Community Q&A // May 2026

I'm not going to dig too deep in the weeds on character progression and variance just yet. We'll have a dedicated post on this later. But at a high level, the answer is yes, the skills change, and there's something pretty cool baked into how the system works.

Each character has variants from different corporations and different eras. For example, you’ve all seen Maxine with her Atomic Era // Deltapath Distribution variant. If you check the website, you’ll also see Maxine in a Synthetic Era // Apex Ordinance Systems variant. For the purposes of the game, that’s a single character with multiple variants.

Here’s the cool part. When you unlock the Atomic Era // Deltapath Maxine, that’s your base Maxine, and she comes with her own ability set. When you later unlock the Synthetic Era // Apex Ordinance Maxine, she comes with her own ability set too. The mechanic we’re building is that as you unlock new variants, you gain access to those skills across the character. So you’ll be able to choose your primary attack, your charge skills, your Flux Strike, and your passive from the pool of abilities across every variant you’ve unlocked. That means you can build a custom version of Maxine that suits your team’s needs. The more variants you collect across eras and corporations, the more interesting your loadout decisions get.

So no, it’s not just cosmetics. You do get a cosmetic for each variant you unlock, which means you can pick which skin you want to run. But that skin carries the corporation tag with it, and there will be moments in the game where you’ll want to run a team aligned to a specific corporation for reasons beyond looks. Skins aren’t just decoration here. We’ll also have skins down the line that are tied to a specific corporation or a multi-corp identity, but more on that later.

On how you actually unlock these variants:

• Progressing through the campaign
• Through in-game events
• Through the gacha system

Multiple paths, paying and free-to-play, and we’ll go deeper on each as we get closer.

I don't want to spoil the whole thing because some of this is meant to be discovered through the game and through future lore drops, but here's the general gist.

Each character in 2.0 has an Atomic Era variant. Take Maxine and Gus, our two early reveals. Both of them are the singular version of themselves, until you start thinking about their era variants. You’ve seen on the website that there’s a Gus from the Post-Atomic Era and a Maxine from the Synthetic Era. Those variants are clones.

Those clones can be brought into your character through a system we’re calling echoes, which we’ll explain in detail later. The shorthand is that you can take those clones, learn from them, and gain their abilities while also unlocking their skins, their corporate identity, and the rest of the kit that travels with them.

Cloning is going to be a major piece of the lore and of how some of the game’s mechanics actually work. There’s a lot more here, and we’ll be dropping pieces of it both through the website and through the game as you play.

A lot of love for the OG Umbranu in this batch, and I see you. Let me unpack each piece.

First, on a more mutated Umbranu: yes. There’s an Umbranu variant coming from the Mythic Era that leans hard into that side of her. In the lore we’re building, the Mythic Era is the wildest, most untamed, most experimented-on era, where most of the corporate genetic experimentation actually happened. So Chimerans from that era tend to have far more pronounced mutations than they do in the Atomic Era. That means the Mythic Era Umbranu is going to give you those animalistic vibes again, just rooted in the new world we’re building. We’ll go deeper on the Mythic Era lore in its own post.

There are going to be a lot of classic throwbacks as we keep building, and a lot of new direction too. We’re not throwing everything away. We’re taking the soul of the old characters forward where it makes sense and we’re not handcuffing ourselves to the original creative direction of 1.0 where it doesn’t. It’s an homage. You’ve already seen Gus, Maxine, and Atomic Era Umbranu evolve, and you’ll see that pattern continue across the rest of the roster.

On the question of coins unlocking skins or original appearances: coins will be tied more specifically to bonuses on your team loadouts, not skins. We’ll have a dedicated post on the coin bonus system soon. Coins themselves won’t release skins, at least not early on. What they will do is increase the bonus your team gets based on whether the coin was colorized, silvered, or gold gilded. Skins are going to live more on the 24-karat gold trading card side of the collectibles ecosystem, which is where you’ll start seeing the more endgame collectible content show up.

On the silver and gold variant idea specifically tied to powering up a character: it’s a cool idea, and I appreciate the creativity. But generally we don’t want to lock a character’s ability set behind collectibles. As we release new characters, we want them to be earnable through gameplay first. The bonuses, skins, corporate affiliations, and other extras can layer on top. The character is yours to play. The collectibles power up what’s already there.

On why we moved away from the heavy mutant or hybrid look: mostly because we wanted a new creative direction. The original game leaned in a different direction than where I wanted to take this universe. I didn’t want to get rid of the idea of human-animal hybrids, but I wanted to ground them in a lore we could actually build a game around. We wanted it to mean something when you saw a Chimeran, instead of “oh look, there’s a cat lady” or “oh look, there’s an ape dude.” So we built the chimeric concept around genetic manipulation, the corporations doing the experimenting, and the consequences of all of that rippling across the timeline. The further back in time you go, the wilder the mutations get. The further forward, the more shunned and hidden being a Chimeran becomes. There’s a ton of storytelling room in that, and a lot of fun characters going to come out of it.

I'll be adding more to the website for you all to dig through and start guessing at who's who and what's what. I think that'll be a fun thing to add.

In the next week or so, you’ll see the animations for Felix, which came out phenomenal. You’ll also start seeing concept art for player and NPC characters, including some from the enemy side that we haven’t formally introduced yet. And the long-asked-for, much-hyped Mythic Era Umbranu in her full Chimeran form is in the works. We’ll be sharing some of that art as the design comes together.

There’s a ton of art coming. I can’t wait to show you.

At their core, they're the strongest attack each character has. The closest analogue from 1.0 is the Super Swap. A lot of the same general mechanic, but with brand new abilities, interactions. We did not want to move too far from our iconic Super Swap system so we simply improved the depth of the system and explored how we could make the abilities every more impactful to use. Each character's Flux Strike is unique to them, themed around their kit, their era, and their corporation. We'll do a proper combat deep dive in a future post that walks through how these feel in actual gameplay.

Honest answer: I think the lore being added matters more for the campaign and the overall vibe of the game than for tournaments specifically. So I want to gently reframe the question.

What we are doing is making tournaments more interesting to participate in by introducing different tournament modes. The play pattern for every tournament isn’t going to be the same. We’re testing a bunch of options for how to structure these so that different play styles do better at different tournaments. It won’t be one method to win them all.

Some examples we’re throwing around internally, none of which are final:

• A tournament built around the most efficient horde clears, similar to how 1.0 worked
• A boss-focused tournament where the most damage dealt wins
• A composition tournament built around running a team aligned to a specific corporation
• An equipment-loop tournament, more in the style of 1.0's farming meta

These are not commitments. They’re a snapshot of the kinds of things we’re playing with. The point is that tournaments in 2.0 are going to feel more dynamic, more approachable to a wider range of play styles, and more rewarding for players who can adapt. Still competitive. Still fun. Just not the same shape every single time.

Yes on the limited-time tournament characters, with a fix for the part that didn't work in 1.0. The plan is that you'll still be able to win the character during the tournament, but if you missed the event, there will be a delayed path to unlock that character later (most likely through the gacha system). What you won't be able to recreate is the original tournament moment itself (like potentially winning a limited time tournament coin), but the character won't be locked away forever just because you weren't online that weekend. We heard the feedback loud and clear on this from 1.0, and we don't want it to repeat.

Tournaments will still have really cool things to win, just not “you can never play this character again” energy. New era variants of units and other rewards will keep tournaments meaningful, but the gates won’t be permanent.

On Mint collaborations: we don’t have anything to announce right now, and they’re not on the immediate roadmap. They’re not off the table either. Right now we’re focused on getting the game rebuilt the way we want it and on hitting the launch in good shape. Once that’s solid, collaborations like this become a much more interesting conversation. So nothing to share today, but stay tuned.

No. The development team will not be competing in 2.0 tournaments for prize-eligible rewards.

That said, I never want to block the team from playing the game. I think that’s just generally a bad idea. The people building this thing should be able to enjoy it as much as you all do. So what we’re doing instead is running our own internal dev tournaments every now and then, and we may even share peeks into those with you so you can see how the team is competing and what their favorite builds are. Just for fun.

On the player-facing side: every development account will be flagged so it cannot impact tournaments or score points in player events. They’re walled off into their own system. You’ll never see a dev account distorting the leaderboard or claiming a prize coin that should have gone to a player. That’s the line and we’re holding to it.

On personal money: if a developer wants to spend on the game and put it toward our internal dev tournaments, that’s their personal choice. None of that money or activity will ever be used to compete against actual players outside the dev team.

This is on the list of things we want to implement. Whether or not it's in at launch versus a follow-up is still being figured out, but the philosophy is yes.

Community-based goals and shared achievements are exactly the kind of thing that turns a game into a place. More broadly, we’re really looking into how players can interact with each other inside the game, and how we can build out collaboration systems that go beyond just the Discord being the social layer. This shouldn’t be hard for us to implement once we get there, and it’s on our radar to bake in. Curtis (PhantomBlur4), thank you for laying out the format you’d like to see, because what you described is genuinely close to how we’ve been talking about it internally.

Every corporation has its own flavor, and how it affects gameplay is nuanced depending on the system you're looking at. Let me give you a couple examples to ground it.

Deltapath Distribution is the shipping and logistics corporation. They’re the UPS or FedEx of the Era Stack. Other corporations hire them to move things across timelines and locations. From a gameplay perspective, that flavor shows up everywhere. Deltapath enemies lean into speed mechanics, with abilities that revolve around speed up, speed down, and tempo control. Player characters from Deltapath, like Atomic Era Maxine, share that same DNA. Speed is the language they’re built around.

Foresight Defense Co. sits on the other end of the spectrum. They’re the security and armor corporation. Their belief is that the best offense is a good defense, and you’ll feel that across both their enemies and the player characters who come from them. Defense up, defense down, mitigation, durability. Post-Atomic Era Gus comes out of Foresight, and he’s a heavy defensive tank as a result.

That kind of corporate identity carries through every corporation in the game. Each one has a gameplay flavor as well as a lore identity, and the two reinforce each other. On top of that, there will be game systems and events that lean specifically into the corporations. Bonuses for running a team of all one corporation, events that favor a particular corp’s tools, synergies that only show up when you stack multiple characters from the same employer. The corporations are one of the cornerstones of both the lore and the game design, and we’ll have a lot more to share on this in future posts and ongoing Corporation Spotlights.

Time travel deserves its own post or its own dedicated section on the website, because the rules and structure can spiral into mental gymnastics fast. We'll save the full breakdown for another time. But here's a quick taste.

Do characters need something to time travel? Yes.

Does it have to be unlocked through the game? Yes and no. From a pure lore standpoint, the act of time travel requires a specific something, and we’ll get into what that is later. From a campaign standpoint, you’ll be moving through eras and locations naturally as you play through Acts I, II, and III, so in that sense yes, you’re “unlocking” time as you progress.

On who the characters are fighting: the characters are fighting the corporate overlords of the various corporations they all simultaneously work for. The Museum Personnel (the player-aligned characters) work for these corporations, and they’re also quietly undermining them. So the entire campaign carries a corporate undertone. Across every era, the big bads aren’t dragons or demon kings. They’re the corporations themselves, and their leadership.

The full lore around the mechanics of time travel, the artifact (or whatever it might be) required to do it, and how the campaign weaves through that is something we’ll dedicate a proper reveal post to. Worth doing right.

For new coins going forward, the experience will be much cleaner. We're building a system where, when you win or buy a coin, there's a digital handshake that happens on both ends to bind it to your account. We'll get into more detail on that as the system gets closer to test.

The most important part is the security model. Once a coin is registered to your account, it’s hard to unregister it and trade it off without your permission. Nobody is going to see a picture of your coin on stream or on Discord, copy it, and try to steal the registration. That’s not how the system works. When you trade or sell, the handshake happens with your knowledge and your consent. Your collectible stays yours unless you actually move it. This is one of the most important problems we’re solving and we have a strong system being built around it. We’ll share the full details once it’s ready for daylight.

For legacy coins the process will have a bit more friction since it will not be automatically tied to a game account like the new coins will be. We will have more information on that process closer to launch.

Yes, we'll be looking into a side web store for 2.0, and not just for in-game items and bundles. Cool swag, collectibles, and other physical drops that don't fit cleanly inside the iOS or Android stores belong on a first-party web store, and that's exactly the kind of thing we want to expand into.

Definitely keep an eye out. We want to go deeper on what we can offer (collectible cards, cosmetics, limited drops, general swag), and a web store gives us a lot more room to do that than the platform stores alone. Pricing flexibility is part of the appeal too, since the platform fee structure is different on a direct channel.

On shipping: we hear you. The plan is to land on transparent, reasonable shipping pricing rather than baking it into prize logistics in a way that distorts the rest of the offering. More on this as the store takes shape.

We're building 2.0 in Unity, with native iOS and Android builds. We don't have plans for a desktop application right this second, but it's not off the table down the line.

The game will run much better on both platforms compared to 1.0. It’s not going to be as graphics-intensive since we’re working in 2.5D rather than full 3D, so we’re not getting shackled by rendering and shader budgets. The focus is on great art implementation, finely tuned across devices. We hear that a lot of lower-end devices struggled with the original game, and the new creative direction plus the native build approach should make this version run a lot better, including on older hardware.

Yes, our internal tooling is in a completely different place than it was in 1.0.

The honest caveat first: I can’t really name a single game that doesn’t, at some point, ask you for a screenshot or a video of a bug. Sometimes a problem is so device-specific or loadout-specific that the only way to reproduce it is to see exactly what you’re seeing on your device. So I’m not going to promise that we’ll never ask you for a recording. That’s just not how game dev works.

What I can promise is that we won’t be beholden to that as our primary tool the way we were in 1.0. Our analytics capacity in 2.0 is night and day different. We can see what’s happening on individual accounts, on player groups, on the server, across characters and units, across loadouts and play patterns. We can spot anomalies, spot bugs, and act on a lot of issues without ever needing to ping a player. Edge cases will still come up where we’ll ask for help reproducing something, but the default loop is going to be a lot tighter.

I don't want to go too deep into the anti-cheat playbook in public, but here's the philosophy.

We’ve been implementing a much more server-authoritative architecture across the entire game. A lot of the theories floating around about what was happening in 1.0 weren’t quite what was actually happening, but we also didn’t always have the tooling to see clearly. In 2.0, our entire server backend and game infrastructure have been reconfigured so we can see basically everything happening in the game at any point in time. Our analytics capabilities are night and day different from 1.0.

The bigger point is that there are a lot of ways to solve account security, anti-cheat, VPN abuse, and ban dodging, and the right move is rarely to just patch one symptom at a time. We’re going after the root: server authority, account-level analytics, anomaly detection, and the ability to look at outliers and figure out why an account is behaving the way it is. That layered approach is way more effective than any single tool. So the answer to “VPN blocker?” is more like: VPN abuse is one of many things we’re addressing through the broader system, and the system itself is much smarter this time around.

Eighth Era Studios is building the new game with an entirely new internal development team, including some really great artists and animators. The overall game direction is led by myself, with Paul leading the game design, Riley focusing on narrative and lore, and Manu on Art and Animation. Overall we have a great continuity of leadership from the original studio who transitioned over into Eighth Era Studios. So 2.0 is being built by a mix of new talent and trusted veterans who carried the love for this universe forward. Mark Salzberg is still involved. It's a re-shifted, restructured organization, and the team we have around the game right now is the strongest it's ever been.

The sign-up will live on the website, and we'll announce it on the Discord and the blog when it goes live. You're not going to miss it. I'll make sure everyone on the Discord is looped in, so just stay tuned.

When alpha testing opens, getting players in to play, give feedback, and stress-test the systems is going to make the launch significantly stronger. The more eyes the better.