Update 13 is here with some good new improvements. Attachments got a big upgrade, the new Endscreen makes runs more rewarding, our first pet class and a lot more. Check it out!
Weapon attachments got a polishing pass and offer better choices. Many attachments got improved, reworked, tooltips updated and should be of high quality now overall!
Mache Hunter gains a powerful tracked unit as permanent pet. Slow but durable, "Snappy" provides fire-support and can mirror the Hunter's main abilities!
The new Endscreen now offers extended stats, and shows best in match, new records, badges amongst other improvements for a more rewarding experience!
Existing Rare Enemy Squads have been improved, new Rare Squads and encounters have been added.
We added 4 new maps and made varied improvements to others!
We dialed back on some of the friendly-fire elements in the game. All mine types no longer trigger on players as example and explosions hurt you noticeably less. Previously mines triggered within 0.5m for friendlies and 3m for enemies.
Varied improvements have been done regarding the endless mode or "loop". Mainboard and Cooling chambers also got their unique loop style. The styles are not just a post effect, but have a full lighting, material, color, and fx pass while different for every environment type!
The campaign loot progression has seen continued refinement. Coop players will also find a bit more chests.
The item menu has seen some improvements and allows switching their slots which also works with controllers. Some extra polishing is coming up to add more feedback to the buttons and recycling.
The game over screen got many improvements, both showing more details but also offering new elements making runs more intrinsically rewarding. Making a good Endscreen which supports up to 4 players is a very challenging task with all the elements we want to portray, so we added a new tab with detailed stats and badges. The main tab still shows the summary with items and weapons as before.
You can now see more stats in a seperate tab to compare with your squad.
Each stat shows a Star icon for the player having the highest value in a category.
If a stat surpasses a previous record, this is presented as your best stat yet.
We have a new system which allows giving badges for certain performances in certain stats, so if you reach a certain threshold, you are awarded with a gold badge. More levels of batches might be coming up.
Leveling up now has some cool effects to make it more clear.
We added new maps and tweaked / fixed a good bunch of issues. Some shop placements have also been adjusted to not be as close to each other.
Machine Hunter has been made into our first class using a permanent pet. This gives the class a much stronger identity, away from recon and allows exploring some new design space. The addition of the pet also offers a lot of cool things which were never possible on other classes, such as mirroring abilities, or enabling things only on the pet. The pet replaces the utility ability, meaning Machine Hunter has less healing now (however is having a small heal on area cleared baked into the perks, and the pet can tank quite a bit of damage) which however means that the class has not really lost any power overall to compensate for the pet for now.
Snappy is a slow moving but powerful armored weapon platform. It will not rush into enemies but provide steady fire support and can tank quite a lot of shots. Snappy mirrors certain Machine Hunter abilities, such as Heat / HVAP, and Turtle Shield. Turtle shield can be used to protect Snappy from taking too much damage. New class Evolutions have been added and many other Evolutions now have an additional effect which include the pet or are mirrored on the pet. Note: a first version was already included last patch by mistake, so this had been partially live already.
Recon had been a bit on the weak side and has gotten a bit of polish and improvements across the board. We still want to do more perk changes on all classes once we have a more flexible perk system however.
The class got a bunch of smaller quality of life improvements.
Varied Class Evolutions have been buffed, more notable changes are listed below.
Weapons have not been a large focus for this update but we have some solid tweaks based on community requests. Overall weapons should be in a good state outside of some outliers.
While we have a massive amount of weapons, some people felt like the early loot pools could be more diverse, so we shuffled some things around to make early loot more varied and get some little-used weapons more showcase.
Varied smaller tweaks and loadout changes have been done to handguns across the board.
There has been a pass on attachments with further refinements. Overall the state of attachments seems quite good outside of some outliers. With some further cleanup and plugging some holes, this should now be a really strong upgrade sandbox. Custom slot attachments will get a pass in the future also.
A good bunch of variants have been changed
Resistance G11
Explosive Crossbow *
Time splitters *
HE Crossbow *
Simple HE Crossbow
DKH Snub Revolver
Dual 9mm Storm
Tec-9
SK-9
Some cool new weapons coming in!
Assault-Rifle Launcher combo Fires shield breaking fusion missiles Very low recoil
Fires high damage armor piercing bolts Compact automatic crossbow submachine-gun
Nailgun loaded with Nails Low range with ammo regeneration Effective up close
Finally we had some time to improve the boss fights and do varied tweaks. Overall the Bosses should feel more polished and also more challenging.
For the damage and health scaling throughout the run, we reduced damage scaling to allow a slightly slower pace in the lategame and increased health scaling to reduce the times where enemies get killed in 0.1 seconds in the lategame. This should be a tweak in the right direction, but let us know what you think.
The lategame Chrono Squad has seen varied improvements to make it more balanced, more difficult and less punishing.
We made all sniper style lock-on units a distinct and clearly visible lock-on effect to improve on the readability of the gameplay.
The new Directives add varied new enemies to the game!
We added varied new voice lines, and especially added death voice lines for the first time.
Reinforcements coming in!
A powerful ranged turret, firing a single devastating shot after 1 second of aiming.
We have mirrored the ingame global chat on Discord, so you can chat on the both at the same time in a dedicated channel.
We have added a third party integration of AMD's FSR2.2.1, which is a great alternative to DLSS but supported on any hardware. This means much better image quality on the low end.
Remember to always use DLSS or FSR2 as they give better performance but also look better than native resolution with TAA or SMAA. Most developers integrate the settings incorrectly and start their quality settings at a default Nvidia/AMD setting of around 65% resolution which is why they have a bad name, but on high resolution levels you will see the best of both worlds, especially with DLSS. If you set it to 85%+ you will have the game look noticeably better than native while also running better.
A lot of under the hood improvements have been done towards reducing server load (as example all actions/abilities use greatly reduced resources) and loading times for area transistions, making runs a lot more stable, loading faster and greatly reducing the chance of a server overload, causing a disconnect. We continue on improving things, let us know if you still have issues with server disconnecting mid-run.
We made further improvements in varied areas of the user interface.
We have added over 1 0 0 HD Upscaled weapon sprites from S1 using latest upscaling tech for everyone to use! Remember it only takes minutes to make your own weapons and we have many weapon models and sounds for you to play with!
Modify Health, Modify Plating, Modify Shield needs to be used on self only for networking same as how modify stat works. Applying this directly to other entities was always a sort of hack but it can no longer be supported as this does not work in multiplayer. The proper way of doing this has always been to give someone an action which modifies what you want, like using our healing or plating or shield actions, or make your own health/shield/plating changing action, which is applied as a buff or debuff or perk.
This was also not only a networking issue but is poor structural design as you could never trace back where this health was coming from. This now works the same as modify stat and should be the last of things which need to be changed to self only. If you had actions which healed all entities in range as example, that will no longer work and requires applying a healing action to all entities in range. This is also better as you can give particles and feedback. Actions using this will not crash or anything but simply not apply this and only apply on self.
Another thing that will be phased out with U14 is "delete self action delay" - Please use "Timer bigger than X -> delete self action" or simply delete after the path is over - same issue for delay on "deal damage". Please check out Power Kick how to do delayed damage in a good way where you can do proper feedback on it.
The reason is that these 2 delay ones are the last ones which use some async timer trick to make a delay for ease of use, but this causes actions to update the path unneccessairly even if the delay is not used, which is quite bad for server performance (and not great for singleplayer performance as well) These were implemented at the start of the project when we did not understand the ideal systems and workflows but really must be cut to make ways for the right approach.
Next up we want to work on a small polishing pass, iterating items and start on the outgame progression elements. The second floor areas will also get some improvements and enemy tweaks.
