New Version

• Polaris_Win64_Shipping_2025-02-09_1723_28485
  

Summary

The second content update for POLARIS™ is here!

And given it’s quite a bit bigger than our last one, we’re giving it a name worthy of its status:

Welcome to the Skyborn Echelon update.

Skyborn Echelon encompasses a range of additions, most significantly our new Sandbox mode, which allows groups of friends to get together in any level for unstructured fun, where they can learn the terrain, experiment with weapons and abilities, and generally blast the heck out of each other.

As I expressed in our previous update, I want to send an enormous thank you to everyone who has experienced POLARIS™ so far. Your passion and enthusiasm for the game has been so rewarding. We’ve amassed quite a community already and I've really enjoyed interacting with many of you in the official POLARIS™ Discord server:

https://discord.gg/polarispve


We love this game. And we love tinkering away on it and adding new features to it. Many of the changes in this update were directly motivated by your feedback. Thank you for inspiring us.

The headline additions for Skyborn Echelon are:

🛝 Sandbox Mode

Given the dynamism of our flight abilities and totally destructible environments in POLARIS™, the new Sandbox mode can be a real blast. Get creative with your friends and carve the maps up by drilling into them with Sonic weapons or blasting them apart with the devastating new payloads. Or just kick back and relax or even set your own rules, using the mode as a playground for ad hoc games of deathmatch, organising jet-powered sky races, or whatever your mind can conjure up. It’s your space to do with as you see fit.

Please share videos of what you get up to in the game. Sandbox is where you’ll be able to push the game’s systems to their absolute limits - and maybe even beyond - so we anticipate it being a venue for some amusing antics.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

🪖 Payload Update

Payloads can be crazy fun. But we spoiled them a bit by locking them away in the Equipment menu, requiring you earn Experience Tokens before gaining access to them.

We’ve gone and removed that barrier for everyone. From today, all Payloads are unlocked by default (although you’ll still need to earn Requisition in missions before deploying them).

Furthermore, we’ve gone and added 3 whole new Payloads on top of the existing Precision Strike, Rocket Salvo, Sentry Turret and Rocket Turret.

Orbital Laser is a focused beam of high energy destruction which mercilessly slices through buildings, terrain, and enemies. If you’re skilled enough, and you get your timing just right, you might even be able to one-shot an entire Devastator rig with one.

And if we’re gonna add an Orbital Laser to the game, we might as well go nuts and add an even more powerful Orbital Laser too. Turbo Orbital Laser is the Orbital Laser on overdrive. More expensive, but more deadly, with a massively expanded radius. Aimed correctly, a Turbo Orbital Laser can demolish a whole skyscraper in a single strike.

Pro tip: take both of these for a spin on Floating Mountains if you enjoy watching a mountain range get vapourised from underneath.

Last but not least, the new Singularity Bomb takes the laser guided accuracy of the Precision Strike, and augments it with an epic black hole payload, unleashing an expanding rift in the spacetime continuum which annihilates any terrain or structure inside it. Spam down a few of these in Sandbox mode and watch the level vanish before your friend’s eyes. It’s quite a sight to behold.

We encourage you to indulge in the new Payloads to your hearts content.

📊 Total Rebalance

In the last update, we completely overhauled the difficult levels, adding 5 new levels on top of the original 10, providing a huge range of choice when it comes to finding the right level of challenge for you and your friends.

These changes, while definitely a big improvement to the game, only felt like one side of the coin though.

To round out the overall game balance, we’ve been hard at work retooling the player and vehicle weapons, the weapon handling, the projectile behaviours, and the damage systems.

Weapons now feel much more meaningfully differentiated, both by weapon class and by projectile type. You’ll really feel how projectiles with an anti-shield bias have their own set of strengths and weaknesses compared to projectiles with more of an anti-armour leaning.

And we’ve improved how our weapons interact with the environment too. If you don’t believe me, take the Sonic weapons for a spin, particularly the Sonic Cannon mounted to the Dagger - Sentinel. Hold down the fire button, fly your Sentinel towards the nearest mountain range, and enjoy the ride.

There’s no doubt more work that can be done on the difficulty and weapon balancing, but we’re confident this round of changes provides a solid foundation for great experiences to be had in the game.

As always, we welcome your feedback and ideas.

✈️ Thrill of Flight

A regular item of feedback we received was that the feeling of flight - both when in a vehicle and when in on-foot / biped mode - felt less than satisfying, with the sense of speed failing to live up to its potential.

We couldn’t agree more.

We’ve spent the last week adding new VFX to the game, such as screenshake, speed lines, screen distortion and more, all in tandem with minor tweaks to the existing flight model, massively enhancing the experience of flying in the game.

We think it makes a big difference. Interested to hear your feedback.

And if these changes aren’t to your taste, we’ve made sure to expose toggles in the options menu so you can turn independent elements on or off as fits your preference.

Sorry we didn’t meet your expectations at launch. I hope these changes go a long way to remedying the issues you encountered. Hugely grateful to you all for encouraging us to make these changes.

✨ Quality of Life Fixes, Bug Fixes, Extensive Polish

You've been hard at work sharing your feedback in the Discord channel and on the Steam discussion pages and we've been paying attention to every note, comment, screenshot, and video you've shared.

We've made a range of stability and performance improvements, bug fixes small and large, laid the foundations for future updates, and polished up a few weaker areas here and there.

With every bug fix and polish change that we’ve worked on, we’ve seen opportunities for quality of life changes and subtle improvements to the clarity of information and feedback in the game.

The aiming reticule should now be easier to read against different backgrounds. The map should be more intuitive to use. Certain text information has been resized and updated to make it more readable. And fixed problems with key rebindings, ensuring players using international keyboards aren’t disadvantaged and maximising the range of options available to players when rebinding keys.

A whole bunch of other changes, tweaks, minor adjustments, and subtle additions have made it into the game too. Let us know if you spot any and how successful you think they are.

As always, please do consider joining the Discord server to make yourself heard by the developers:

https://discord.gg/polarispve


In this update, I’ve added a personal note from myself, Jonathan the creative director. I thought I’d express it here too:

POLARIS™ has been a real labour of love for me and my team. If you like what you've played, please consider leaving a positive review. It makes an enormous difference, it really does!

Alternatively, if you have reservations about the game or there are things you'd like to see improved, before writing a negative review please hop into our Discord and talk to me direct. Perhaps I can fix them for you.

I hope you enjoy POLARIS™ even a fraction as much as we’ve enjoyed making it for you. With your help, we can make it the best game possible.

See you amongst the clouds, Skylancers!

Change List

• New content Added Sandbox mode for all maps
  
• New content Orbital Laser payload
  
• New content Turbo Orbital Laser payload
  
• New content Singularity Strike payload
  
• New content Extra Life requisition item
  
• New content Total rebalance of weapons, ships, and payloads
  
• New content Enhanced flight experience
  
• New tutorial video (via YouTube link)
  
• Collecting small, medium and large valuables earns requisition
  
• Fixes to lobby and main menu navigation
  
• All weapon pickups display correct weapon mesh
  
• Allow for movement key rebinds
  
• Improved the appearance and distribution of ferns in Desert Canyon
  
• Fix for bug where Devastator drills do not appear correctly on client
  
• Fix for mission heavy weapon HUD icons
  
• Minor cosmetic polish to HUD UI
  
• Improved map navigation and presentation
  
• Updated the pre-placed vehicles in all maps
  
• Added vehicles hidden underground which must be dug out
  
• Changed which weapons and vehicles are unlocked by default
  
• Additional minor fixes and improvements