Project 5: Sightseer [Steam] had me utterly hooked at the start, but after a while it fell a bit flat. Seems the developer really was hard at work to improve it dramatically as this latest update shows.

One of the main things, was that the world ended up feeling a little boring. There wasn't a lot to see, but that's changed. Now, you will come across many more NPCs. Some of them can be helpful, some can be aggresive pirates. They're also working on a proper trading interface, since NPCs can trade with you now too.

Enemy NPCs will now retaliate if you attack their outposts and they will periodically raid you too! This makes the actual base-building element a lot more interesting, previously you only had to worry about players and given the size of the world it would be a while before anyone found you. This actually makes it feel a bit more like an always-on RTS.

You can see an example of such a raid below:

You can now use special skills as well, making it a bit more tactical. Weapons have different special abilities, although they do require you to have certain upgrades installed it seems. Their implementation of skills is interesting too, as the cooldown timer is a "soft" version of it, meaning you can attempt to use a skill again during the cooldown, but it only has a chance based on how much time is left before it's actually ready.

There's also a threat system, with skills and items playing their part, so someone assuming a "Tank" role could be the one to attract enemies attention while the players with more powerful weapons hit them hard. There's also finally a weapon type that can heal other vehicles. If that's not enough, there's a further two tiers of weaponry available now as well.

In addition, the early game is no longer as slow, with a revamped tech tree giving you access to some nicer vehicles a bit sooner. That was a gripe I had with it, so it's pleasing to see that addressed too.

Guess what? This update even brings "full" Linux support, with water rendering that actually works! I know this was a gripe for a few players in our Discord server.

This all sounds rather exciting, might have to jump back in soon! What an insanely good sounding update.