RESPONDING TO YOUR FEEDBACK

Before anything else, thank you to everyone who has taken the time out of their day to leave reviews and comments on the Steam forums. While we might not be able to respond to every single thing, we do read your posts and they have been very helpful. To put it in some kind of perspective, the attention so far is roughly equal to the first two years of the first game condensed into less than a week. As a result, our priorities with the first two hotfixes on the 21st and the 25th were squashing the most immediate problems that we could deal with the quickest. 

There are more details about our future plans at the end of this article, but in brief we plan to put out another hotfix next week, with a content update at the end of September. Dealing with the other, more long-term issues will come in time, and we're going to go through most of those here – but the short version is the following: we are confident that most of these problems are completely fixable. 

Now on to the main points of discussion we have seen the past week.

"The EA version has less content than the demo"

The statement that the demo has less content than the Early Access version of the game was repeated frequently in both reviews and in our Discord server. To better explain what happened here is to revisit the demo, compare it to the EA version, and go through the reasoning for the changes.

The demo is split up into two campaigns – OBSTACLE 1 and THE GARAGE. OBSTACLE 1 is a short narrative segment where the player kills some Brigadors as Team Anchor, and then they are transitioned to the garage. Initially the only thing available from the main menu in the demo is NEW GAME, but once players complete the narrative segment, the main menu changes to say CAMPAIGNS and they will see OBSTACLE 1 and THE GARAGE listed separately – they do not need to complete the narrative segment again to access the garage, and the rest of the demo has almost no other progression to speak of. 

The Early Access version by comparison merges *four *campaigns into one campaign (OBSTACLE 1, UNDERCITY, ANGEL BASE and THE GARAGE). One reason for this is from our experience watching people play our first game where they only ever touch the Campaign portion and completely ignore the Freelance part of the game, which arguably contains the bulk of that game's content (but Freelance is listed in the second spot on the main menu). For Brigador Killers, we did not want players to miss anything. We wanted them to be able to eventually access all the game's content from just one thing – no extra navigation or confusion required. At the same time, with the EA release we were deliberately restricting what was initially available so as not to overload the player. The narrative sequence of Pinball > Team Anchor > Undercity is fundamentally a tutorial with a limited set of things to do that increases in complexity. It starts with a basic routine of "go here" with the Pinball; to "go here, shoot that guy, leave" with Team Anchor, that then becomes "go here, pick this thing up, maybe also shoot some guys, leave" in the Undercity. In other words the Pinball teaches movement, Team Anchor teaches moving and firing, and Undercity adds in the rhythms of inventory management and bringing stuff back to base. All this is so by the time the player gets to Angel Base they have the basics down, though the player still does not have full access to everything when Angel Base begins, such as access to all the missions or any vehicles.

In short this boils down to at least two problems:

• Player frustration over having to go through a narrative segment to reach the meat of the game.

• Confusion over the obvious presence of vehicles in initial Angel Base missions not being initially accessible.

This was not the case with the demo where after about 15 minutes of play, the player got full access to effectively everything. With the exception of the rigs, or very high end vehicles bought from the merchant causeway mission, the majority of the content was very easy to acquire. Want a Garbotruck in the demo? Go straight to Chop Shop and there's a 1 in 3 chance one will spawn in the car park that can be acquired in about 30 seconds and quickly drive out.

By contrast to get a Garbotruck in the EA version of Brigador Killers, the player needs to clear all nine of the Angel Base missions first and have a functioning vehicle to get across the causeway to the Garage and only then do they get access to the Chop Shop mission. In addition vehicles only become available after clearing the first seven missions of Angel Base. In other words, vehicles were locked from use until the player successfully clears:

• Crow's Field

• Shoreline

• Boomtown

• Roundabout

• Aubrey's Hood

• Papyard

• The Stakh

All on foot no less, with no upgrades to boost health available either like the Cinderblock rig. After clearing The Stakh, the game basically flips a switch that says "vehicles are now available for use" and the player can start getting into cars and using the Fabricator to upgun things, but by this point the player is so used to seeing vehicles they cannot access (despite having use of some vehicles with Team Anchor and even at the end of Undercity), they are conditioned to attempt things on foot.

In addition, a lot of heavier vehicles (such as the Security Truck, the Rounder tank, the Party Van, the Fork mech, etc.) were made deliberately inaccessible to the player, in spite of their appearance in trailer footage. The intention there is that these are mid-to-late-game vehicles, but it has always been our intent that the player will eventually get access to these vehicles – and they are absolutely still in the game's pack file – but they were gated away for the beginnings of Early Access.

Though many people have already written as such, it bears repeating here: it was jarring for excited players to go from the demo that was basically one big toybox, to the early access version being quite literally in some places a pile of rocks at the start.

We did not do a good job signposting either the intended progression, or that content present in the demo had been temporarily gated off, and this was further compounded by the difficulty.

The difficulty and penalty on death

The difficulty in the demo version is effectively non-existent for a few reasons:

• The enemy AI is extremely easy to exploit (e.g. go into the Barclaw mission and see how many units immediately hit the ground when the player fires any gun).

• Getting good weapons and vehicles is very easy once the player knows where to look (e.g. farm Roundabout until a Porco appears).

• Access to higher tier stuff is barely gated (we have seen at least one video of a player getting the Carmine rig parts in the demo using just the panel van from the gas station in the same level).

Both the demo version and the EA version penalize the player on death by taking away any items the player has on their person, with no method of getting that stuff back. Though some players expressed frustration with this in the demo, it appears that the difficulty being trivial didn't seem to matter too much, or if people didn't want to lose stuff they soon realized that Alt+F4'ing on death would roll them back to their initial state.

What happened between the demo and the Early Access version is a few things: 

• Almost all existing maps were remixed in terms of objective, enemy spawn, item placement and exits.

• Weapons were sorted into different tiers of power that lined up with the perceived difficulty of a mission, meaning low tier missions mostly had low tier weapons.

• Enemies were granted new AI that was not as easy to exploit, but in some cases completely lethal.

• Specific maps introduced reinforcements after a certain amount of time passes, meaning there's no downtime for the player.

Though there is brief mention in the mission selector text, there is no warning in-game that enemy reinforcements will not only come into a mission after a certain amount of time to chase down the player, but also that the difficulty of those enemies would increase substantially. This was felt very early on in the Angel Base missions such as Roundabout – if the player stayed too long in the map, teams of heavily armed Corvids along with a Cinderblock with an automatic shotgun would eventually appear and at that point – with no access to a getaway vehicle or the means to out DPS the opposition – the player's run is over and their gear is lost. To make matters worse, to comfortably get back to a position where the player can take on Roundabout again safely, they would need to play through Crow's Field and Shoreline again to get some decent weapons (such as the Duiker rifle and the Southy shotgun) and ammo for them. 

The irony here is that what we wanted to do was push back against the time-consuming loot goblin habits we saw from demo players, and instead implicitly teach the idea of "don't hang around – get in and get out" but a number of players were used to the demo's rhythm being one of "take your time" and continued to do so, only to get blasted in the face. At the same time we were not only asking the player to get in and out quickly, but also repeat the same content a few times so as to make the next task easier. The end result was players were not just losing gear but their time and this was not acceptable. Or, put in an abstract way, it was all too volatile – the lows were too low, the highs were too high and periods in between too long.

So, the first hotfix that came a day after the EA release was to dial this difficulty all the way down and remove the more lethal units and reinforcements. We know that we have deliberately overadjusted on this point, and that things are currently perceived as too easy, which we are fine with. It's easier to tune things back up from here rather than try to incrementally dial things down over and over and keep coming back to players asking them if they are tired of being shot to death 5% slower.

Other things are also tied into the difficulty, such as the player having no knowledge of directional damage modifiers. What this means is if the player shoots things in the rear, those things take more damage – but so does the player. This means running away from gunfire is potentially more dangerous, because it's technically safer to retreat while facing the enemy. Directional damage is a legacy mechanic from the first game, and expecting this to be inherent knowledge for a newcomer is unfair.

Related to all of this is that some players have asked for a kind of "Iron Man" toggle so that they can opt in/opt out of the penalty on death. This point is still up in the air, because as developers we want there to be stakes since the potential threat of losing stuff adds to the thrill, but at the same time we want players to have their time respected.

Inventory management, merchants and the UI/UX

There are multiple problems here that we know about regarding the inventory system as well as the general UI/UX, so we'll try to comment on each point:

• No ability to unload enemy weapons of their ammo when on a mission

A lot of players reported frustration at picking up weapons but having no means to immediately get the ammo out of them. This was felt most acutely in the early Undercity missions, where in some cases it's easier to just start punching and kicking things to death than trying to equip and fire the weapons. Unloading weapons is only currently possible by taking the weapons back to an ARMORY. A temporary fix coming soon is that we will adjust the ammo economy of drops.

• No way to find mission exits if a player is too far away from them when they open

Due to how some missions were redesigned or remixed to have a "flow-through" design e.g. the player spawns in at the east side and is expected to exit at the west side. The reason the exits were set up this way was twofold: stop people from brute-force farming specific things since they would spawn in right next to an exit, and also stop people from accidentally immediately exiting a map and potentially losing a vehicle they just came in with.

Instead what happened is some players would end up in places so far away from their expected mission exit that it simply wouldn't appear on the UI. This is fairly easy to fix with existing tools, and some missions are going to change back to the demo's behavior of having multiple exits too.

• No clear idea what to even do when on a mission

Every Team Anchor mission makes use of an "opening card" that briefly states the objective before it starts (e.g. KILL and a picture of the target). Unfortunately all the other missions after that neglected to make use of these cards, relying on the brief bit of flavor text in the mission selector. A lot of these missions are going to get these cards added to their starting screen, so the player gets a two word reminder why they are there. Later we want to add more information to the pause screen.

• Poor awareness where threats are coming from or how bad they can be, particularly when in a menu

This is mixed in with the previous points about habits from the demo, difficulty and reinforcements – once the player is in a mission in the Early Access version, they basically have no downtime. Though there might be a mention in the mission selector about keeping an eye out for enemy reinforcements, we did not give the player any warning enemies would be inbound to their location as they go around a level, and it's very easy to get snuck up on while the player checks through loot.

• No explanation what the consequence of death or mission failure entails

This part seems self-explanatory, but it's entirely absent from the game. At no point after the Team Anchor segment do we explicitly tell the player that they will lose their stuff if they die and have to go and get it all over again. The player might have known that from the demo, or from reading our news posts, but we blanked on making this explicit anywhere in the actual game. In some spots, like in Undercity, death can be so punishing as to kick the player almost all the way back to the start of the sequence of missions, and they have to go about getting another wheelchair and parts to begin the ending sequence again.

• An extremely clunky flow with acquiring items from merchants or vending machines

Demo players may recall that the "merchant" (a computer console next to a food mascot statue) sold large boxes of guns rather than the guns themselves. This merchant system was expanded in a very kludgy way that was ultimately even less intuitive, causing some players to go into a mission, buy one thing, leave, and come back again, not realizing that multiple purchases were possible by simply kicking the existing box out of the way. This is going to change to be less chaotic, or at least less box-oriented. 

In addition, interacting with merchants is currently extremely hazardous, since the player can be gunned down in a level while they're shopping, so we're going to change things to make it possible to buy gear and not die in the process of doing so.

• No awareness or notification that merchants get new gear after completing phases of missions

When the player completes specific phases of missions, all merchants get new and better gear. For instance, Eddy in Boomtown has a weak set of explosives the first time he's encountered, but return to him after completing both Roundabout and Aubrey's Hood and the player can buy a Froggy IED and a mortar, and much later he'll sell you a rocket launcher. Each merchant has about three or four "phases" of gear upgrades that are tied to the player's progression through the Angel Base and Garage maps. The player should be going back to these merchants to get newer and better gear so as to make subsequent challenges easier to take on, but unfortunately the player never receives a strict reminder that new gear is now available for purchase.

• Mount sizes on the player and vehicles being unintuitive

As infantry, the player can wear a backpack. When they're in a car, they can typically carry a small container on a passenger seat, while larger vehicles can carry medium or large crates. Observant players may notice the highlight in the inventory's UI when they have actively selected a backpack, but this is highly contextual and makes a lot of assumptions about the player. What is eventually intended to happen here is some kind of indication on the MNT slots of the inventory (and/or the container itself) that indicates what can go where, but this doesn't exist yet.

• Clarity on what upgunning a vehicle even means or does until the player goes to the trouble of making that vehicle and trying it out

The FABRICATOR is a console that unlocks at the base which the player can use to construct vehicles and upgun existing ones. Players can see a vehicle's name and a sort of holographic highlight of the thing they can make, but any stats on the vehicle or what the available weapon mount sizes are on them are effectively a mystery until the vehicle is made. This means the player has to spend parts to find out. Even though built vehicles can get all their parts refunded via the SALVAGE console, players would have to have already acquired those parts, either from salvaging vehicles from missions or from visiting the parts merchant on Vilutian Boulevard. However, due to previous points about difficulty leading to so-called "gear fear" (i.e. a player not risking the use of their best equipment or vehicle), and the player already conditioned to not have access to vehicles until clearing the Stakh mission, means a number of players ended up not engaging with the vehicle system at all. This was unfortunate, since the vehicles are meant to act as a significant upgrade, making the player both more sturdy and give them more carry capacity.

• No way to highlight all interactables on screen

There is a desire from some players to have a Disco Elysium-esque "press a button to highlight all interactive things on screen". A form of this already exists, in the sense that any item on the ground within the pickup radius of the player has a little pip appear on top of it, but this does not highlight containers that the player can interact with. There is a kind of highlight in the game, but it currently appears when a player is using the inventory menu, such as when they directly interact with a container or a vehicle's storage, but it only highlights the thing being interacted with and does not outline everything on the screen. Whether we can implement some kind of a "highlight all" requires some amount of negotiation with our programmers, who have already warned us about the impact such a thing can have on the game's performance and (wisely) anticipate things like players dropping hundreds of items in the same spot simply because they can.

• Little to no tutorialization of basic mechanics

Most players don't have the same level of familiarity with a game that the developers do, and we proved to be guilty of forgetting this basic fact. One of our longer term plans is to add some kind of in-game tutorial or codex that the player will be able to access via the pause menu, so they can, for example, get clarity on what the aiming cone means.

• Too many placeholder UI elements 

While plenty of players mentioned enjoying the MS Paint placeholders in the demo, this was far less well received in the Early Access version. More importantly, there is still a lot of repetition in spots where the same placeholder appears over and over, which can cause the player to glaze over and conclude "this looks unfinished, I'll leave it alone" such as at merchants. This is the opposite of what we want, and one of our more immediate priorities is to replace the MS Paint icons with their intended renders and add ones to the empty spots.

• No "pickup all" button

This has been a frequent request since the demo. It's clear what the desire here is but it comes up against the deliberate inventory interactions we want the player to have during gameplay. This problem is felt more acutely on controllers, which don't immediately have the equivalent of Shift + Left Click to quickly transfer items from one side to another (it is possible by assigning something to MENU MODIFIER 1 under SETTINGS > CONTROLLER, and whatever button there becomes the same as Shift on keyboard when accessing the inventory on controller – just make sure that it doesn't overlap or conflict with an existing bind). Figuring out a means to accommodate this desire will take time.

Lastly, we fully realize that we have not responded to absolutely everyone with this post – so please let us know in the comments or even via email to team@stellarjockeys.com if you prefer.

Plans going forward

In the short term another hotfix is coming next week. The full details will come in the patch notes when it drops but in short it will:

• Make the Cinderblock and Carmine rigs available after the player clears certain mission phases.

• Add ammo vending machines to bases.

• Include numerous UI renders for vehicles, weapons and ammo.

• Open up mission exits on Salvage missions.

• Change or adjust enemy spawns across multiple missions.

At the end of September we want to do a content update. The overall goal with this update is to not only give people access to the full range of vehicles and guns, but also add new missions and Brigador kill targets, as well as add in more lore blurbs to read. We also want to add in gun unloading functionality, make it less difficult to use the merchant system, as well as UI improvements mentioned in the body of this news post like adding mission objectives to the pause screen.

Before the end of 2026 we expect to have the game translated into the first set of languages, more specifically:

• Chinese (Simplified & Traditional)

• French

• German

• Japanese

• Russian

• Spanish

These translations are already underway, but the system to add them into the game is not ready yet. The old language selection system that is used in Brigador no longer exists in Brigador Killers because it was causing a lot of problems and so was removed. Instead, it is being replaced with something more stable. Assuming things go well, more languages will be added to the list.

In the long term Brigador Killers is not going anywhere. Our first game initially came out in 2015 in Early Access, went 1.0 in 2016, got overhauled in 2017, and received its last content update in October 2021. Brigador Killers started out as an alpha over on Itch in 2024, and was rough until December 2025 but that led to a successful demo in June 2026 and gave us the confidence to begin Early Access two months later. We know we have a lot left to do and we are looking forward to your feedback on it.

P.S. Here's another track from the OST by Makeup and Vanity Set, called "Authentication".

The Brigador Killers Soundtrack by Makeup and Vanity Set is also available on:

• Bandcamp

• Spotify

• Apple Music