A new minor update [0.8.1.1230 (b13820764)] is now live with the following changes:

Added

• UI fade animations

Updated

• Ai Improvements to profession upgrade plans and competing for a rank
  
• Production info button is now visible even if there is no production
  
• Safety Production and Safety Consumption values
  
• Overseer effect “safety” changed to “security”

Fixed

• Bandit army commander is wounded when army appears
  
• In rare cases, one could send a Courtship delegation to a character who was in Trade delegation
  
• Potential crash fix

Known Issues

• Some siege events may incorrectly refer to ‘bandits’ in their text
  
• Left ALT skill preview UI flickers
  
• Ranged units show ranged animations while in melee
  
• UI scaling might cause some buttons to go outside the screen on some resolutions. To fix this, adjust the UI scaling percentage in Video Settings.
  
• Character customization images might fail to load occasionally. The UI still works, and reopening the menu sometimes fixes the issue.

- Great Houses of Calderia Team -

As part of our upcoming 1.50 update for Euro Truck Simulator 2, we're excited to bring an update to the Wielton Trailer Pack DLC. Founded in 1996, Wielton S.A. has become one of Europe's top manufacturers of semi-trailers and trailers, With a focus on quality, durability, and innovation, Wielton consistently delivers exceptional trailers.


Today we are happy to share that we have worked closely with Wielton to bring an all new trailer series from their latest catalog. Introducing the Container Master! This new generation of subcontainer trailers features a super lightweight and durable chassis. This update will contain two lengths for this particular trailer.



The first being the Wielton Container Master NS3 P20 SL TANK, which measures 8305mm (27ft) in length and is especially created for the safe transport of Chemical Tank Containers (ADR). We're especially excited for this to be our first-ever branded ADR container trailer in Euro Truck Simulator 2.





The second length we are introducing is the Wielton Container Master NS3 P40 SL, which is designed for the transport of a 40ft container or 2x20ft containers. Both of these trailers will also have a range of options available for them, suited for your hauling needs, such as Side Protection, Rear Bumpers, Tool Boxes, Optional Spare Tire, Mud Flaps, Paintjobs and more.




We look forward to seeing you haul across Europe with these new trailers, which will come as a free update for all Wielton Trailer Pack DLC owners in the 1.50 Update. Until then, be sure to follow us on Twitter/X, Facebook and Instagram to keep up-to date with all the latest news and more.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2455690/Euro_Truck_Simulator_2__Wielton_Trailer_Pack/

It's time to boldly launch what no man (or bear) has launched before.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1309620/Bears_In_Space/

Miss those action-packed 90s toy commercials? So do we. We're bringing them back with our new 'live action' trailer.
Watch the Bears in Space Launch Trailer here:


Over the last 7 years, what started as an after-work passion project between friends, has given rise to a must-play absurdly fun action-packed adventure. We can't wait to see you have a blast with it.

Take care of Maxwell and Beartana for us on the journey home.

- Broadside Games

We'd love to hear what you think of the game in our Discord!


Follow us on socials!
Twitter/X
Instagram
TikTok
Facebook

- Now companies will go bankrupt or merge a little less often;
- Companies will not merge with a player's company without a request;
- An illegal company will no longer participate in new events that appeared with the last update;
- The amount of the yakuza payout is limited;
- Fixed a bug that caused the player to have too many people on the board of directors when merging companies;
- Fixed a bug with a game crash;
- Improved Japanese translation of the new text;
- Other minor bug fixes.

We're excited to announce Season 2: Frostrealm for Infinite Realms is coming soon! The current release window is March 28 to April 3, 2024. We'll confirm the release date next week.

Season 2 will bring fresh content including a new biome, a new boss, a new element for gesture magic, new cosmetics, and bugfixes. More on this soon!

Till then, here's exactly what happens when a new season begins in IR:

• Character Level and Skill Tree (and Accrued Skill Points) will reset.
  
• Characters retain all Zen, Dust, and unlocked / purchased cosmetic items.
  
• Previously acquired gear items will be automatically converted into dust.
  
• For all "Unique" gear items acquired during the previous Season, characters will get to keep them as cosmetic items.
  
• Characters will start with the default Starter Gear.
  
• Characters that reached Level 10 or higher in the previous Season will gain a "Season Rank", indicating how many past Seasons the character participated in. More details on this next week!
  
• Characters will gain a "Season Level Prestige" indicating their character level in the previous season. In other words, each Character will get its own "Season Level Prestige"
  
  • Level 0-9 = Novice
    
  • Level 10 - 30 = Bronze
    
  • Level 31 - 50 = Silver
    
  • Level 51 - 75 = Gold
    
  • Level 76 - 99 = Diamond
    
  • Level 100 = Legendary

Hello everyone, lets talk about Blog Post 5!

In this post, we're looking at the crafting systems for Bellwright and showing off some of the core gameplay loops when it comes to automating and managing your settlement. There are three main goals when it comes to the upkeep and moderation of your encampment whether its food, new armors and equipment, or new buildings/technology to construct. It will be up to the you to determine where your priorities lie and find the right balance to keep your soldiers fed and combat ready for the upcoming rebellion.

As usual, this footage is under development and subject to many balance or further UI updates as we enter into early access.



If you have any questions or suggestions for future deep-dives into the in-game mechanics and systems, please let us know on the Bellwright Discord.

Until next time,
-Misper

In an unexpected turn of events, Surgent team members were asked what the official football mascot of Kenzera would be in a recent Discord Q+A.

Against all odds, they actually had answers readily available (they may have also inadvertently opened some old wounds in the process).

Hear their responses and get a sneaky reveal of a character we haven't talked about yet:



It's only one month until ZAU is released worldwide, which means you only have four more weeks to get your hands on the pre-order in-game items (and 10% discount) we announced at The Game Awards in December!

In the meantime, you can always give the demo a try:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2316580/Tales_of_Kenzera_ZAU/

- The Surgent Team

Hello, Mist warriors,

This is Cecil Armstrong, the Competitive Producer for Guild Wars 2. We recently completed a World Restructuring beta event, which ran from January 12 to February 2, so let's talk about it!

We're pretty happy with the results and data gathering provided by this beta: uncovering some startup data errors, increased queue issues, and some beta-specific reset and UI errors. In addition, we gathered great feedback from community members about their experiences and have some good areas for improvement identified. We've already set to work on those fixes and improvements, so let's get into some of the details.





We uncovered several individually small issues that compounded upon one another and led to incorrect team placement. First, during the EU reset at the start of the beta, we discovered that our servers had failed to read the new team-creation data and fell back to its last known good data: the teams from the last beta. We identified the issue pretty much immediately and restarted the matchup with the correct data. Unfortunately, some players were presented with the option to select their team when the wrong data was active, and that choice prevented them from being fixed in that reset. Ultimately, our engineers came up with a clever solution that allowed us to identify the affected players and fix them programmatically, but we couldn't get it done until early evening Pacific Time, so most of our EU players had already logged off for the night.

After resolving that, we could dig into the still-unknown reports. We identified a trend of people who told us they selected their guild close to the lockout deadline and started exploring that thread, revealing our second major issue. The analytics that track guild selection had an error and stopped reporting during the night before the lockout, effectively preventing any selection from making it to the server for an extra day. This was an easy fix once it was spotted, and now we've got some safeguards in place to spot the issue if it were to occur again.

The rest of the issues in this category occurred very rarely, and some are still being investigated, but we also caught a couple of places where the system was working as expected but felt broken. The first is in the case of an inactive WvW guild. Our system has a method for removing guilds and players from the team-creation data if they don't participate in WvW for an extended period. Normally, this won't affect you if you have a WvW guild selected, as it is very likely someone else that selected that guild has played WvW recently. If no one with the guild selected has played recently, everyone in it gets sorted as a solo player. We are looking into solutions for this.

The other edge case we saw affected players who had transferred worlds to a different region. If you normally play in NA but had transferred to EU during the lockout, you would be sorted into a team on EU. If you then transferred back to NA, you wouldn't have been kept with your WvW guild.

The combination of all these issues meant a lot of players were not kept with their guilds as expected, especially in the first team creation. I want to give a huge shoutout and thanks to Rubi, Roy, and the amazing members of our Customer Service team, who spent a lot of time getting players manually moved to the right teams to minimize the impact of these issues. This is the first beta for which we had a proper solution for manually changing teams, and we certainly put it through some rigorous live testing.


The dreaded "queue issue" or "Map Is Full" error struck again during this beta. With the increased population due to the very popular WvW Rush and World Restructuring beta, we saw occurrences and reports of these issues skyrocket.

While this is sort of a known quantity and ongoing investigation in WvW, we did find some new variations of this issue that are specific to the World Restructuring system. The team is exploring why that might be and seeing if it can inform the larger queue-issue investigation as well.


Beta resets have had some odd UI errors, and while we solved many of them, there were a couple that still affected us this time around. Notable reset errors were:

• Team names could be incorrect on the WvW Mist War panel
• Players could be unable to join WvW via the UI or portals

Thankfully, these have a simple workaround and are fixed by relogging, but they still led to reset frustration for lots of players. We also discovered an issue in which players that had set themselves to invisible status would not see the proper UI for their WvW guilds. While this issue was visual only and the server was still getting the proper data, it likely caused people to be misplaced in team creation due to the confusion. Luckily, all these errors have somewhat similar root causes, and we have fixes prepared for them.




Despite the issues, the beta was very successful in many ways, giving us tons of data and great player feedback. Thank you all for sharing your experiences with us to help us improve the World Restructuring system! I want to quickly address some of the major feedback topics.


This was a mixed experience. There has been a lot of discussion about the balance of specific matchups, time zone coverage, and the distribution of experienced commanders (especially open tags). I am very glad that we received so much feedback in this area, as it was the primary goal of this beta. Our new team-creation algorithm was utilized for the first time, and the new criteria are working as expected.

The goal of this system is to create the most engaging matches possible, ensuring there is a good balance of player and commander activity throughout the matchups and across time zones. We certainly have improvements to make with how our criteria are used to create balanced teams, but initial data and feedback shows us moving in a good direction.


Many players in our EU community experienced issues communicating with their teammates due to the heavy mixing of international guilds and players. With communication being so critical to a good WvW experience, this is a major area of improvement for us. This is challenging to solve without breaking down the balance aspects of the team-creation algorithm. We don't have a timeline or solution nailed down for this yet, but we are investigating ways to mitigate the issue.


Several players have expressed a feeling of loss of community with the World Restructuring system. While we understand that this departure from the longstanding WvW server system will have some negative impacts, World Restructuring provides a regular redistribution of players that is critical to the long-term health and balance of the game mode. We are aiming to provide tools and options for you to create and maintain robust communities within the new structure.


We hear you! This was a major issue for some teams. During this first week, this was heavily impacted by a population surge from the WvW Rush event, but even in later weeks we could see some significant queue times on certain teams. We're looking into ways to reduce queue pressure in prime-time slots while protecting balance in lower population times.

Many players have also pointed out that long queues led to an increase in AFK players; a vicious cycle. We are investigating better ways to clear inactive players from the maps to reduce this inflated pressure on queues.

Of course, both of these issues were also made worse (and significantly more frustrating) by the "Map Is Full" errors we discussed above, and that investigation is a top priority for us.


During the World Restructuring beta, I was paying special attention to commanders and saw a lot of extra people tagging up!

• Unique Commanders: 6,236
• Commanders were tagged for an average of 4.7 hours during the beta
• Average weekly commanding hours increased by approximately 26% during the beta

Earlier this year, an issue caused us to disable gliding in WvW for a period, which ended up being a sort of impromptu rules change test. Many of our players certainly felt the impact, as you'll see below.

• 35,546 players died of fall damage while gliding was disabled
• This averaged 5,359 falling deaths per day; a 94% increase over the normal daily average

With this beta wrapped up and lots of work yet to come, we want to talk a little about our future plans.


This is a system with lots of moving parts, data, deadlines, and player input. In an effort to make that information more accessible and apparent, we're planning several UI and API improvements. We don't have a definite timeline on these yet, but we will share updates as we have them.

• UI
  
  • Adding Next Team Creation and Next Lockout Deadline to guild/WvW panels
  • Adding guild roster indicators for players who have chosen the currently viewed guild as their WvW guild
  • Making the WvW Team Selection panel information visible but inactive when you have an assigned team, allowing players to see what teams their contacts and guilds are on
• API
  
  • Adding Next Team Creation times for each region
  • Adding Next Lockout Deadline
  • Adding WvW guilds' assigned teams
  • Adding WvW guilds' next team
    
    • Similar to our World Linking forum posts, this would allow guilds to know what team they will be assigned at reset as soon as the team-creation data reaches the server
  • Adding an API key option for a player's selected WvW guild
  • Adding an API key option for a player's assigned team / next team

Many players were frustrated by the feeling of "losing" a guild slot to properly organize in the World Restructuring system. We always want to encourage players to build long-lasting and meaningful communities in our game, and this made that more difficult. To remedy that, we have decided to add a sixth guild slot when World Restructuring is turned on full-time. This new guild slot will have all normal guild functions, and it will be available to all players, regardless of their WvW participation.


During the beta, we got quite a few questions about the future of world and region transfers with the removal of home worlds. We wanted to let you know that region transfer functionality will still be available via an updated character selection interface. In addition, we will be setting the gem cost to transfer regions to a flat 500 gems, as we no longer need to have variable costs based on world populations.


While the beta was mostly a major success for the team, we are concerned about the new version of the queue issue we've discovered, particularly the evidence that World Restructuring is worsening it. With the "Map Is Full" error being such an extremely negative player experience, we aren't comfortable enabling the system full-time before we resolve it. Investigating this issue is the number-one priority for the World Restructuring team, but we don't have an expected timeline to solve it right now. We will share more information on this issue when we can.

Once we find a solution to this queue issue, we'll have a clearer picture of what the next step is for turning World Restructuring on full-time. Ideally, the next time we turn on World Restructuring, it will stay on.


Your involvement in our World Restructuring beta events has given us the ability to test and tune the system to support the future of WvW. We've got lots of exciting stuff coming and lots of hard work ahead, but we couldn't have gotten here without your participation and support.

For now, I'll leave you with a quick reminder of our current priorities. The Future Goals section below specifically references things that we know we want to do but could be deprioritized or significantly delayed as other important issues come up.

• Top Priority
  
  • New World Restructuring "Map Is Full" error investigation
  • Adding Next Lockout Deadline timer to in-game UI
  • Add 6th Guild Slot
• Future Goals (No Timeline)
  
  • API integrations for WvW and World Restructuring information
  • Additional guild & WvW interface improvements
  • Better mixed-language team experience
  • Improved detection of inactive players

Here are some things that are new this week:

Added level 18 preview

This preview can be found in the legacy museum. It is a technical test and is rather unoptimized, it is not very playable either. More details for it will be coming next week when we (hopefully) drop it.

Added several new liquids

Luka's almond water brew, K3 Rizz soda, Grim's Kvass, NotASDF's Cashew Water, and Buzti's Backrooms Brew have all been added. We named them all after our playtesters. Thank you Luka, K3, Grimnee, NotASDF, and SherlockBuzti!

Added 3 new songs

Just like last week, we have more songs from LunaNightZ! These are ambient themes for levels 23, 36, and 369. They're quite calming. Visit Luna's soundcloud at https://soundcloud.com/zerobladerising

Released frowner from his house

Frowner has been released from the house in the boiler room! Just like in the old days you can now take frowner to other areas of level 5. How sweet...


Added tons of new music and ambience

With the help of our lovely playtester and contributor LunaNightZ, we have added many new music and ambience tracks to levels. Among these are themes for level Critical, level Theta, level 25, and many more.

You can visit their Soundcloud at https://soundcloud.com/zerobladerising


Revamped MEG base alpha



This is the third iteration of the MEG base. Featuring all new entrance rooms, lounges, offices, and bathrooms, this iteration is quite expansive. All of the MEG features you know and love from the old base are still here. There are new NPCs and even an MEG cat!

Revamped BNTG trader's vault



The level 1 BNTG base is the largest base in-game! Featuring 12 shops and many other buildings, it contains all sorts of goodies to buy and sell. Now the base has gotten a graphical rework, with much more rubble and many more dirty surfaces. Canopies instead of cubic geometry, and trims instead of straight edges. The base as a whole is a bit darker now.

Revamped level 22

Level 22 has gotten a light revamp, putting more realistic rubble in place of rubble that comes out of no where. More dirt and grime leads to a more ruined atmosphere. In addition, many of the walls are now concrete, giving it a varied feel.



Added Level 369

Back a few updates ago we added Level Theta. It was created by a member of our discord named Gatchi13. They did an awesome job sculpting the level in Unreal Engine and then we revised it and put it in-game. So, we did it again. In fact, anyone can submit their levels, as long as it meets our quality standards. Join our discord if you're interested!

Level 369, made by our discord user Dave, is based on the Backrooms Fandom version of the level. It's a large grassy complex of concrete halls, often talked about as "The Grassrooms". Calming wind chimes play in the background. There are three exits. One to level 9 via a key door, one to level 18 via a vine, and one to level 8 via a rocky area. There are physical windchimes that the player can interact with, and also physical vines that the player can crawl up. There are many fruits and foods as well scattered around the outskirts of the level.



Added...gun...skins?

It sounds like a dirty word these days, but I'll tell you, "no microtransactions, ma!"

Jokes aside, there are now 10 new gun skins in this first set for the AS-VAL, AKS-74U, AK-47, MAC-11, and M4A1. These can be purchased in the Guns n optics n ammo shop in the frontrooms. Again, no microtransactions, just a highly requested feature bought with in-game money.



Added new balloon sounds

Our discord member @SherlockBuzti made three new balloon noises! And yes, it is an actual recording of a balloon popping.

Buffed most entities

A lot of balancing changes have occurred this week. Previously, many entities that were quite large only took a few shots to disable. This is no longer the case. About 2/3s of the entities have been buffed to make each encounter feel like a real fight.

Raised prices of many things

The shacks in Shack Storage, the building supplies in Moe's Building Supplies, and some other items have all gotten a bump.

Rebalanced the clump wheel

The individual token payout sectors have been decreased from 10->6 and from 5->3. This is only the start of the clump wheel's long journey and shaping into a fair game element.

Improved Smiler AI

Instead of chasing you around the map infinitely, Smilers now have a set radius where they disengage like most other entities. They aren't all-knowing any longer! They also engage at a shorter distance.

Hardmode changes

For those who don't know, hard mode can be ticked on in settings when you're in the frontrooms. This gives a hardcore experience with all sorts of buffs/effects. Now, when you die in hard mode you'll get sent back to the frontrooms. Not only that, but the vault will now have limited quantity in hard mode!

Added several new areas to the poolrooms

The 9-map poolrooms complex is here! Full of new and freshly revamped maps. A full list of maps is:

> (New) Poolrooms entrance area
> Sprawling poolrooms
> (New) Poolrooms showers
> (New) Water-filled desert
> Dark poolrooms
> Dead-end house
> Hotel pool
> Red poolrooms
> Dead-end pool neighborhood



Added a new procedural area to Level Critical

An infinite hotel complex has been added to the front of Level Critical. It has red neon theming like the rest of Level Critical, but is much less ruined.

Questionnaire questions are now checked by default

In the beginning of the tutorial, the questionnaire questions are now checked by default to prevent folks from accidentally leaving them unchecked.

Here are a few rapid-fire changes:

Added lactose-free lucky o' milk
Added a new song to level 480
Fixed a small bug with the ammo boxes
Fixed a bug with the full auto scrap bug
Fixed a bug with ammo boxes
Fixed some achievement issues
Fixed a level 9 house collision bug
Added a hive entrance in level 8
Removed poolrooms devrooms entrance
Buffed AK-47
Fixed wretch and mangled ragdolls
Buffed M1 Garand
Buffed most entity health
Disabled windows in the indoor playground
Nerfed G28
M1 Garand ejects bottlenecked casings
Added more details to the level 10 houses
Fixed level 5's elevator
Compressed 200+ textures and audio files
Fixed glitchy rocks in level Critical
Improved the new level 9
Increased clump pull time
Fixed level 1's sports card trade-in
Sports cards can now be added to the inventory
Nerfed Taurus Raging Bull
Nerfed AK-47
Nerfed Mac-11
Fixed Level 13 entity pileup
Added the legacy museum to the normal hub
Fixed chicken sandwich hand positioner
Replaced poolrooms ladder
Moved showers and sinks in the poolrooms to be at a better height
Level 3999 challenges UX has been improved
Jumpscare achievement fixed
Fixed book hand positioner
Fixed bad spawner in level 13
Buffed brown hounds

IN OTHER BRVR NEWS

The only piece of news we have to report this week is that BrVR is now full price again after a wonderful Spring Sale.

Join our discord https://discord.gg/Px6jpjFEt6
Wishlist our other game Bread or Dead VR

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2380600/Bread_or_Dead/

If you like the prologue or/and want to support the devteam and you still didn't try the full game, grab it now✅

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1905980/Farmers_Father_Save_the_Innocence/



Oh and we have just uploaded full game release trailer. Check it out:



Try to survive and save your family.

Have fun,
FreeMind team.