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.
Certain weapon models have been improved to match our latest skill level. Some examples below.
As we started with U9, we want a more clear hiearchy in our line-ups, where blues are at the start and epics at the top. This had been quite muddy in the past, however we of course like the Synthetik style where any weapon can work. We are pushing a bit that later weapons are more exciting and also more powerful, instead of them being not really neccessary.
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
We added the first iteration of rare enemy squads, which have around a 50% chance to appear in many maps. These add some higher tension moments to gameplay and can be seen on their special star icon. More details in the enemies section.
We also added varied rare units which can appear if no squad is spawning. Also certain enemies can also spawn next to turrets as before.
Many things have been improved or shuffled around in timings. Some units have had stat adjustments.
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.
