Vlambeer's Nuclear Throne, a "lightning-fast top-down roguelike shooter in which squidgy mutants vie for possession of the eponymous throne," came out a couple of years ago to widespread acclaim. We scored it 90/100 in our review, and it enjoys an "overwhelmingly positive" user review aggregate on Steam. It also wore out the developers pretty thoroughly.
"Nuclear Throne took a lot out of us, and when we finally released the current U98 over a year and a half ago, we were all entirely exhausted," Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail said last week. "Since then, we've slowly been finding our footing again, and now that we're feeling creative again, we decided to return to form with an long-long-long-awaited final major update to Nuclear Throne for PC, Mac, and Linux."
That would be Update 99, which dropped yesterday, developed alongside Nuclear Throne Together mod creator YellowAfterlife. It doesn't add any new content, but "it is nevertheless significant," bringing improved performance, easier modding, and "a lot of quality of life and balance fixes."
"We're excited to have one more update art by the phenomenal Justin Chan, we're excited to see the meta change once more, and we've genuinely missed seeing your responses to our silly development antics," Ismail wrote. "We are eternally thankful for your patience, and your sense of enthusiasm and community for the game."
The full patch notes are too long to list here, but these are the new "features" listed:
- Area/weapon/mutation seeding is now far more consistent.
- There's now an option for borderless fullscreen on Windows (Alt+Shift+Enter / in options).
- There's now a confirmation dialog when exiting/restarting a run; R confirms in it.
- Safe spawns now work consistently.
- Added a setting for native cursors - when supported, this gets rid of mouse lag once and for all.
- Added a setting for mouselock (when available) - for windowed or multi-screen setups.
- Both players can now play the same character in coop without making use of bugs.
- Added localization support (see lang-example.ini / copy to lang.ini for translating)
Some commenters have said that their progress was erased following the update, or that the game launches into a blank screen and refuses to progress. It's not clear yet if the two are connected (at least as far as I've seen) but if you do encounter the blank screen issue, hitting alt-enter will apparently get your wheels turning.
