Check for bites and watch out for the jump scares in our 2.8 update, The Walking Dead, a patch infested with terrifying content and looming dangers for our rogues. In the face of fear, players will get to enjoy our The Walking Dead Cross Over cosmetics, a new narrative event and more!
The Walking Dead Bundles
When the end is here and the dead walk, you must survive! But at what cost? Rogue Company and Skybound Entertainment team up to bring you a cross over so good, so dangerous that even the dead will walk! Hop into this update to scavenge up these amazing cosmetics that range from avatars to mythic weapons all themed after The Walking Dead comic book series! All of these can be acquired via bundles in the in-game store for direct purchase or via The Walking Dead Supply Drop!
Bad Actors Narrative Event
Trench returns a changed man from his horrific accident. His warmth turned cold in the pursuit of the traitor who nearly brought him down. There is a connection between what happened to him and with the AI from Meltdown. Paranoia and stress mounts amongst the rogues. Learn more about how his change impacts those around him and also take some time to earn the rewards tied to the event!
New Feature - Weekly Contracts
We’ve heard our core players about some lacking elements in our engagement and more opportunities for Rep and/or rewards. In this update, we’d like to introduce Weekly Contracts. With this feature, players will be given a set of 5 challenging Contracts every Tuesday. Each contract will award the player with an amount of reputation for completing them and, if they complete all 5 within the week, they will receive a Reward Supply Drop as well. Remember, you have before the next Tuesday to complete all 5, so get out there and have fun! We hope that this feature will challenge our players and give them more goals to work towards. Let us know what you think of this feature and it’s challenges.
Game Changes
Quick Play Queue Refined
Quick Play is quickly becoming a popular queue with our playerbase. Learning this, we are refining our Quick Play queue to be everchanging throughout the 2.8 patch. Every Tuesday, our Quick Play queue will have some mixture of 4 of the following game modes:
- Battle Zone
- 4v4 Team Death Match
- King of The Hill
- Dodgeball
- Extraction
- Strikeout 2.0
Canals Back in Development
Similar to Depot, we are bringing Canals back in house to see if we can give it some major gameplay improvements to work better for all of our game modes. Please look forward to its future release!
The Fixer Rework
Thermal Vision: In addition to seeing thermal signatures of his enemies, Fixer now has “White-Hot” precision zones from the chest-high all the way up to the top of his enemies' heads. Hitting the White-Hot precision zones awards bonus damage while the ability lasts.
Fixer’s passive has been reworked to Full Metal Jacket: Fixer’s Firearm damage now ignores enemy armor.
Our two goals with this rework were to:
- Give Fixer a more clearly defined role or “niche”
- Give Thermal Vision an upside that allows you to benefit from it, even if your smoke grenade is on cooldown.
The combination of bonus damage for precision hits and ignoring enemy armor turns The Fixer into a solid counter-pick against heavily armored targets. With the introduction of perk rarity, we saw an increase in both the magnitude and availability of armor, as well as the need for a natural armor predator. While shredder rounds helps provide some counterplay, we think there’s room for anti-armor to be a part of a Rogue kit. Fixer’s current passive wasn’t fun to play with or against & he was a perfect candidate for the niche given his backstory of a lethal, high-precision hitman. We also weren’t happy with how Thermal Vision felt to use without a cluster smoke available, which was happening a lot more often with the introduction of the Gadget Cooldown system. Using Thermal Vision without a smoke grenade in front of you felt almost useless, so we wanted to add something impactful and thematic. Bonus damage for precision hits felt like it hit the mark for who Fixer is, as well as making his traditionally difficult to master weapon arsenal more appealing.
Chaac Passive Quality of Life Improvement Rolls Around
For Chaac, his passive was meant to give him incredible survivability while down, anything to help give him the time he needs to either self revive or be revived. For the longest time, there was friction point in his passive where, while being revived, he could not dodge roll, this often felt worse when a revive came his way unprompted(drones and Dahlia). In this update, we have come back around and smoothed this out so that he can now use the dodge-roll-while-down part of his passive while being revived. Happy rolling Chaac Mains!
Battle Zone Shop Update
With Battle Zone becoming more of a staple in our Quick Play queue, we want to get under its hood and figure out if we can further improve and enhance the gameplay experience with a new shop experiment. We’ve change the shop in a way that we hope gives the player more agency and customization over their shop decisions as they deal with an ever-changing match. Players will have access to a wider range of perks, ones that can be further invested into to make them even stronger. Additionally, if you’re the type to not give into chance, you can purchase a select few weapons and come into the zone more confident with your loadout. Take this new shop for a spin in Battle Zone and give us your feedback!
Balance Changes
With our 2.7 mid-patch balance updates, we are going to continue to gather data and observe the new patch. Look forward to the 2.8 mid-patch balance updates.
Known Issues
- Purchase completion screen fails to appear on purchasing any of the TWD bundles from store.
- The Walking Dead Pistol Mythic skins have audio misconfigured, will be adjusted in the next hotfix.
- In Lobby, shadows may appear darker than intended.
- The Weekly Contract of ‘Earn Downs in 3 matches with a Primary, Secondary, a Gadget and Ability ’ Fails to get tracked on using Molotov with Scorch.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a major issue where surrendering would cause the match to crash.
- Fixed an issue in Battle Zone where perks would rearrange after purchasing one.
- Fixed an issue where players were unable to party up for Ranked.
- Fixed an issue where the audio for the Ibex lacked attenuation ranges.
- Fixed an animation issue where, when using quick melee as Scorch while crouched, you were forced to standing.
- Fixed an issue where Kestrel, while ADS, was unable to activate her ability.
- Fixed an animation issue for our female rogues while they ADS with the SLC Mixtape.
- Addressed more locations that Juke could exploit unfavorably on some maps.
- Addressed an edge case where, if you were downed immediately after trying to place a deployable gadget, the gadget would not get deployed.
- Cleaned up collision on a select few maps.
- Fixed an old issue where, if you spammed Chaac’s gun while firing your gun, you’d would get into a broken state.