We heard your feedback about the game balancing and difficulty, especially during the early game. This update directly address that, and smooths out the early game difficulty, fixes a batch of bugs you may have hit after launch, and helps us track down all of the bugs that are left. Heists generally now provide a longer starting period before enemy waves start to grow stronger. We didn’t want to walk back the difficulty too far so this is a gentler approach to the early game. We’ll see what people think before any further changes!
Gameplay and balance
- The ending no longer needs every station maxed out, only all of its parts collected. Saves that already hold every part can use it right away.
- Early fights are kinder: hits stun longer and knock enemies back further.
- Enemy waves start with a short quiet moment, then build up more gently before reaching full strength.
- The first Internet Investigator now shows up at 1:30 and the first Lawyer at 2:30.
- The Investigator’s dirt throw does 25% less damage.
- The YouTuber’s health is buffed slightly by 10HP.
- Vending machines take half as long to activate.
- The Goon Balls machine unlocks rarer recipes one level sooner, and the first machine can roll a Rare recipe occasionally.
- The Map station now suggests unlocking a new map once you have found every Goon Piece on the open ones.
- Upgrading a Goon now raises its hire cost half as much as before, so a fully upgraded crew is much cheaper to hire. More changes are to come regarding a preview / visibility on upgrade hire cost inflation.
Onboarding
- The first Build created and the Consignment Safes you are taught with have been refreshed.
- The Emperor no longer scolds you for a missing Goon Piece when unavailable, or for Junk Builds once you have made a recipe.
- The Emperor now casts a proper shadow in the opening scene.
Fixes
- Consignment Builds no longer get stuck or jitter when flying out of the safe to you, including when you stand behind or on top of it.
- Goon Shelf upgrade buttons you can’t afford now always look unavailable.
- A controller that disconnects and reconnects now works again without restarting the game. This was a rare issue we found through anonymous logs.
- Fixed glows disappearing behind the Emperor at the Playmat.
- Fixed a few errors when returning to the Lair, around the Safe’s build tooltip, the Playmat’s Assemble button, and pickups being collected.
- Fixed a rare error when moving from the opening scene to the Lair.
- Fixed an animation error that could leave an animation unfinished after several trips between the Lair and a Heist.
- The settings menu no longer moves focus onto its tabs when you use the keyboard or a controller, and the selected setting and its tooltip always stay in view.
- Session select no longer shows an unreadable save for a save that was deleted on another device.
- Playing with the DirectX 12 option no longer runs out of graphics resources in larger levels.
Stability
- Shaders are now kept between launches, so the game should start faster after the first launch.
- Addressed a crash some Intel graphics users could hit while shaders were being prepared.
- If you are on an AMD Radeon card and the game freezes then crashes mid-heist, please update to AMD Adrenalin 26.10.2 or later. If it still happens, you can switch to DirectX 12 via launch options. We are still working on this one, and this update records more detail when it happens so we can track all remaining problems on Vulkan rendering.
Crash reporting
Crash reports now include which part of the game you were in, and never include your Windows user name or your Steam ID.