Thank you!
We haven't made proper modern cover like in Shadowrun, just made maps with more stuff to step behind or jump out of, and taught AI to step behind stuff \ jump out of stuff. Like telephone posts and trash cans and walls, but I wouldn't call it true cover, true cover just didn't work, made fighting too complex. However, you'll find a lot of new stuff there. I don't even wanna start about the special armor, it's like a game in itself, with it you get aoe attacks, special gun mounts that remind me of 40k, and the weapon I made for it personally - the pile driver like you can find on any good mechs IRL. Generally the combat is again what we liked in Fallout 1-2, but it has so many features surrounding that simplistic old-timey core, it's hilarious in a way. You get 2 square melee attacks, tons of hidden fatality animations, flamethrowers with AOE, every weapon can be modded, there's a text battle at one time where you tear off someone's face, we have special attack animations for the only katana in the game, etc. I recently likened this combat system overhaul to a guy in a really, really expensive pimped-out wheelchair with rgb lighting and VTOL flight capabilities. Like, the fella is differently abled, sure, he can't walk properly, but oh my god that kid is rolling like its nobody's business. He's on a roll and he's rolling in style.
The tree was reworked completely, there's now x10 more skills, and they grow alongside you, so even though you start on at least level 15, you will still get stronger with every level. I don't think we kept more than 3-4 old skills. Folks in Early Access mostly liked it, but we'll still be on the lookout. While we're personally happy with it, some suggestions from in-depth players might nudge us into changing some numbers in the formulae. You can make real beasts for all kinds of playstyles, melee, pistol, you name it.
Another huge improvement are the graphics, the game will be shorter than Atom mostly because our map guy made every single Trudograd map in the time it took for him to make 5-6 in ATOM. And it really shows if you compare Atom and TG side by side. It really does!
Dialogues are shorter, much more English gone through editor before publishing, and due to popular demand you can now mostly tell quest NPCs and flavor NPCs apart.
This is mostly because almost everyone in Trudograd is now a quest NPC or becomes a quest NPC later on in someone else's quest. And even though I kept the ability to ask every single character in the game (with ~10 exceptions) the standard 4 questions - name, what are you doing, what do you think of X and share some rumors with me - you almost never get quests by asking those questions. They now can be ignored if flavor text, rumors and worldbuilding stuff isn't your thing. Most NPCs now have a separate quest-related dialogue option.
Also music improved, world map is sped up - for example in ATOM travelling from A to B took 1 minute of walking, during which you could get 0 to 3 random encounters. Now it takes around 5 seconds, but you also can get from 0 to 3 random encounters in these 5 seconds, so same thing but much quicker. There is also much more esoteric stuff made to f**k with the player's brain IRL, but it's really deeply hidden, much deeper than in ATOM. Nobody found some of that stuff yet. Also game has less of a wacky feel. Some people called ATOM RPG a Fallout 2 clone, well by that logic Trudograd is a Fallout 1 clone if you get what I mean. Despite me totally objecting we're a clone of anything, but that's gonna be hard to prove...
