Want to participate in the next Alpha test?

About a month ago, we opened the game up to a small group of Alpha testers to play and give feedback. The test went great and we gathered a lot of really good feedback. We're currently working on implementing a lot of it, as well as adding new features and expanding the world.

One of the major pieces of feedback was "I don't know where I'm going or where my friends are". We're implementing a few features related to this. One is a party system where you can group with your Steam friends or people you've waved to in-game. We're still deciding how to allow you to physically locate them or group up in the world, but we have some ideas.

The second navigation system we're implementing is a map. You'll have to explore the world to reveal the map, but towns will show in undiscovered areas if you're near enough. You can unlock talents to increase the radius that towns will show and other navigation related enhancements. We'll also mark revealed landmarks on the map (like radio towers, light houses, etc.) so it's easier to orient yourself.

In addition, we've implemented a linear compass that appears at the top of the screen at all times. This has become pretty common in popular games so we thought it would be nice to include this basic way to figure out where you're going. If you activate a GPS Cache, a pin will appear on your linear compass to help you locate it.

The linear compass at the top of the screen. GPS Caches that you've activated appear as pins for easier location.

Our next Alpha milestone is the Travel Update. We're focusing on the larger world, big cities and traveling from place to place. This includes a few major development efforts:

Optimizations to make sure the servers can load the entire world and have acceptable performance when many people are playing at once.
Travel related gameplay features: various cars with different performance, better driving experience & controls, interesting things you can do or encounter while traveling.
Improved internal tools for world creation so we can quickly populate the world and make it interesting.

We're busy on all of the above, and we've already added a bunch of new vehicles. There are now 40+ vehicles in the game, here are a few of them:

Thank you again to everyone who participated in Alpha 1, please stay tuned for the Alpha 2 date announcement in the near future.