Summer Splash Update
Agents, it’s time to make some waves in the cutthroat world of summer fashion. We have our biggest live event yet dropping with some massive new features and overall quality of life features. Grab something to drink and let’s dive into the details!
General
New Live Event: Summer Splash
The Evensen twins are celebrating their newest summer collection with a world tour. Under the pretense of a fun summer party, they are smuggling new prototype weapons under the guise of water guns.
With 15 levels of unlocks and more ways to earn points than before, Summer Splash is our most ambitious event yet. We wanted to try and drive some different gameplay with this one. To gain event points you’ll have to:
- Gather event posters for 25 points each.
- Gather prototype weapons for 50 to 100 points each. These are more heavily weighted towards restricted areas.
- Loot weapon crates for 150 to 200 points each. These only spawn inside the vault, encouraging players to progress the match instead of just looting outside.
- Last, but not the least, players will be able to gain 500 points by interacting with the catwalks added to all levels as a VIP! Players will need to stay inside the catwalk social interacts to gradually gain points up to 500. It’s called fashion hun, look it up!
Additionally, we are making a change on how event items work to better allow everyone to progress. Event items now have a single use PER TEAM instead of a single use period. This means you won’t be blocked from progressing if another player loots everything aggressively in the map.
Suspicion Mechanic
We are shaking up the meta this update with a massive change that will have significant ramifications on the game. One of the most common feedback pieces we receive is that there is no incentive not to run around everywhere once you get a hang of the game. This is an inherent differential between new players that will always walk carefully and experienced players that will almost always run.
Introducing the “Suspicion” mechanic. When in cover, you will now have a new bar that fills around your cover bar while running. Once filled up, this will start draining your cover bar, putting you at risk of blowing your cover.
(Click on image to see WebM of Suspicion Mechanic in action)
We know this is going to be a polarizing change, and we will keep a very close eye on feedback for the future steps of this mechanic. To help calibrate that feedback, our design goals with this are as such:
- Adding decision making in movement. Having to manage a resource that could put you at risk makes normal traversal more tense and adds moment to moment decisions to the game.
- Putting a limit on the ability for a player to cross the entire map to third party an active fight. They could always push themselves and blow their cover to get there, but at that point it gives a better chance for the defending player to react.
- Level the playing field a bit more between overly careful new players and extremely reckless experienced players, giving a bit of required downtime to these players to slow down games.
Crucially, suspicion is no longer active when in the extraction phase. When everyone is on high alert, running is not suspicious anymore, allowing the final phase to continue as the high octane chase it always was.
We have been testing this internally for a very long time, with a long history of iteration to get it where it is today. At this point, we need to put suspicion in your hands to get feedback on where to take it next.
Retinal Scanner
A major new gameplay element is making its debut with this update: The Retinal Scanner! For a long time, we’ve wanted to offer players an alternative way to progress the game, separate from vault terminals. This would not only offer an alternative if players are aggressively camping a terminal, but would also give more strategic options on how you want to play a match and add some much needed diversity. Here’s how it works:
- A retinal scanner is present at every vault entrance.
- They will be locked for 7 minutes (half the first phase) before players can interact with them. Once 7 minutes has passed, players can start bypassing them.
- Retinal Scanners cost 40 intel to open when no vault terminal has been deactivated. This lowers by 10 every time one is turned off reaching 20 intel when a single vault terminal is still standing.
- Players can deposit intel at any retinal scanner to lower the required amount. All players participate in lowering this.
- Once there is no intel left to spend, a VIP disguise is required to authorize the scan. This will result in the vault opening immediately, bypassing vault terminals.
- The retinal scanner that is used to authorize the VIP will give a Gold Upgrade chip.
In this way, the progress of bypassing with the retinal scanner is a shared progress between all the players in a match. We are excited to see how this affects the pacing of the game and we will track feedback around the scanners very closely to better target future changes on them.
Guards Tweak
We have reduced melee range significantly to allow players to run away from a melee attack and not take the damage. We have also shaved off a bit of Douglas’s massive hitbox to help a bit with him not blocking unwanted shots.
Better Celebration for eliminations
A solid piece of feedback we have been looking at tackling is that DI reminds you constantly of the levels of people who beat you, putting salt in the wound after a defeat, but does a poor job at telling you you triumphed over someone that is more experienced than you.
To remedy this, we are overhauling the elimination UI to add better information as well as some gameplay rewards for taking on a strong player.
- By default, you will now see the name of the player you eliminated.
- When eliminating a player that is at least 10 account level above you, you will get additional celebration in the Elimination Hud, including the level of the person you eliminated.
- This will scale depending on the level difference up to a difference of 300 levels, giving a massive celebration of the achievement.
- XP values for an elimination will scale slightly with this, giving up to 60% extra XP on the elimination at the highest level difference.
Additionally, the levels of people you spectate will now be an opt-in feature in the settings, allowing you to focus entirely on the positives of what you achieved instead of the negatives of who eliminated you, giving full control on what information you feel is relevant to you.
We plan on expanding this type of celebration and better celebrate victory in the future.
Echelon Cosmetics
Reaching a high echelon level is quite an achievement and requires a massive amount of dedication to a single agent. In order to better celebrate this, we are unleashing a collection of new echelon skins and inks, allowing you to show everyone your PRESTIGIOUS status.
Every agent now has:
- A golden echelon 10 Skin
- A unique ink at echelon 30
- A platinum echelon 50 Skin
- A dazzling diamond skin at echelon 100
We want to extend a heartfelt thank you to any player that has sunk enough of their time in the game to earn these and we look forward to seeing you in-game sporting your new threads!
Melee Overhaul
Reliability
Melee attacks not registering is something that has plagued the game for a long while. We’ve made several attempts at lessening the pain, but this time we went more in depth and changed how the melee behaves from a server/client level to make it far more reliable. In addition, we have reworked melee animations to give better feedback on the fully charged state for every character instead of relying only on sound and a glowing effect.
Controller Experience
We have added vibration to melee attacks for controller users, making the whole experience that much more satisfying.
Danger Event Size
Melee attacks used to trigger a danger event with a size equal to a gunshot. This of course makes no logical sense and would trigger guards from a long distance even if from a player perspective it feels stealthy to do a melee attack. Now, melee attacks will produce a much smaller danger event, allowing you to melee without scaring or aggroing NPCs from afar away.
Go punch someone and tell us how it feels! (In game of course).
Server Performance Optimizations
We started tackling some of the issues leading to servers having a “laggy” feel that can be amplified by certain agents using their skills back in the catalog 4 hotfix. In this update, we have very wide ranging changes to optimize the server load and make games feel snappier as a result.
From a technical standpoint, a long list of objects are now considered “Sleeping” on the server to consume less ressource until needed and a wide array of agent abilities have been optimized to be less intensive from a server standpoint.
This is not the end of our server optimization efforts, but it’s an important step forward we are excited to release.
Weapon Visual Alignment
The visuals of all weapons in hip fire have been tweaked to align perfectly with the crosshair. This is a pretty significant visual change to the first person view that might take a moment to get used to, but results in a much cleaner line of actions and better feedback as to where exactly you will shoot.
Spawning Tweaks
Spawn Priority
A new spawner system is in place that allows us to put priority on certain spawnable items, namely intel, instead of having a flat priority value. What this means in practice is that you should get much fewer rooms that are only flush with ammo and not a single intel.
Drawer Spawn buffs
The pool of items that can spawn in drawers has been buffed in all maps significantly. This will mean that opening a drawer will have a much stronger value overall, reducing instances where players are left with nothing when taking the risk of opening one.
Team UI additions
You can now clearly see how many “lives” your downed teammates have left by looking at their body, giving a much clearer picture of the current state of your team and how cautious you should be.
Vault Opening Delay Adjustment
The delay before the vault opens after disabling the last vault terminal (or the retinal scanner) is now 20 seconds up from 15. We want to give a bit more time for the players that progressed the phase to make their way to the vault and we will keep monitoring this for further possible changes.
Bot Behavior Upgrade
Bots have received a lot of love this update to make them fully capable agents that can drive the game forward. They can now progress every phase of the match, from disabling vault terminals to printing themselves a gold keycard and even extracting with the package.
This is a massive jump forward on bot behavior and we are excited to finally set them loose as a more robust tool to get players acclimated with the game and its flow.
Sound Eclipse Vault Visual Tweaks
We have changed the overall color scheme of the inner vault area of Sound Eclipse to increase visual readability and better understand where you are in it.
We are currently working on a more in-depth set of changes to Sound Eclipse which you can expect in a future update.
Ammo Dispenser Intel Balancing
We are lowering the cost of using an ammo dispenser to 2 intel instead of 3. The reasoning is quite simple: Buying a single box of ammo is not the same value as a full heal or a healing vial. We think 2 intel is a price that better represents that value and will give more incentive to actually use dispensers when in a pinch.
Toggle Auto-Fire Setting
A hotly requested feature, especially for controller players, was the addition of an auto-fire setting for semi auto weapons, allowing you to hold the fire key without having to press every single time.
This has been added and is available under gameplay options!
Social Interact Camera Smoothing
A new, smoother camera transition now exists when interacting with social interactions. Since a smooth movement can trigger motion sickness in players that are more prone to it, we have also added a setting in the menu called “reduce motion sickness” to disable this smooth movement.
FOV Setting on console
We have added the possibility for console players to adjust their fov exactly like PC players have been able too. Please note that a high fov can result in performance loss in some situations because of the additional objects to render at once.
We are committed to expand the options and customization of console players to improve their experience and this is a first step in that direction.
Balance
Agents
Larcin
Last update, we talked about looking at Larcin as an outlier for fast reload speeds. We are making some changes to the reload time of all of Larcin’s weapon with Silence being the most affected of the three. We want his weapons to still be fast reloaders, but be less of an outlier than they are currently.
Weapons
Weapon 1: Silence
- Reload Speed 1.15s => 1.3s
Weapon 2: Cadence
- Reload Speed 1.4s => 1.45s
Weapon 3: Violence
- Reload Speed 1.25s => 1.35s
Red
Red has always been punished for recovering quickly after activating “A view to a kill”. With this tweak we want her to keep her advantage for a short duration so that it does not entirely invalidate the passive.
Passive
Passive 2 : A view to a kill
- Amped up effect now lingers for 3s after recovering, allowing Red to reposition after grabbing a spy cache.
Sasori
Coated weaponry has been held back by how much time it takes to trigger, removing possible reactions to an ambush. We are making it far more reactive to make it a more attractive choice this update.
Expertise 1: Coated Weaponry
- Can now cancel the animation much earlier to prevent a state where the players feels “locked” when triggering their expertise in a fight.
Madame Xiu
Passive
Passive 3 : Mamba’s Hunch
- Players' positions are now captured at the same trigger as before, but shown 2 seconds later. This delay adds a bit of imprecision to the current picture of where other players are and allows victims to reposition to prevent Xiu from knowing exactly where they stand.
Gadgets
Drone
- Battery no longer drains when leaving the drone, only while piloting it, allowing you to keep it stashed somewhere for use later on while still imposing a limit to max uptime when following a spy.
Goo-Pod
- Reduced Goo-Pod HP so they can be destroyed in a single shot by every character.
Scrambler
- Raised Scrambler HP to 15 to prevent it from being destroyed in a single shot by high fire rate characters, giving it a bit more of a defensive gadget identity.
Bug Fixes
General
- Objects in lost and found boxes can now be pinged correctly.
- Getting revived after getting eliminated while running will no longer result in the player running when revived.
- Fixed an issue where navmode interaction with charged weapons could lead to cover not being blown on shot.
- Fixed an issue where using a health vial during an animation involving the left arm could make your first person arms disappear.
- Breadcrumbs now last 15 seconds as intended (they were still 10 seconds)
- Reviving allies at extraction terminals no longer leaves a breadcrumb behind.
- Fixed railings that would block bullets instead of letting shots go though.
- Fixed an issue where drawers opened by NPCs far away would make objects inside invisible until the drawer is closed and opened again.
- Fixed a wide array of LODS that were too aggressive.
- Field upgrade chests and lost and found boxes won’t show the “in-use” message anymore when currently being hacked by an enemy player.
Agents
Ace
- Fixed an issue where mashing the big blind expertise could lead to placing multiple zones.
- Big blind no longer stays up when Ace is eliminated in team matches.
Chavez
- Return to sender now plays audible sound effects when hit by shot in 3rd person.
- Fixed an issue where the Duke’s barrel would reset back to position after firing in ADS.
Cavalière
- “It’s a Setup” will no longer remain active after a Cavalière is eliminated.
- Fixed an issue where canceling a melee attack could cause Cavalière’s weapons to vanish in first person.
Madame Xiu
- Fixed an issue where Xiu could take fall damage after teleporting while falling.
- Fixed an issue where the screen could stay tilted after taking damage when teleporting.
- Fixed an issue where timing navmode use with serpent’s bluff could make it work without triggering the cooldown.
Octo
- Fixed Calamari 1P animation issues leading to wrong weapon placement in a variety of conditions.
Vigil
- Fixed Vigil having the same echelon title unlocked twice instead of the correct ones.
Yu-Mi
We have some big fixes on Yu-Mi this update and are planning more for the next release. A major cause of Yu-Mi related issues is how she is handled from a server vs client perspective. We have a solid grasp of what needs to be done to make her kit far more reliable and are planning to make it a focus of our engineering efforts in the coming weeks.
- Fixed an issue that would lead to Yu-Mi being stuck in a state where she can’t shoot after using or canceling her expertise.
- Fixed an issue that would lead to Yu-Mi shots getting lost in high latency situations.
- Fixed an issue where rapidly releasing right click and holding it again could cause it to fire without a pellet, costing ammo.
- Charge SFX is no longer extremely quiet.
- Un-charged shots now have correct vibrations on the controller.
Levels
Diamond Spire
- Fixed a hole in the shortcut in purple room D that allowed players to shoot from inside.
- Fixed a close spawn point on the 4th floor between players.
Fragrant Shore
- Fixed npcs spawning on picnic tables.
- Fixed Healing vial dispenser clipped in wall in Staff Room.
Hard Sell
- Fixed un-sittable toilet in vault.
Silver Reef
- Fixed a spot where players could shoot through a wall in the shortcut of room C.
- Fixed multiple spots with missing collisions.
- Fixed lighting issues in the main hall bathroom making objects dark in spots.
- Fixed invisible collision in purple room inside vault protruding from wall.
- Fixed spot in main hall that would count as a guard room when close enough to the wall.
Sound Eclipse
- Fixed stairs collisions sometimes stopping players in SE purple rooms.
- Fixed restroom door collision being larger than the visual.
- Fixed SE bathroom doors still letting aggro-ed guards open them.
Gadgets
Drone
- Drone camera will no longer turn when the spy turns.
Hacktrap
- Fixed an issue where hacktrap clues would not get cleaned when the owner is eliminated.
- Fixed an issue where clues that are far from the players could have their status not updated.