Hey there everyone!

Today we have some news to share with you about the next Silent Echo update, and why we're changing our plans for it.

Scope review

The team has been working on a few aspects of the game since the last update. The first one was the new area, the second the new sex scenes and safe room content, the third the rework of talents (which we will get to in a bit), and the fourth, implementing the safe room in chapters 2 and 3.

We've hit many of our goals as of today.

The security rooms in Chapters 2 and 3 now make use of the transient safe room, which allowed us to remove close to 80k words worth of duplicate content, but more importantly allows us to maintain and add stuff much more easily as we no longer have to do things three time, only once.

For the sex scenes, we've finished implementing four new sex scenes, complete with their artworks and content.

Finally, regarding the talent rework, we are on track to finish it before the end of week.

All of that said, we're only left with the new area, named the Crimson Grove. On Monday the team had a call to discuss the state of its development, and we realized taking care of the above three issues took enough time to handle that we were in a position where it is humanly impossible for the team to meet a reasonable deadline without cutting out massive portions of the new area.

We took a decision that might be a bit surprising to many, which is to release what we currently have in the game and is both tested and validated, and take an extra month to put everything we want to add in the new area (I promise it's worth it).

We primarily do not want a repeat of giving you nothing for two months or so, and in that spirit, it means we will put this update in early access this weekend (surprise).

Development will extend a bit into next week as we finish implementing the Agent Improvement Program and handle your feedback and bug reports, but otherwise, we feel this is the best course of action so we can give you the proper version of the new area.

Agent Improvement Program

As part of the talent rework, we decided to shift track from only offering the custom talent tree to those who were xenocorrupted enough to meet Echo, instead creating some generalized talent trees that use Upgrade Chips to progress through, and moving the xenomaterial specific talents to a new Xenogenesis tree.What this allows us to do is give all players a way to dabble in the talent system, regardless of if you're on the pure route or are fully devoted to corruption.

Further, by moving some of the standard power upgrades to the new Agent Improvement Program trees, we can keep an intended, power progression open, making it easier for us to balance future encounters as we don't need to account for people who've earnt and spent essence, and those who haven't. As part of implementing this in a natural way, we've gone back through the previous chapters, adding in a handful of interactions where it makes plausible sense that Agent 36 might have come across one of these rare chips.

Worry not, if you're already deep in the latest chapter, you don't need to restart, as we've retroactively flagged these items for collection, allowing everyone to have them as if they had collected them in their intended locations during the journey.

With that in mind, now that we won't have to worry about crazy levels of power difference between corrupted players and normal players, we are looking into what kind of fun talents we can add as part of Xenogenesis, to really embrace the corruption and the wicked things it can do.

For now our plan is to make sure this change works for all players and doesn't break everything in the process, and in the next update, we will introduce new ranks and trees to explore.That's all for now!Have fun!