Pre-season 2: The Hornet's Nest - Patch Notes

Calling all Extinction Elites,

The first phase of Basic Training is over. Time to take it up a notch. Time to kick the hornet’s nest.

Pre-season 2 introduces a new mode, weapon, enemy, and more!

Expedition mode lets you roam the map freely without being tied to a mission. Your efforts will have a bigger and more visible impact on the War Effort, but beware: The dinosaurs are increasingly angry. Expect heavy resistance.

Starting with the release of this pre-season the War Effort will update twice a week: On Mondays and Thursdays at 13.00 CET you will see and feel the consequences of your actions - or your inaction. So keep an eye on your progress and be prepared, for there are new Emergence Events in the mix. Also, remember to take a well-deserved break when the clock hits the hour to avoid getting disconnected.

Now for the technical bit: The team has been working hard on fixing crashes and black screens, getting contracts working, balancing changes, and improving the game with a lot of quality of life fixes. Worth noting is that Rex will no longer float on your downed body, Dragons Breath is no longer OP and those grenade jumps you used to cheat the game? Yeah, they’re gone now. Sorry!

Want to know what else has changed? Check the full list below.

Abilities and Perks

• Sometimes Rosy's electric fence got stuck and could not be deployed. She’s been welding away and fixed the issue.
• The Fully Automatic perk did not work if the Burst Fire perk was equipped. They do now, so perk away!
• The perk Impact Detonator now replicates for other players.
• The assault rifle perk Slugshot is working again.
• The Airstrike is now showing up for all players.
• The SMG Shock Ammo perk will now always show bullet impact effects.
• Bouncing mine, Mine seeding, and Air Strike no longer multiply damage per player in the squad.
• Achievements
• Research and Rescue and Black Site achievements are no longer granted when completing only Research and Rescue.

Audio

• The payload rocket sounds that could be heard after the payload had landed has been removed.
• Occasionally the payload kept making a hissing sound after landing. We’ve made it stop and will leave the hissing noises to your cat.
• Concrete footstep sounds are no longer triggered when running on top of containers.

Balance Changes

Abilities

Jurgen

• Increase to Satchel Charge recharge time.

General

• Reload, health stim and use ability can now be interrupted by other player actions.
• Health stim usage can now be interrupted by significant attacks or taking damage.
• Increased equipment capacity to 6.
• Reduced health stims capacity to 3.
• Increased Support Beacon recharge times.

Weapons

Shotgun

• Increased projectile speed.
• Dragons Breath perk has had damage significantly reduced.

Missions

• Slightly reduced upward research scaling in Hard and Insane difficulty levels.

Player

• Slight decrease to the Bleed Out timer.

Contracts

• The Recovery Action contract was unlocked at level 5. This was way too early, you need more practice. Recovery Action now unlocks at level 15.
• After finishing the mission Charged Extraction, the completed contract Beginning the Hunt was wrongly displayed as not activated. This has been fixed.
• The contract Mutation Research no longer expires upon activation.
• The issue where the player got previously completed contracts as new contracts on the board has been fixed.
• The icons that were overlapping in the Contracts board are no longer overlapping.
• Players that were unable before can now unlock level related contracts.
• The reward for completing the Destructive Additions contract is now correct.
• Selecting an unlocked seasonal contract did not work correctly. It does now.
• Players can now complete the contract Destructive Additions.
• The issue where the player did not get the contract Making an Omelette has been solved.
• A War Effort contract that had missing information now has all the information it needs.
• The Expansion contract now shows the correct objectives, which could be helpful.
• The Into the Fog contract could not be completed because the Rex was not counted towards kills. Killing Rex should always count towards kills. And now it does.
• Players are now able to complete the King of Rage contract.
• The contract chain for the Rocketeer contract no longer has the timer set to 0.
• The Firebug contract does now count the enemies killed with fire.
• Several contracts that were not working properly have been fixed.

Controls and Settings

• An issue where the fog was still enabled in-game when the setting was disabled has been solved.
• Sometimes after turning V-sync off in fullscreen mode, it still seemed to cap the framerate. This has now been fixed.
• The issue where the keyboard overlay was incorrect for French keyboards has now been fixed.
• You can now load the game with the 1862x1048 resolution.
• An issue where the game settings did not display all monitors in a 2 GPUs PC setup has been solved.
• Crashes and Black Screens
• Players should no longer experience a black screen after receiving damage, although it was a pretty good representation of getting knocked out.
• The game no longer occasionally crashes after claiming a reward for Continuing the Hunt.
• The issue where players got stuck and unable to perform any actions before the intro video is now fixed.
• A crash that occasionally occurred after extraction when the dropship flew away has been fixed.
• The game no longer occasionally crashes on mission load due to the vegetation system.
• There are many issues that can cause a game to crash. We’ve solved several of them.

Enemies

• Enemy AI can no longer attack the player through windows.
• Sometimes no enemies were spawned when extracting, this has been fixed. Lucky for the dinos, unlucky for you.
• Sometimes a killed Rex is resurrected for a short time just to die again. She stays dead now.
• Rex has been floating on downed players. She has been warned for BM and will not do it again.
• The Alpha raptor was sometimes stretching when killed. He ain’t stretching no more.
• An issue where the enemy action seemed to repeat itself has been fixed.
• Players can no longer avoid damage from the Rex when standing underneath it.
• Enraged dinos will now count towards progression.

Gameworld

• The floating lamp in Black Site is no longer floating.
• Engines of the broken dropships at Black Box activity now have collisions.
• It is no longer snowing inside of a hangar on the second floor in Magna Petram. So much for that Christmas feeling. 
• An issue where the insertion map was still active after the players backed out from the map has been fixed.
• The double fence that was blocking the path for AI and hid the path from players has been removed.
• The tower at Objective A in the mission Homebound now has collision.
• Fixed an issue where the player was unable to call in a fuse for stranded dropships.
• An issue with the despawn of Rosy's barricade didn’t work is now fixed.
• The Alpha corpse now despawns correctly.
• You can no longer negate fall damage when spamming the emote button when falling. Sorry for removing one of the community’s pro-tips.
• The downed start animation now matches with the rest of the downed animations.
• The tree that was misplaced at Aga Hills, and was clipping with the dropship has been chopped down.
• The floating box that appeared in the game is gone. We were not happy with his performance and will not have him back any time soon.
• The issue where the player could not respawn if they had attempted to revive in the down state has been solved.
• The missing guardrails on the bridge south of the south power station have been fixed.
• Grenade jumps will no longer let players cheat the game. Sorry, not sorry.
• An issue where the player was getting the repair extraction point activity twice has been solved.
• An issue where the objectives and the difficulty reset upon rejoining has been solved.
• The Altum Valley extraction point is now displaying the countdown correctly.

Graphics

• The player's flashlight light cone is no longer floating mid-air.
• Sometimes an animation would be repeated after repeatedly pressing the E-key, this is no longer an issue.
• Meshes were flickering. Emphasis on were.
• Camera focus issues that occurred in the deployment screen have been fixed.
• The lighting issues that occurred when the dropship arrived at the Magna Petram extraction site has been solved.
• Sometimes explosion effects were missing, this has been fixed and the visual booms are there now.
• There was a weird mesh that could be seen outside of a cave. The weird mesh is no more.
• The sky/atmosphere no longer changes during extraction. 
• An issue was fixed where the burn status effect triggered twitches.
• Occasionally the player character was floating in the air after climbing a cart in Charged Extraction. We’ve stopped the floating.
• The Wraptor skin for the scout rifle randomized the skins as long as it was equipped. Cool feature but not what we wanted. This has now been fixed.
• Improved an issue with the SSAO influence. It was enabled on the snow and was disappearing around objects that moved around. We are continuing to work on improving this feature.

Menu, HUD, UI, etc.

• The party UI no longer disappears after transitioning between menus.
• The pause menu will no longer cause some audio bugs by reflecting front-end sound.
• Players should no longer be able to get locked in the mission select screen.
• The issue where the Mission Started text would occasionally show up for players after rejoining a game has been fixed.
• Text was sometimes displayed over other text. That makes it very hard to read, so we decided to separate it.
• The character Œ was corrupted once again. Œ has now agreed to play nice and present itself accurately. 
• Sometimes the description text for Emergence Events did not disappear. Well, they do now.
• The research point HUD in-game no longer moves off the screen.
• An issue where a War Effort event showed “LOC text” has been solved.
• It is no longer possible to select the mission description box with the mouse and then proceed to move the cursor around with the gamepad.
• World position icons will no longer disappear after respawning.
• The "Missing metadata item..." debug text that was present after completing the Gas Pump activity has now been removed.
• The activity icons that were missing have been found safe and sound, and are now where they should be.
• The minigun equipped with the Wraptor skin no longer disappears in the Armory tab.
• The research points icon will no longer disappear occasionally.
• The front-end scene will no longer sometimes be visible on the sides when the War Effort World Update is displayed.
• An issue where the player lost all original skins has been solved.
• Sometimes the preview message was displayed to the player when finishing a mission. This will no longer happen.
• The mouse movements are now more responsive on the campaign map.
• An issue where icons were misaligned in the loading screen has been fixed.
• Players are no longer able to move back to the Main Menu after selecting a drop zone.
• The weapon's skins list no longer occasionally persists to be on the screen after switching to the Contracts tab. Cosmetics might love to be in the spotlight, but that’s no excuse for stealing Contract’s thunder. 

Missions

• The issues where the player could not respawn during the Black Site mission has been fixed.
• Players are no longer able to respawn on top of a mountain during the Black Site mission.
• The issue where players were able to send out all servers without the timer after respawning during the Black Site mission has been solved.
• The Radar Dish mission at Comm Center is no longer broken.
• The issue where the objective to repair the radar relay got reset after respawning and then couldn't be completed properly has been solved.
• An issue where the player could still complete the mission successfully after getting crushed by the extraction ship has been fixed.
• Loot packages no longer wrongly give large amounts of materials (50-100+) in place of research.
• Multiplayer
• The issue where a multiplayer session error occurred after the host left has been fixed.
• An issue where the shock ammo for the SMG did not replicate in multiplayer has been fixed so that you can now show off your shockingly good shots to your friends.
• The Backdraught perk for the minigun now replicates the VFX for other players.

Weapons

• The magazine will now get changed after a minigun reloads, every time.
• The default machine gun skin sometimes got sad when players got a shiny new machine gun skin and would disappear. We’ve told it that newer doesn’t always mean better and it has promised to stick around.
• The issue where the grenade launcher projectiles didn't detonate on impact when hitting an enemy has been fixed.