Hello everyone, we are hard at work on our next quality of life update. As previously mentioned, these updates are focused on bugs and balance and we are pushing to get them out as fast as we can. Today I am going to touch on this next Quality of Life (QoL) update as well as the next content update which is also being worked on, ie: the beloved sharpshooter!
We currently have two sharpshooter weapons going through our pipeline first, the Lever Action Rifle and Crossbow. Both are currently in the process of being textured and I hope to show them to you in the near future with some renders! I’ll be talking more about the Sharpshooter weapon set and perk skills as they start to come online.
Now something that will be in players hands much quicker are some upcoming changes (some of which will come in stages as we try one thing and react to the data and feedback we receive). The first of which is our dynamic difficulty tuning. With an upcoming quality of life update along with as many fixes as we can get done in there we are introducing the first pass at a dynamic difficulty tuning system that we are calling the Game Conductor.
With this system the game can make some decisions based on how well players are doing to increase or drawback the intensity of the wave within some limits (each difficulty can be tuned up or down towards the ones bracketing it). The goal of the system is to find a sweet spot where the players feel challenged but not over or underwhelmed. We expect parts of this system to start coming online over the next few QoL updates.
I also recently mentioned we had a close eye on the Demolitions perk. This is an item that is a bit further out in terms of players seeing it but I wanted to give the community an idea of what we are thinking about here. Part of our goals around balance moving forward is to give perks more distinct roles both overall and situational. Using the perk tree we are looking at branches that give the demo options for better crowd destruction or to specialize as a larger zed exploding machine who may want to conserve ammo.
We are aiming for our next QoL patch to come out next week and our current WIP changelog (subject to change!) is as follows:
Balance:
First pass of live player skill tracking system Game Conductor
Demo - Offperk skill was doing 15% instead of the intended 10%
Berserker - Melee attack speed % increase was not working properly as players ranked up
Gunslinger - changed how Uber Ammo skill works so dualies will not run out of ammo during Uber Ammo
General:
If a player leaves the server and doesn’t drop the detonator, any deployed c4 will be removed
Continued to improve AI code to help prevent “walling”
Bugs:
Fixed a bug where clients that joined an in progress game could see already destroyed collectibles (and thus not be able to interact with them)
Fixed several gamepad issues in the options screens
Fixed not being able to save favorite servers while using a gamepad
Fix one case for zed warping online - other cases including high latency are still being worked on
Fixed the game displaying a pick up message when you dropped a 9mm from having dualies
We are still aiming to get the Modding Workshop in as soon as we can fix some outstanding issues. We think we have a good handle on it but will know more early next week.
And to wrap things up this week we are hoping to get a “Pulse Of The Community” poll going every once in awhile to see where our players feel we should be focusing our efforts. Below you can find a link to the first of such polls.