Knights and mercs, we're back with another update in 2025 with more content - this time a new Power Play storyline, the first critical round of changes to the rules around Smoke / Smoke Grenades, and a really big number of minor tweaks to appearances to reduce small clipping and cosmetic appearance issues. Thanks to everyone posting up feedback, we are getting our engines going this year with big updates - story, missions, and the final set of features before launch - so stay tuned for some big hits!
If you are enjoying Early Access and our style of relentless updates and constant improvement, please take a moment to leave a review! You can always change it later :D
New Power Play Storyline
A new storyline has been added to the Power Play set - storylines that can attach to Contacts who have successfully executed a Limit Break to put themselves into the risky "Power Play" status. This new storyline sees you working closely with the dangerous Ricksham Syndicate - the masters of the UNA's train network, riders of the rails, train-hobos - to negotiate the flow of new and powerful combat and hacking drugs into the New Boston Zone.
The storyline contains multiple missions with new challenges - seeing cross-faction fighting in the middle of a mission map, challenging extraction objectives and more VIP hunters dropping in to mess up your day.
You can read more about the Power Play system at the holiday milestone update here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1021210/view/516322831358755690
Smoke Grenade Reactions
For a long time, Smoke Grenades have been a powerful tool that deal in absolutes. The enemy agents stupidly ignore them, and the utterly baffle attempts at pursuit or detection. Update #199 takes the first step in softening the power of Smoke (Agent EX) and Smoke Grenades.
Our goal is to keep them fun, exciting and strong - they are a delay tactic, they sow chaos and confusion, they cover escapes and give you advantageous terms for a gunfight.
However, if its smokes - something must be on fire! Enemy agents in the Unaware state who see smoke will now report it to the Sec AI (+2 Tally, up to a maximum of +4 Turn for multiple agents) and become Suspicious (so they will not report Smoke again). Then they will proceed to hunt in the area, searching for the cause of the smoke or disturbance.
This is Step #1. Step #2 will be to make adjustments to how smoke affects detection and combat to remove absolutes (you cannot see through or into smoke) to instead powerful rules (your visibility is reduced to 2m inside smoke).
As we know this is a topic dear to many player's hearts, we will be putting up a preview thread to list all of the proposed rule changes in the next few days for everyone to comment on!
Fixing Appearance Clips
With Update #199, we closed over 25 F10s that referenced specific small issues with the cosmetic stacks - either clipping, odd placements, hair not covering the entire head and more. This was a great cleanup but there is always more to do in this area. Our next cleanup effort will be looking at specific cosmetics that are not "good" at taking colors, the colors don't affect them too much or (in the case of short shaves) go crazy.
v1.9.79 - 1/11/2025
- Added new Power Play storylines; high-risk negotiations with the Ricksham can bring new combat/hacking drugs into the NBZ
- Enemy agents now react to Smoke (Grenades, Agent EX) by increasing Tally by +2 and hunting in the nearby area
- Fixed model clipping at back of head for some characters wearing beret hats
- Fixed model clipping at back and sides of head for ponytail and other hairstyles
- Fixed reported typos, dialog clarifications