Some big news for Blade Symphony today, not only do they have another major patch release they've also announced the free to play release date.

On March 7th, the flood gates will officially open on Steam for everyone to jump into Blade Symphony completely free. This is a huge milestone for Puny Human, something they've been solidly working towards for some time now.

They've also added experimental asset streaming into the Source Engine, something a lot more modern game engines use and this can help speed up loading time.

On top of that, it now has some experimental Controller Support too! They say this includes "both Steam Controller and regular game pads".

For me, the Linux version is still on the unstable side so I've sent them some crash "dmp" files to help them track down the issues. I couldn't get the asset streaming to work at all, with the "+r_particle_streaming 1 +mat_texture_streaming 1" option set they mentioned in the patch notes it always crashes before it gets to the menu. It also refuses to let me enable Ambient Occlusion, weirdly. Hopefully issues like this will be solved before the free to play release.

Find it on Steam.