Sep 26, 2024

Stars Reach - Ninja.Niina

by Raph Koster

Hello everyone, I’m back with the third chapter in our exploration of the pillars for our vision of Stars Reach. Today I’ll be talking about the ones that get much more concrete about how the game works.

It’s been great to see the discussion of these pillars on the official Discord and MMO sites online!

The last big pillar starts out by describing the setting of the game. There’s a lot of stuff piled into a single overstuffed sentence, I admit! But we wanted to capture all the key elements that make the galaxy of Stars Reach what it is.

An Endlessly Explorable Fun Retro Sci-Fantasy Universe
The world is grimdark enough; our game will be visually appealing, brightly colored, and have a tone of optimism and enjoyment. It will accommodate melancholy, mystery, and even fear, but will do so within the overarching atmosphere of limitless possibility and player enjoyment. Around every corner will be new vistas, new things to discover, and new mysteries to unravel. New planets will be found (and lost), old secrets will be uncovered, and new content will be rolling out constantly, allowing players to find their own paths in a galaxy of infinite potential

There are a bunch of adjectives in there!
A lot of settings aren’t worlds. They don’t necessarily lend themselves to MMOs. A setting that is great for an MMO has to have variety, it has to have rich texture to it, and a degree of coherence and realism that a purely character-driven IP doesn’t have. We owe Tolkien a big debt for setting the template for detailed worldbuilding in service of an epic story.

But worldbuilding also has a “flavor” to it. The setting of Mad Max has thematic implications, and it’d be pretty darn weird to set the stories of, say, Studio Ghibli movies in a setting like that. (When they did their own post-apocalyptic thing, in Nausicaä, it was pretty different).

So let’s focus first on the “retro sci-fantasy” bit. Why retro? Why call back to older rocket-and-rayguns stuff?

It isn’t because we want to aim the game towards people old enough to remember that stuff from when they were growing up. And it’s not because we want to aim towards kids (a lot of that iconography has aged downwards as it has been used by toys).
Rather, it’s because we want to capture the spirit of that sort of sci-fi. It came from a period before, during, and post World War II where there was great enthusiasm about the power of science and the potential of humanity. Today, we see that retrofuturistic style used as a way to evoke the lost dreams we once had.

Here are a few images from our “mood board” of artwork that reflect that sense of possibility… but also the danger that can be out there.

After the war ended, print science fiction moved away from the sense of optimism (it took media SF on screen and in comics a while to catch up). The Golden Age gave way to New Wave SF, which was much more pessimistic about humanity and the future. Ever since, science fiction has been much more ambivalent about technology. Even the premier space opera of our time, Star Wars, is gritty and dirty.
Ultimately, that ties back to the core themes of our game and our lore:

Stars Reach is a game about hope and optimism. The real world is grimdark enough. We want to capture that sense of possibility that was present in Golden Age sci-fi, that sensawunda (“sense of wonder”) that it evoked.

That doesn’t mean we have to shy away from serious themes or dark elements in the storylines. We need a world that can encompass many sorts of stories. But it should be presented in an overall spirit of optimism.

Humor is fair game, but we lean towards wit, caricature, and gentle humor, as
opposed to cartoon, slapstick, or “easy” dad jokes. This is not a comedy game.
It’s a game that takes things lightly.

The lore really deserves its own blog post, because a lot of thought went into it. It’s designed to provoke questions, and in keeping with the other pillars, it’s meant to be easy to approach but offer depths that aren’t apparent on first glance.

The game will have deep lore.
As Tyrion put it at the end of Game of Thrones, stories are what hold us together. Tribal identity is driven by culture, and culture is driven by stories. We want to create a new tribe, the players of our game. We can unfold discoveries over time, and drive the sort of tapestry of complexity that long-lasting IPs have, a web of characters and motivations that generate fan fiction and cosplay and the like. These things are what create a long lasting fandom.

The central theme of the game is that our player species have plundered and destroyed their homeworlds as they have clawed their way up to the brink of interstellar civilization. Now, these species have been given a second chance: a galaxy of terraformed worlds on which to build their future.

Will they learn from the lesson of the fate of their various homeworlds? In order to support this theme, responsible shepherding of these inherited planets must be rewarded by the game, and thoughtless plundering of them should be punished.
Among the things that we want to make sure the lore represents are an understanding of the grand sweep of history, themes of cross-cultural communication, how one deals with a Galaxy where a genocidal species basically swept thousands of planets clean, a feeling of uncovering a deep past… one of the central mysteries is, where did the Old Ones go and why did they leave? We don’t know whether they annihilated themselves, decamped to greener pastures, or were exterminated by something even more terrifying.

So all in all, Stars Reach is upbeat, optimistic, and colorful; yet capable of weighty themes and strong characters. It is meant to project hope, and it is also a game that winks and nods at itself and the tropes it uses. If I had to sum it all up, it would be we’re going into space, and it’s going to be awesome.

Now, if you’ve followed the reception to SR online, you probably already know that the graphics are a bit controversial. I’ll restate again that we aren’t at all done with the visual style. But I also won’t lie, nailing an art style for the above is challenging. It ties back to whether the basic presentation is conveying that tone but also stretches to accommodate all the tonal variety we want in the lore and setting – and also reaches the audience we want.

One of the challenges with a hyperrealistic style is telling all the games apart. As rendering capability has increased, realism is starting to get… kind of boring. From a business standpoint, we need to stand out in the market. We also need to keep costs down, and our technology that allows us to stream content down on the fly works more cost-effectively with less load in terms of highly detailed textures. But lastly, high realism tends to tell broader audiences “this game is not for you.” It signals to people that the game is complex, unapproachable, and often specifically chases away women players.

The game will be welcoming and fun and beautiful.

Edgy may drive core audiences, but most mass market things are fairly sunny and brightly colored. If we want to drive retention, we need the experience to not be stressful; an escape more than an ordeal. If we want people to live in the game, we need to make it feel livable.

I vividly remember two great examples of this from long ago – when World of Warcraft came out, and when Dark Age of Camelot came out, they both felt immediately more colorful and welcoming than Everquest was.
This is a hard line to walk. When we were doing early concept art, we actually developed a “realism to cartoon” scale, where we made sketches of a human avatar’s head, in styles ranging from kids’ cartoon through to realistic, and told ourselves, “never fall below a 7 on this scale.” But it’s a long way from sketches to in-game art, and we still have more work to do.

This leads to a set of specific goals for the art style of the game:

Do to grimdark sci-fi what World of Warcraft did to grimdark fantasy.
Bright and colorful — a place you want to be.
High beauty, not high fidelity – by which we mean, it is more important that the environment be attractive than it be super high res textures and realistic rendering.
It can be fun and even funny, but archetypes, not cartoons.
Familiar tropes that serve as “anchors” for players’ imagination, because much of the best visual design leans on things that are already familiar, then add a twist – rather than going all out weird with something that people can’t relate to
Strong silhouettes and iconic forms that can move across art styles.
Influence from caricature and anime, for a contemporary look.
Iterative development: we test our stuff and see that players respond.

You can be sure that as we continue to iterate the art style, we’ll be doing a lot of that last one with you all!

Our last pillar is all about gameplay.

The game will constantly generate new content.
It is expensive to make content. We want to enable players to create as much as possible, and we want to enable the game to create as much as it can as well. It has to be constant, because we want players to always want to learn about what’s going on. We want them to feel like it’s something that stays fresh and evolves and makes them want to check in regularly.

Now, this doesn’t exclude content we create. But that’s sort of the default assumption these days in design: that the designers will populate all the content. Designing for the game itself to drive emergence doesn’t mean that we abdicate our responsibility to create engaging content. But it does mean taking a look at every single system to ensure that it isn’t reliant on that.

From this emerged a whole bunch of pretty specific principles which shaped the game design very powerfully.

We decided that Collection, Crafting, Settlement, and Combat were the core activities of our game. This wasn’t arbitrary, either. It was driven by the audience we are after, which is a large one, and a diverse one in the sense that it is made up of players with varied gameplay preferences but who all like existing in a sandbox together where they interact.
This then also implied two big things:

The entire game economy is player-driven.
Combat is opt-in, and not at the core of the game loop.

To many players, these two things may feel like a marginalization of combat. The fact is that combat usually marginalizes everything else, so every once in a while turnabout is fair play! I was wondering online a while back on Reddit, “when exactly did we start calling everything else you do in an MMO ‘life skills?’” The default current of MMO design usually puts combat at the center, and relegates other ways to play to “side games.”

Everyone always feels like their preferred way to play should be dominant, and can even get pretty resentful of seeing other ways to play present. But there are good reasons to interweave everyone more.

We want to put Community First because MMOs are about other people. I often describe virtual worlds as “be someone you aren’t, somewhere that you can’t be, with others.” That’s the heart of the unique offering of MMOs. You can get individual bits of that sentence elsewhere, but there’s something magical that happens when you get all three from one experience. And it leads to a few more goals:

Player-driven economy fostering social ties – because each different play to play the game can be related to the others via the goods and services that playstyle outputs.
Similarly, having multiple guild types and multiple guild membership also helps foster strong ties. Basically, a common pattern that we see (and a common mistake, we’ve come to realize) is trying to make human relationships one-size-fits-all.
“Increase communication bandwidth.” Chat, emote animations, etc, should be very important, because the higher the bandwidth for emotion and humanity to pass through the game, the more likely players are to behave, because it’s easier to recognize the people on the other side of the wire as being people like yourself.

Of course, that means you have to recognize that it takes all sorts of people playing in their own ways to build a world. That sort of diverse playerbase is very different from chasing a super narrow audience of specialists in just one way to play. The bet we are making is that the range of playstyles in one game will appeal to people who get tired of one-note play. If you get bored of one way to play, you can go try another.

We think of that range of play in a couple of ways. We have to support diverse sorts of players – different age ranges, genders (a lot of games chase away demographics through their choice of art style, as mentioned above), ethnicities, and so on. We also need to support different playstyles; we have used both Quantic Foundry and Solsten models to think about our players at different stages of the game’s development.

And lastly, we need to level the playing field some between new players and old pros. The power accumulation curve of most MMOs results in friends being unable to play together as soon as one of the members has more or less time to play than the others. MMOs have long recognized this problem and built design hacks into the system that basically “undo” you advancement when playing in mixed-level situations. The first one of these was “sidekicking” in City of Heroes in 2004, but nowadays we have level scaling and other approaches, all of which are fundamentally about ignoring the level system that the game is designed around.

Since we favor horizontal progression, where instead of “numbers go up” we have “number of commands goes up,” we can avoid this issue. In our game, your hit points won’t go up noticeably. And you will do more damage not because you leveled up or your gear got better, but because you compounded tactics together that you unlocked with skills.

So, that (finally) finishes the series on key pillars for the game. I hope you found it an interesting glimpse behind the curtain on how we try to wrangle a huge project like Stars Reach into something that a team can wrap their head around.

That’s it for this week, but I’ll see you around the Discord, or Reddit, or wherever your favorite theory crafting community is, and if you want to talk about these pillars, I’m always up for it!

Sep 26, 2024

Season 4 - IT'S SHOWTIME!

THE FINALS - Embark | Oscar

UPDATE 4.0.0

IT’S SHOWTIME!

Welcome to Season 4, Contestants!

Season 4 brings exciting new content and features to THE FINALS! From the sleek, urban Fortune Stadium map sponsored by HOLTOW, ENGIMO, and ISEUL-T, to three powerful new weapons, there's plenty to dive into.

We’ve also added sponsor tracks, allowing players to sign up with one of our three sponsors for unique rewards, new World Tour ranks, and improved Ranked Cashout Tournaments. Plus, new customization options, loadout slots, and revamped leaderboards ensure a more competitive and personalized experience.

Read about all the changes below, and gear up for the most spectacular season of the gameshow yet!

New Map: Fortune Stadium

Welcome to Fortune Stadium! Our sponsors, HOLTOW, ENGIMO, and ISEUL-T, are bringing you this new map in our arena! Traverse the streamlined urban environment which has sectors dedicated to each brand and some highly vertical spaces.

Three New Weapons

HEAVY
.50 Akimbo
These bad boys bring extra firepower and precision to the arena!

MEDIUM
Pike-556
Extend the effective range of the Medium build with this designated marksman rifle!

LIGHT
M26 Matter
Swiftly master this new pump-action shotgun!

New Feature: Sponsors

This season, our proud sponsors are looking to sign with contestants and support their seasonal journey with swag, money, and fanfare! Players now have the option to sign with either HOLTOW, ENGIMO or ISEUL-T as their sponsor for the duration of Season 4.

Earn Fans by completing Contracts and performing well in the arena. The more Fans you earn, the more rewards your sponsor will offer you! Can you make it all the way and earn everything from your sponsor of choice? Choose wisely though, you only get to sign once!

New Feature: Alternate Sights & Scopes

We’ve added a selection of alternate sights and scopes to some of the existing weapons, allowing you to switch between traditional sights or alternatives like Red Dots or Scopes. These alternative sights are unlocked using VRs via the weapon customization screen.

New World Tour Ranks

For Season 4 we’ve introduced Platinum and Diamond ranks to World Tour! We’ve also heard your feedback on the difficulty of earning Emerald rank, so in Season 4 Emerald will now be unlocked and available to earn from the beginning of the season and will be earned with Win Points, not tournament wins. Expect lots of fun stops along the way as you climb your way to Emerald Tier 1!

New Ranked mode

Ranked Tournaments are back! This Season, you’ll be competing in Cashout with an 8-team, 24-player tournament format. As part of improving the ranked experience, we’re also now seeding tournaments based on the strengths of each team, and your change in Ranked Score will be dependent on where you finish in the tournament as a whole compared to your initial seeding. We believe this will give a clearer and much more authentic tournament experience.

Cashout Rule Variants for Ranked and World Tour

To give the best experience in our competitive Ranked Tournaments and our more casual-friendly World Tour Tournaments we’ve introduced slightly different variants of the Cashout rule set in each mode.

In Ranked Tournaments, the 10% team wipe penalties are active, gameshow events such as ‘Low Gravity,’ for example, are disabled to reduce randomness, and loadout changes are only permitted between rounds of the tournament.

In the World Tour, team wipe penalties are disabled, game show events are still enabled, and players will be able to swap items from their Reserve into their Loadout between team wipes and between rounds. While Ranked Cashout is set in stone, there will be opportunities to change up the World Tour experience in various ways throughout the season!

Improved Player Cards

It’s time to get personal on the Player Cards! For Season 4, we’ve added a new layout, collectible and adjustable badges, borders, and player titles. There are new backgrounds available to collect as well, and we’ve improved the lighting on your character to help showcase your style!

Updated Circuits

Circuits now run in parallel to the World Tour stops and share the same Sponsors, allowing you another way to earn rewards from the show’s benefactors. We’ve also removed the requirement to complete earlier Contracts before you can access later Circuits, hopefully making the experience a little more streamlined.

Two Extra Loadout Slots

Due to popular demand, we’ve added two additional Loadout slots, bringing the total number of slots from six to eight.

New Battle Pass

This season’s Battle Pass has 106 levels of rewards to unlock. It heavily features items from popular sponsor OSPUZE and rewards from returning sponsor IVADA.

New Career Levels

We’ve added 10 new levels, complete with rewards, to the Career Level system. These rewards come courtesy of one of the show’s sponsors, ENO+RINO.

Leaderboard Improvements

We’d made some big improvements to leaderboards for Season 4. Players can now filter leaderboards by region, and the World Tour leaderboard also includes filters for the different tour stops.

We’ve introduced leaderboards for Quick Cash, Terminal Attack, Bank It, and Power Shift, and a board tracking the performance of each Sponsor.

New Static Crosshair Setting

THE FINALS’ default crosshair is a dynamic crosshair that will often move as your character animates, for example when running and jumping. We know that some of you prefer a crosshair that stays locked to the center of the screen. We’ve added a new setting to our crosshair customization to turn “in-world crosshair” off, which will create a true static crosshair that stays in the center at all times.

New Feature: Facial Hair Customization

You’ll now have the option to select from a variety of beards and mustaches to give your competitor a more sophisticated look! Check it out in the style tab!

New Feature: First Time Player Experience
In order to welcome new players into the game with more confidence, we’ve made some significant changes to the onboarding experience! These changes include intro videos for each build type, a more advanced Cashout tutorial that shows off destruction, clearer and faster menu systems, and more!

We’re also debuting a brand new set of OSPUZE-branded starting outfits because, let’s be honest, we’d all grown tired of the rookie ‘pajamas!’ Don’t worry veterans, you’ll get them, too!

In addition, we’ve added a clear set of goals and unlock activities to the main menu in order to guide new players through their first five rounds. We hope this helps ease new players into the game and introduces them to all the fun there is to be had.

Season 3 Rewards Coming Soon

Normally, all ranked rewards are delivered at the start of the next season! This season, however, we will delay the delivery in order to do a final sweep of our leaderboards and ensure that all players have earned their rewards fair and square.

In Season 3, we added new competitive modes and rewards to THE FINALS by introducing Ruby rank in Ranked Terminal Attack and Emerald in World Tour.

We know all of you want to show off your progwess from Season 3 as soon as possible, but we want to be sure that these rewards are handed out correctly, to those who earned them through fair play, these rewards will be handed out in Update 4.2!

DLCs

At the launch of Season 4, we’ll have three new DLC available at three different price points for you to browse through and check out! Do note that, just like last season, the Starter Pack returns as a DLC for this season as well.

Let’s get into the details!

With a new map, expanded arsenal, sponsor mechanics, and tons of improvements across ranks, leaderboards, and customization, this season is shaping up to be the best version of THE FINALS yet. Now, let’s dive into the full details and numbers behind these changes to help you prepare for The Arena!

Balance Changes

Archetypes

Heavy

Dev Note: We wanted to leave a quick dev note on the state of the Heavy archetype, as we know there have been some frustrations that the Heavy is ‘overly nerfed’ compared to the Light archetype. While the Light (most played) does remain much more played than the Heavy (least played) as of the end of Season 3, across all skill tiers and modes we see that the Heavy is by far the most winning of our three archetypes, with Light the most losing. Our intent with much of the balancing is to bring all of the archetypes' win rates more closely in line, while also equalizing their pick rates. This ultimately means that, when it comes to the Heavy, we need to work through a process of both making it more balanced in terms of power and making it more fun to play. This will be an ongoing process but is the underlying thought process behind some of the changes made to start Season 4 when it comes to balance and usability of items.

Gadgets

Anti-Gravity Cube

Increased radius from 6m to 7m
Increased height from 11m to 12m

Breach Charge

Increased ammo from 2 to 3
Increased cooldown from 26s to 30s
Dev Note: We felt the Breach Charge had become under-used in the current meta and we believe this change will increase its value versus the Thermal Bore

Data Reshaper

Increased range from 15m to 21m
Increased number of charges from 2 to 3

Explosive Mine

Decreased max damage from 140 to 120
Decreased cooldown from 30s to 15s
Decreased ammo count from 2 to 1 (max mines deployed remains at 2)

Dev Note: Our intent for the Explosive Mines has always been to have them be a defensive gadget that covers choke points to help protect an objective, and where placement is a skill. Being able to immediately place two of them back-to-back led to a lot of mine stacking, often right on the objective, and allowed defenses to be set up too quickly. We hope that adding 15s between each deployment and less damage will lead to less stacking and encourage teams to get to the objective location sooner in order to be able to fully set up defenses before combat commences

Flashbang

Increased the max duration of the Blind status effect from 4s to 4.5s
Increased the max duration of the max intensity of the Blind status effect from 1.8s to 3.5s
Increase the intensity of flashes that explode close to the enemy’s position
Increased the view angle of flashes, causing more intense flashes when the flash goes off by someone’s side or slightly behind them
Flashbangs now only show Hit Indicators on the crosshair if they reach a minimum amount of intensity on a hostile target
Decreased the intensity and duration of the Blind status effect on teammates
Improved the leniency of hit detection of the Flashbang when targeting players, so that it is less likely to be blocked by small objects

Dev Note: We found the Flashbang to have been underutilized and have added some quality of life fixes that will hopefully make them more reliable and effective.

Glitch Trap

Disabled crosshair hit markers when the Glitch Trap attaches to an enemy, so that it can no longer be used to detect players
Decreased ammo from 2 to 1
Decreased cooldown from 30s to 20s

Jump Pad

Added a small amount of variance to the Jump Pad so that objects cannot bounce on them indefinitely

Proximity Sensor

Increased radius from 10m to 11m

RPG-7

Decreased damage from 140 to 100
Increased reload time from 0.9s to 2.15s
Decreased projectile dispersion when aiming down sights from 0.3x to 0.25x

Dev Note: We never really intended the RPG to be an ‘opener’ in combat, even if it is an item that is more accessible to new players, the intent was always that this was for destruction first and foremost. We believe this change makes it still usable as an opener, but a much less valuable one, shifting its focus back to destruction and breaching.

Tracking Dart

Increased magazine size from 2 to 4
Decreased ammunition regeneration rate from 13s to 12s
Decreased tracking duration from 15s to 10s

Zipline

Decreased the height of Ziplines slightly, so that they will better fit through doors

Liftables

Propane Gas Canister

Decreased direct physical impact damage from 50 to 25

Modes

Cashout Modes

Introduced new re-spawn placement logic for teams that are wiped, with the goal of reducing the number of ‘third-party’ fights

Ranked Tournaments (Cashout)

Added Ranked Tournaments
Disabled game show events in Ranked Tournaments

Dev Note: To make Ranked Tournaments a more competitive friendly environment, with less randomness involved, we’ve decided to disable all game show events. We believe this will make matches slightly more consistent, less random, and easier to strategize around.

Increased the cash awarded per Cashout in the final round from $10,000 to $25,000
Increased the cash required to win the final round from $20,000 to $50,000

Terminal Attack

Terminal Attack now uses a best-of-nine-rounds (first to five) format, with a half-time break where level destruction is reset

Terminal Attack (Ranked)

Removed Ranked Terminal Attack and replaced it with Ranked Tournaments

World Tour (Cashout)

Disabled team wipe penalties in World Tour

Dev Note: World Tour is intended to be a more casual tournament experience than our Ranked Tournaments. Our research in Season 3 showed that removing team wipe penalties caused less player frustration and led to closer matches.

Enabled the ability for players to swap items between their Loadout and Reserve between team wipes in World Tour

Dev Note: This is another change aimed at making World Tour more friendly for the casual player, by allowing them to swap items between lives. Ranked Tournaments will continue to only allow swapping between rounds, as we believe counter-picking rival teams and adjusting to maps and map variants should be a skill in competitive play

Increased the cash awarded per Cashout in the final round from $10,000 to $25,000
Increased the cash required to win the final round from $20,000 to $50,000
Added Diamond and Platinum ranks to World Tour, between the Gold and Emerald ranks.
Emerald rank is now unlocked and available to progress towards from the start of the season
Emerald rank is now earned by collecting Win Points, rather than tournament wins
Updated the required Win Point totals for all World Tour ranked tiers, due to the change in ranks and how they are earned

Specializations

Dematerializer

Improved targeting to reduce the amount of times the dematerializer fails to make a passageway through objects.

Goo Gun

Fire mode changed from semi-automatic to fully automatic

Healing Beam

Decreased healing rate from 50 health per second to 40 health per second

Mesh Shield

Mesh Shield will now enter cooldown either when destroyed or lowered

Dev Note: The Mesh Shield was intended as a Specialization used to shield teammates or to represent the Heavy archetype’s toughness and staying power. We felt the juggling of the shield, constantly raising and lowering it to fire weapons, was hard for some players to understand and very frustrating to play against. We understand this is a significant change and we’ll obviously monitor its impact closely

Decreased Mesh Shield cooldown from 15s to 12s. The cooldown is only 8s if the Shield is undamaged when deactivated

Weapons

93R

Smoothed the vertical recoil to avoid having sharp jumps in intensity, which could previously cause an inconsistent feel
Updated firing animation when aiming down sights to give greater visibility
Increased fire rate from 210 RPM to 220 RPM
Decreased bullet dispersion when firing ‘from the hip’ when crouching, crouch moving, standing still, running, and in ‘uncontrolled’ states such as falling or sliding
Decreased the rate at which bullet dispersion builds up over time when firing for a sustained period
Increased the bullet dispersion recovery speed from 0.45 to 0.65

Dev Note: The 93R has been a difficult weapon for us to balance due to it being a burst fire weapon. Burst fire weapons give players the expectation that all the shots in a burst should be able to hit when aimed well, but this also means potentially doing three bullets worth of damage per ‘shot’ fired, making the weapon also high damage when the full burst hits. Getting this right whilst also differentiating the weapon from the FAMAS has been difficult. We’ve been reluctant to make the 93R a two ‘shot’ weapon versus Lights, because all testing of this scenario has made the weapon game-breaking, but at 72 damage a burst (i.e. three shots, nine bullets to kill a Light) the weapon has repeatedly underperformed, so it constantly sits on this knife's edge of being too good or very bad. In this update, we’ve focused on making the weapon much more effective when fired ‘from the hip,’ rather than when aiming down sights. We feel this combination of damage and mobility puts the weapon in a better place, but we’d love to get your feedback on it.

AKM

Decreased magazine size from 36 to 32

CL-40

Increased max damage from 93 to 117

Dev Note: This change sounds significant, but keeps the weapon in a place where it still takes two shots to kill a Light and three shots to kill a Medium. The change is mostly aimed at making a Heavy three shots to kill instead of four, as we felt it was unfair to the CL-40 to have to land all four of its available four shots (i.e. 100% accuracy) to kill a Heavy without reloading

Decreased fire rate from 275 RPm to 210 RPM

Dev Note: A small adjustment to offset the significant damage buff a little.

Increased the max damage radius from 9cm to 30cm

Dagger

The Dagger’s backstab secondary attack can now be held, only triggering when the button is released, rather than automatically. During this stance, the player moves at the normal run speed and cannot sprint

Lewis Gun

Smoothed the recoil pattern of the Lewis Gun, reducing the amount of horizontal recoil at some points. The recoil pattern overall remains the same but should be considerably easier to control

LH1

Decreased the damage fall-off start range from 80m to 50m
Decreased the damage fall-off end range from 100m to 55m

Dev Note: With the addition of alternative scopes/sights, we felt the LH1 was starting to stray well into the territory of the SR-84. This change reduces that to some extent.

M60

Increased fire rate from 560 RPM to 580 RPM
Smoothed the recoil pattern of the M60, reducing the amount of horizontal recoil at some points. The recoil pattern overall remains the same but should be considerably easier to control

MGL32

Decreased reload time from 3.1s to 2.8s

Dev Note: The MGL32 is a weapon we’d very much like to re-work at some point, but that will take a more considerable effort. For now, this is a simple and small quality of life adjustment that should make the weapon a little more viable

Recurve Bow

Increased damage at minimum draw from 55 to 60
Decreased damage ramp-up start time from 0.2s to 0.15s
Decreased the time taken to reach maximum draw from 0.585s to 0.49s

Riot Shield

Increased damage from 84 to 90

SH1900 Shotgun

Decreased reload time from 2.5s to 2.125s

Spear

Increased run speed modifier during secondary spin attack from 65% to 75%

SR-84 Sniper

Updated the SR-84 to now only fire hit-scan rounds up to 40m range. After this point, the shot becomes a projectile with bullet drop from gravity and drag

Dev Note: While the SR-84 is by no means overpowered or overly successful in many of our modes, it has become somewhat oppressive at very long ranges in modes like Terminal Attack and Power Shift, causing frustration for a lot of players. We feel this change limits much of the very long-range harassment that players found frustrating, while maintain the skill level and responsiveness in medium-to-long-range encounters

Sword

Updated attack sweeps to be more centered on the crosshair, making the weapon more accurate
Increased the range of the secondary lunge from approximately 5m to approximately 6m
Secondary lunge attack now maintains its top speed for slightly longer

Throwing Knives

The Throwing Knives secondary attack can now be held, only triggering when the button is released, rather than automatically. During this stance, the player moves at the normal run speed and cannot sprint

XP-54

Increase the magnification of the XP-54’s sight slightly, as part of the addition of alternate sights/scopes
Decreased damage from 18 to 16

Content and Bug Fixes

Animation

Fixed an issue where players could spawn into a round without the spawn-in animations or FX
Fixed an issue where pairing a Quick Melee action with other actions would make the animations look faulty
Polished the Riot Shield first-person animation where you would perform a phantom strike if you quickly zoomed after a strike
Removed camera animations when previewing first-person animations in the front end since it felt distracting
Fixed an issue where melee weapon animations could sometimes get stuck in the ‘charging’ pose in third-person

Audio

Fixed an issue where the Santa Hat extra VO lines would not play

Career Rank

Added 10 new levels with rewards to the Career Rank
Fixed an issue where stages or circuits that gave XP might not apply them to both the Battle Pass and Career Rank

Characters

Fixed an issue where various hair types could clip with the bucket hat

Gadgets

General

Fixed an issue where deployable gadgets could remain floating in mid-air

Data Reshaper

Fixed an issue where items transmuted by the Data Reshaper would not count as destroyed for certain Contracts

Flashbang

Improved the leniency of hit traces from the Flashbang to target players, so that they are less likely to be blocked by small objects

Vanishing Bomb

Improved the hit detection of the Vanishing Bomb on the player that threw it

Ziplines

Fixed an issue where Ziplines could break instantly upon being placed

Game Modes

Cashout Modes

Fixed an issue where Vaults opened out of bounds, causing the newly spawned Cashbox to be indefinitely stuck out of bounds.
Added notification messages to the HUD that show Cashout Started, Cashout Stolen and Vault Opened to the entire team when a teammate completes said action
Fixed an issue where the Cashout overtime timer could be broken, making sure a cashout being completed during overtime won't spawn new Vaults

Cashout Tutorial

Introduced a new version of the Cashout tutorial, for a smoother and more fun experience
Fixed various smaller issues with the tutorial flow and components
Fixed an issue where the correct loadout was not alway loaded in the tutorial

Liftables

Fixed an issue that could cause thrown items to stutter

Maps

Seoul

Fixed an issue where the audience jumbotron could glow

Kyoto

Added autumn themed version of Kyoto

Matchmaking

Players will now connect to levels faster, without waiting for other players who have not yet loaded. As a result, players will reach the lobby much faster and will see connecting players represented as a hologram

Movement

Fixed issue where players could lock their cameras to a fixed direction if they died while climbing a ladder

Performance and Optimization

Fixed issue where VOIP would not work as expected if the push-to-talk key was pressed when going back to the main menu
Fixed a rare issue where during the tournament intro/outro sequence, characters could be invisible
Reduced the number of hitches that could occur when selecting items in the customization and drafting screens

Specializations

Goo Gun

Goo will now correctly stick to a Guardian Turret’s base, rather than the barrel, preventing chains of goo from rotating through walls

Guardian Turret

Bullets can now be blocked by the player who owns the turret, just like they can be by friendly players

Added two additional Contestant slots, increasing the maximum from 6 to 8
Added a setting that allows players to disable the in-world crosshair. When set to ‘off’, the crosshair will always be in the center of your screen and static. Otherwise, it will move with camera movement.
Fixed an issue where the lobby screen only showed Defibrillators on all icons when first entering the screen
Fixed an issue where items from previous World Tours could appear in the store
Fixed an issue where the loading screen was occasionally briefly missing
Fixed a bug where "Canceling Matchmaking" was sometimes incorrectly shown in the matchmaking widget.
Fixed an issue where the Play or Reconnect buttons would briefly appear when connecting to a match
Fixed background blurring for Watches in store/battle pass

Weapons

General

Fixed an issue where the character could end up aiming downwards after controlling recoil on high frame rates

Throwing Knives

Fixed an issue where Throwing Knives and arrows could be floating in front of players using the Riot Shield

Riot Shield

The Riot Shield will now block the Winch Claw and prevent the player from being grabbed

Sword

Fixed an issue where the Sword’s lunge animation was not played in third person