Update 11 is here and had a focus on gameplay quality. As the name implies, this update is all about empowering your choices with the new flexible item slot system and healing is finally predictable and meaningful with our new healing and utility abilities. We also have many other good changes, such as boss improvements, a big weapon balance pass and much more. The coop test branch also had many improvements, and we reworked the saving system.
We are bringing more control and strategy into healing and sustain. New healing options have been added, allowing some real healing management and better team coordination.
The class menu allows setting active slots to items at will. As active, they will trigger on button presses only, while as re-active, they will trigger based on a condition which depends on the item. This allows for a lot of flexibility, lets people who prefer more or less buttons have their way, or allows you even to turn down the amount of buttons over the progress of a run.
You can now get map variants which offers a new perspective, adding to variation and replayability. Let us know what you think.
Part of enemy groups now patrol between different points. This makes the gameplay more dynamic as there can be more varied sized encounters, and you can also wait for a unit to have passed by if you don't want to engage too many at once.
Further tuning has been done related to loot and enemy placement, this is as you know an ongoing process. We are feeling that the campaign has gotten a little to short so we try to add back 1-2 maps throughout the campaign in length next.
The weapon and class menu is now split from the pause menu and works while playing. The weapon menu got an overhaul as well. This now also allows inspecting tooltips with CTRL in the weapon or character menu.
Don't ask why they were gone but impact sounds are finally back. Impact particles are now also less obstructive.
For environments we put more focus on mid and endgame levels and again kept working on improving cover placement. We added the new camera angle system as described in the highlight features and some new power-plant maps as well. Environments are gradually getting more variation and improvements as usual.
Classes were not a big priority for this update but got some solid changes here and there. For the next patch we want to look at some chrono trooper and machine hunter improvements and riotguard survivability on higher difficulty especially.
Most Notable changes:
Machine hunter will get some more quality improvements in the near future
As mentioned at the start, every class now has 3 choices for sustain or team utility, which adds more depth and potential coordination. Healing pickups had always been a bad design as you could never plan or see an actual measurement of how well you were doing, and resulted in people not caring about their health, which is really not what we ever wanted. Try the new options and lets us know what you think!
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!
+ High Explosive rocket launcher + High damage. but long reload + Limited guidance
- 4 Round impact grenade launcher - Strong against grouped targets - Weak single-target performance
- Accurate breech-loaded lever action rifle - High damage on weakpoints - Inflexible and low ammunition
- High damage flamethrower - Very effective against unarmored - Limited range
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!
Many items have been tweaked or their functionality changed. Item improvements were not initially planned for this update but we did a good amount of improvements there, this will still see more work in the near future to polish up items to a higher degree.
The new slot system allows great freedom for your item usage. You can set items as active or passive and change them at any time. With this new system finally everyone can be satisfied with their desired hotkey amounts.
Multiplayer on the public test branch has seen many many more fixes and improvements, as well as gotten the new visible class loadout in the lobbies. Dying is still far too little punishing compared to singleplayer, as such we added a very light difficulty increase with 2 enforcers spawning after a delay, we'll see more on that topic. More loot table improvements also have been done. Next up we will add enemy amount scaling so we can reduce health scaling a bit and we want to adjust more maps to have more space.
For the coop Test branch we added a visible ability bar including faction kits, so you can coordinate your loadouts better. This is work in progress and didn't have a visual pass yet.
We decided to remove a popular saving plugin that made us use weird workflows resulting in bugs and hard to maintain code. Instead wrote our own system custom tailored to the needs of Synthetik 2. The new system is now fully in use and many saving and level switching bugs have been fixed. There is probably still some issues here and there but properly dealing with them is now much easier than before. Please let us know if you experience any issues with saving or scene switching.
The combat log has also seen some improvements. Especially in coop, the new filters are very helpful to understand what happened to you.
We replaced the debug-log viewer with a completely new UI. The old solution was a third party plugin we always had workflow issues with and also the CPU and memory overhead was unreasonably high. The new system is designed to be leightweight and easier to extend and maintain in the future. You can find the debug log by pressing "F2" in case you have some issue.
For Ultrawide resolutions all known problematic areas have been fixed.
We started to implement text scaling, which allows making the text smaller or bigger, which is useful for playing on steam deck as example. This is however now completed yet and requires a pass on the entire UI. You can find it in the settings.
For all the modders (and mod enjoyers) we have contracted a talented community member to create new weapon models for everyone to use. These even have HD versions and heat images. You can already find at least one good weapon pack on the mod browser using these new sprites. We specifically don't use these so they are all yours to play with for your own custom weapons.
Never tried modding? Making a weapon is extremely easy and only takes only 7 clicks! (If you haven't created your depot, just name it and create it once the menu is opened, then you should see the same screen)
CLICK ME - Make a weapon mod in 7 clicks
For the next updates we will focus on wrapping up the multiplayer, improve the outgame progression, the new player hub, improved class perk system and localization support. We also want to increase the campaign length a little bit.
Stay tuned and keep watching the spoilers channel on discord!
