Two months after RIVE’s release, developer Two Tribes is pushing out a major update featuring Challenges, Battle Arenas and a new Normal campaign difficulty level. The update has been released on Steam and will be available for PS4 later this year. Also, as we’ve previously said, RIVE is Two Tribes’ last game, and we felt that this would be a good time to give you a status update.

Longevity

People are having a ton of fun with the final game, so it’s no surprise that the feedback they give most often is: it should go on longer! Two Tribes totally understand, especially as the existing extra modes (Speedrun and Single-Credit) focus on hardcore players who want to refine their RIVE skills.

For this update the devs wanted to add more real content, but new levels with the production value of the main campaign just weren’t an option (more on that at the end of this post). Ultimately they found a great way to extend RIVE and provide more variety with the new Challenges and Battle Arenas.

Challenges has something new for you every day, in bronze, silver and gold variations. We challenge you to complete special tasks in familiar backdrops, with a cumulative difficulty level. Essentially, there will be something to do every time you return to RIVE.

Battle Arenas, on the other hand, offers endless fighting, begging the question just how long you could possibly survive. We’ve taken three popular scenes from the game and extended them forever… or until you inevitably crash and burn. (Active Steam players were able to playtest this idea in the temporary Skywhale Survivor special mission.)

Difficulty

There’s another oft-heard piece of feedback. While RIVE met our goal of making a hardcore game for fans of classic shooters and platformers, some people just find it too difficult. A few even called us “sadistic”! Although, to be fair, we also had a guy complaining the game was “too easy”…

Many people told us RIVE is “the hardest game of the year”, often as a compliment, but sometimes as a complaint too. Well, it’s impossible to please everyone, and trying to do so will often result in something shapeless and bland. But let’s just say that now that we’ve reached the hardcore, we want to make RIVE a bit more fun for all of you less hardcore players too.

We already tweaked the game’s difficulty in earlier updates, but for v1.1 we’ve really gone in to polish some of the tougher parts. The in-game statistics helped us a lot as we could see where people died the most. On top of that, we added a Normal difficulty level to the campaign and separate missions.

We still feel Hard is the way RIVE is meant to be played, but for those who need it, Normal comes with stronger bullets, less damage from enemies and stronger health pick-ups.

Watch the RIVE Release Trailer:

Changelist

Here’s the full changelist for RIVE v1.1:

• CHG: Lots of difficulty tweaks in earlier missions, including increased field of view in some difficult areas
• CHG: Mission 1 extended
• ADD: Replaced the in-game Soft Mode with a Normal difficulty level, which is directly selectable from the main menu. (The teddy bear icon has left the building. Instead, you now get a star when you play on Hard. Because you’re a star to us, geddit?)
• ADD: Daily Challenges (descriptions only in English for now), including new Shield pick-up, low-gravity condition and auto-rotating fire
• ADD: 3 endless Battle Arenas
• FIX: Secret pick-ups can be picked up again (sorry about that)
• DEL: Norris achievement (we replaced it with three Challenges achievements)
• CHG: Lots of small fixes

The Rive update has been released on Steam and will be available for PS4 later this year.

Related: RIVE by Two Tribes Launches on PS4 and PC Sep. 13

Nathan Stevens

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I have always enjoyed playing video games and am a programming team lead for a video game company. I co-founded Gaming Cypher because I enjoy the gaming community and would like to provide the best news service around. Feel free to ask me any questions and I will make sure to get back to you quickly.

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