstance
it is so amazing,exciting,replayability
but in my deep heart,the game really lacks a little piece on the stoy
this feeling is similar to see the movie:Interstellar
i want to see Matthew Mcconaughey rescue Anne Hathaway and embrace her
in the end, A-Tak and Beam should not be so

is there any chance to finish the story by no free dlc

[Gorge]

While it is right not all the teams can have enough resources for everything, and can't fulfil every dream the supporters have, there should be a minimum level however. I haven't played the game except a Void run at my friend and seen the first chapter as longplay, but the very first thing I felt is "something should happen with the main characters".

It is okay to make the last season a bunch of rouge-like levels, but even rogue-like games have goals and endings depending on the genre. Galak-Z is far inside this, and it should have a proper ending after you achieve something in the Void. Letting the game finish like this is maybe an awesome twist, but really amateur when it comes to the quality of the contents. Playing through this game makes starting to grow the desire for a climatic end-game event, and as much as I heard about the story, for the reunion of the cast.

Sorry to say this but it isn't a reason you didn't had time or resources to make this happen. It is just an amateur excuse for the lack of idea, or being lazy to have an idea. Just because the Void can be played endlessly not means it can't have a real story with proper ending the fans wanted so much. The rouge-like is a subgenre that can fit into any main genre, but never changes the main aspect of that. In you case it changed to the worst possible case.

While I really love the efforts I see in the game, I hate how you gave up because limitations. You should make use of what you have instead finding a way out of it.