Update 10 is out! We were trying faster turnover times for patches but this was maybe a little too fast, we'll see how to proceed next. U10 brings many improvements around enemies and the core gameplay as well. We also made tons of improvements and fixes for the coop test branch and much more.
A big priority were the coop improvements for the test branch this update. Make sure to let us know how you feel about the changes, especially around the core gameplay and audio!
New rare units and rare enemy squads have been added! From assassins to new Machine Military faction units such as heavy attack spiders, new threats are emerging!
Weapon upgrade crates now have a new weapon tuning system which allows for finer adjustments to your favourite weapons. A new late-game workbench was also added with new powerful performance kits.
The shrine is back, offering a great terrorlevel increase or a survival event and rewards with a set of zir perks if you dared to accept.
We added reverb and varied other features and improvements to the audio system. This should make gameplay sounds more clear and improve realism. Let us know what you think so we can make further adjustments!
We keep tuning the difficulty levels, however your feedback will now be very important as multiple things have changed and the new enemies shaking things up.
The following changes aim to make health management more predictable, planable, and less random, resulting in a harder and more tense gameplay, particularly on higher difficulties. The random nature of health pickups (which were a leftover from very old S1 inspirations, and never really worked well) make them very hard to balance and predict, as such we are looking how to replace them the best. One of these tests is giving them to terrorlevel, as it spawns somewhat consistently, and can be altered through player input in a risk-reward sense.
We have further refined the loot progression, ensuring a logical progression of loot rarity throughout the game and adjusting spawns based on player feedback.
For weapon upgrades, we tried to make things a bit deeper and fix the poor 10% chest upgrades which were visually confusing and had no agency. This is replaced with a new system which lets you tune weapons a little bit instead. For upgradekits, we always hated the random nature and we are testing to drop them on elites instead to give more consistency and make elite kills more exciting.
As usual, more maps have been improved, the Mainboard Environment got a big update, spawnpoints and visuals have been improved in varied areas.
We are looking into more improvements for ambush but there was no time in this patch to make larger changes.
The new core perk gives you stacking benefits for fulfilling contracts. A contract is completed once X amount of kills are achieved without taking damage. This adds a fun minigame to the eliminator which is in line with his identity.
Sniper felt a bit too vulnerable, as such he is getting more base shield to rely less on the stacking mechanic.
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!
- Double barrel scatter-shot shotgun - High burst damage, but long downtime
- Armor Piercing Assault Rifle - Good Magazine size - Accurate when controlled
- Suppressive fire LMG - Very accurate in controlled salvos
- Industrial tool repurposed as LMG - Fires lasers in trio - Stabilized but inaccurate
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!
Cloaked units which are hard to detect, can dodge sideways and use rapid-fire SMGs.
Carries a durable shield and can performs a shield-bash up close. Has a powerful armor aura.
The Purifier is armed with a flame weapon to cleanse out fortified positions
Dispatched on Terrorlevel increase, of higher rank than the Judges. Comes with a medkit.
The pacifier is a slow but dangerous melee unit, equipped with a reactive ion shield. Becomes enraged if other units are killed.
A basic and cheap patrol unit, mostly exists to make a presence.
A patrol wheel carrying a stationary deployable shield. The shield is dropped when destroyed.
A regenerative healing station, which repairs units after a delay.
Boosting aura which regenerates near units and comes with multiple public patrol wheels.
A mobile fortified searchlight with homing fusion missiles. Seek and Destroy in one package.
The Machine Military recon squad is more agressive and posesses defensive shields
A armored attack spider with a powerful focussed laser beam.
A walking array of homing missiles.
A very durable armored spider for frontline combat.
The largest of the 4 legged units, comes with powerful twin cannons.
The common medium tank of the Machine Military. Durable, flexible and with plenty of firepower.
Our dedicated server based online coop has seen a ton of fixes and improvements. You can test it on the beta branch on steam by right clicking your game settings and enabling it in the beta tab. Multiplayer improvements had been a big priority for this update.
Varied audio improvements have been done. Maybe some weapon shots need to be adjusted now as all of them have baked in reverb to some degree.
The combat log is much more helpful and readable now, however keep in mind that this is a sort of a debugging tool and will have internal names shown.
Great progress (WIP) on dynamic tooltips has been done and they can be used for many things already. These are not perfect yet but we shift more and more to them. It is recommended to start using those as well, similar to the newer action. It saves time and shows scaling values on CTRL held.
This has always been highly questionable as you change stats of an other unit without it being visible by a buff or perk, so such changes are impossible to debug. ("Where is this minus health coming from? There is no debuff, no idea")
Also this is buggy with a timer, so if you set this for 5 seconds on another unit, and you die, the effect is never removed, as the unit which would remove it, is not existing
This was added for quick prototyping at the start but it was always clear that this was a bad way of doing things, however now the multiplayer requires to remove it entirely.
So if you want to change a stat of another unit (such as Incubus giving negative health regen to units in range) you have to give them a buff, debuff, item or any action which does that, which has always been the professional way.
The biggest things upcoming are the "loop", outgame progression, new talent system, engineer / raider, boss improvements. Then as usual a lot of polishing, some item work and an alternative floor for arctic are on the plan for the coming updates. We also plan to get multiplayer out quite soon in official state.
We will either do a very short update with fixes and boss improvements, or a larger one next as previously.
We halfway reworked the saving / serialization and some core weapon code, which still causes some issues around weapons and save & load. We try fix these in the near future.
