We've been grinding away at ASCENDANT ever since we received player feedback back in our August open beta, and we're excited to see what you think during this technical test.
After the event please complete our feedback form to let us know what you think. The more feedback we receive, the better and faster we can implement meaningful changes you want in the next event you play in. <3
If you require any technical assistance, the best place for support is in our games community discord. You can join here if you haven't yet! https://discord.gg/7jf6336X
Performance
We heard you loud and clear, and we've made significant changes under the hood to meet your expectations. Performance improvements have been made in a ton of different areas. Like…a lot of things have been optimized. Loads. Many. Also Reflex Mode support has been added to the graphical settings.
Events
- The poor Gorlizard Control just keeps on getting nerfed. These changes are primarily focused at reducing its survival and ability to play safely.
- Its Heal ability cooldown is now 120 seconds (up from 40).
- Its Leap ability cooldown is now 25 seconds (up from 20).
- The damage from its spit has been reduced by 20%.
- Wind Vortices are now present in every match. Instead of just a binary ‘on or off’, different combinations of vortices will instead be active from match to match.
- Earthtree Scraps (the pods that can fall out of the earthtree) have undergone a lot of changes.
- They now come in two forms: regular scraps and golden scraps.
- Regular scraps always contain a tier 3 shield and power.
- The golden scraps now always contain a tier 4 shield or a team life, along with a special ‘beyond rare’ powered weapon. There are six possible weapons that can be acquired from the golden pods:
- T3 Viper - A semi-automatic spore rifle that deals triple damage with the last shot of its magazine.
- CFR Flamespitter - A pyro plasma rifle with a lot of self heal, and the fire reduces the damage output of any victims.
- HPR-200 Shellshock - A heavy sniper rifle with shield piercing rounds.
- BV7 Shield Breaker - A shotgun that deals particularly high damage to shields and comes with self healing and shield repairing capabilities.
- Grim Reaper - Dual purpose beam gloves tuned for both damage and healing, along with life steal.
- SF-10 Annihilator - A high powered energy bomber that deals bonus damage to shields with fully loaded specials and slightly repairs your shield when the last round of the magazine is fired.
- Additionally, there is a new match modifier that can trigger a rain of rare earthtree scraps in the early minutes of the match. Loads of powerful shields and weapons to fight over!
- The base chance of lightning strikes to spawn the Lightning Rod consumable has been increased from 5% to 15% (this chance still grows the more times lightning strikes close to any given team have not spawned a rod).
- The Shop Uplink event has been simplified and made more powerful. Instead of trickling out 200 power over time (with recharge times between each lots of 200) to whichever team controls one, 250 power is now given out immediately after it has been charged.
- The effect still cycles, so several lots of 250 power will be given out across a match to whichever team controls it at the time.
- An automatic Surveillance Drone event has been added. When active, surveillance drones will spawn from the earthtree and patrol the shade, looking for threats. Any player they spot becomes highlighted to all enemy teams.
- If destroyed, the surveillance drone drops one of the following: power, a frag grenade, or an HE grenade.
- As we are getting more of them, automatic map wide events are now more common.
- The Boss Summoner event now highlights the boss it has spawned to your team for 1 minute.
- This is just a little quality-of-life improvement for now; some bigger improvements to this event are coming in the next update.
- The Weapon Replicator event has undergone a bit of a visual overhaul and should now be much more obvious when active and when working on weapons.
Match Rules
- Mission specific world pick-ups and consoles now give score to your team.
- The match no longer abruptly ends when the final biocore is secured. This bit is still awaiting some additional polish, but it now announces that it was secured before the match results appear.
- In matches with a team size of 2 or less, and with 5 or fewer teams, all players will be given an additional life.
Weapons & Consumables
- Shotgun magazines have undergone some balancing changes in regards to their cost; i.e. by how much shotgun power costs vary when you equip different magazines.
- For light and energy magazines, any magazines with a ‘larger than default’ capacity have had their costs increased across the board.
- For heavy magazines, the costs of ‘smaller than default’ magazines are now slightly higher than they used to be.
- Shotgun blast pattern modules have also had their relative costs reviewed.
- The biggest changes have been done to the X and T spreads, with X getting more expensive and T getting a lot cheaper.
- Shotgun melee bonuses are now more expensive. I.e., shotgun modules that increase melee damage now cost more and shotguns modules that reduce melee damage are now cheaper.
- A side effect of the changes to shotgun modules is that the following shotguns have had various modules swapped out:
- Rigor Mortis (less damage and wider spread, but faster reloads)
- Last Horizon (slower reload but slightly more damage over distance)
- Oathkeeper’s Verdict (less damage and slightly slower reloads)
- Justicar (this one has undergone a much larger rework, focusing on fire rate over larger individual hits, and now uses the X blast pattern instead of the hexagonal)
- Sniper rifle energy ammo have had their bullet velocities increased by 20%.
- This does not apply to cluster ammo, but their bullet velocity penalties have been reduced from -12% to -10%.
- Most weapons you can acquire in a match have received new paint jobs. Beam gloves and energy bombers are still waiting for theirs.
- The hyper cannon has been given a new appearance.
- Some more modules have received custom appearances.
- Most notably is perhaps that the 4x Scope for the battle rifle is now actually a scope and not a holo sight.
- In order to improve response times when hitting a target, the client will now predict hits and show the ‘hit confirm’ indicator before the server has verified it.
- In general, this should make combat feel much more responsive. However, there may be some situations where the server can deny such a hit (e.g. if you happen to have had poorly timed packet loss or playing on an unstable connection), but this should be incredibly rare for most people.
- How much damage was done still won’t show up until the server has returned it, so this delay will still depend on your ping time.
Movement & Animations
- There is now an animation playing for when you interact with objects around the map. This animation is fully interruptible so will never prevent you from taking other actions.
- The crouched weapon stance now also applies to the pistol.
Abilities
- The Rocket Jump ability now launches you less far if you’re already high in the air when triggering it.
Vehicles
- The vehicle machine gun turret now has faster projectiles (900 m/s, up from 600 m/s) and tighter spread.
- You can now press Q to swap weapons while in a vehicle. The default button to change seats while in a vehicle has been changed to Z.
- Quad bike steering has been made a bit more nimble.
Creatures
- Black-red cattermaw will now drop a rare weapon if they don’t drop a shield (meaning you will always get some high tier equipment from them).
- Black-red and blue cattermaw are now a bit more aggressive and also use their ranged attack more often.
- Cattermaw projectiles now move faster and deal more damage.
- Destroying the neck gland on a cattermaw now deals bonus damage to it (as well as disabling the ranged attack).
- The entirety of a cattermaw’s shell is now destroyed in one go, instead of the two sides being independently destroyed. This should make it easier to take advantage of their weak spot underneath the shell.
- Regular gorlizard weapon drops are now uncommon instead of common.
- Burrowers always spawn in their unburrowed state, and won’t burrow until after they’ve been in combat.
- The health values of the burrower armor plates on arms and legs have been reduced.
Environment
- There are now many more respawn points spread around the centre of the map, and more of them will be active in each match.
- Remember that these respawn points can only be held by one team at a time, so enemies can steal them from you (or vice versa!).
- The Shop Uplink consoles have had their areas slightly reworked to make them easier to spot.
- For reference, one can occasionally be found in the admin offices on the surface, and one in ‘deep storage’ just behind the warehouse down in the vaults.
- More assets around the map have had their collisions reworked to improve traversal over and around them.
- The plants across the fields have been reworked to provide more consistent soft cover.
- The earthtree has been replaced with a new model.
Lobby
- The lobby has received more visual upgrades.
- New celebratory effects play when a particularly outstanding player returns from a match and ends up on the MVP podium.
- Some characters around the lobby have had some outfit and animation uplifts.
- A bunch of new hiding spots for the ‘Hide and Seek’ activity have been added.
- ‘ALL STAR’ displays have been added to the lobby, showing off creators who have met the requirements for the ‘wall of fame’.
Customization
- New underwear has been added.
- Some new hair styles can now be unlocked from Hugo.
- Celeste and Max have some new clothing items for sale.
UI
- More consumables have had their icons reworked.
- ‘Escape’ can now more consistently be used as a shortcut to close menus.
- The respawn screen now has named buttons to go with each of the unlocked points.
- Mission iconography has been updated to be more consistent and clearer.
- The customization UI has been updated to no longer be split up across three different screens.
- Health and shield values are now also shown as numbers next to the bars.
- The game log (i.e. the section where things like kills and team updates go) have had an update to make the entries stand out a bit more.
- The inventory screen has had some updates to be easier to understand at a quick glance.
- The ‘Winners’ screen have had some visual updates.
- Various buttons around the project have been updated to feel more responsive when hovered, along with some general visual uplifts.
- Some of the fanfare effects that appear when you, say, increase reputation have had an uplift.
Other Updates
- The smoke that comes out of a sabotaged base vehicle is now more clear and lingers for longer.
- Chip, the shop tutorial guy, now has an animation for when he’s sitting down and talking, so that it’s more obvious what’s going on.
- The tutorial video that plays in the cryo pod has been made a bit smaller so that players in tighter FoVs can take it in without having to turn.
- A greater variety of original music tracks have been added for those playing in ‘streamer mode’.
- Pinging a biocore will now also reveal it to your team on the map.
- The power pick-ups have a new model and there is now a visual difference between different quantities of power.
- The hit box for heads has been made a bit bigger in order to be more forgiving when trying to land headshots.
- You must now deposit power into shops before you can spend it.
- Made pick-up hit boxes for a variety of items larger; in particular for weapons.
- You can now be invited to a party (and play a real match) even without having done the tutorial. Playing a match with friends in this way will also advance the ‘do the tutorial’ mission so you can carry on with progression.
- You can still play the tutorial at any point via the matchmaking menu.
- The interaction area on the base vehicle sabotage point has been made bigger so it’s easier to interact with (e.g. to repair or use a hacking device to sabotage it).
- The intro video to the game mode tutorial has been removed. The information it presents is covered elsewhere anyway, so this should get you into the action a bit quicker.
- Different pick-ups now come with different pick-ups sounds (instead of a single generic one).
- More voice lines for picking up weapons have been added.
- Speaker announcements in the vaults should now be louder and audible from further away.
Bug Fixes
- A pretty big issue in regards to weapon tracers has finally been fixed:
- Up until now, all tracers have been visualized slightly in the past, meaning the visual of where your bullets are traveling is actually where they used to be and not where they currently are, which could lead to some misleading situations around whether your projectiles hit or not.
- With this fix, weapon tracers are now accurately representing where your bullets are traveling in real time.
- However, as a heads up, this fix has introduced a different issue which is still being looked into: when bullets hit walls, tracers can occasionally be seen disappearing right before the wall instead of on it. This is not nearly as bad as the previous issue, though, so we decided to put this fix in anyway while we’re working out the final kinks.
- NPCs in the lobby now blink. No dried out eyeballs for Victor tonight.
- Fixed various issues to do with some parts of the UI using default values if you disconnect and reconnect.
- Accepting a duel while you are searching for a match should no longer cancel the search.
- Initiating a climb at high velocity should no longer maintain that velocity when the climb finishes (and should thus not launch you into the air at the apex of the climb).
- Fixed a variety of snapping issues when going between animations.
- Fixed various typos.
- Removed a stutter issue that could occur when using a wind vortex.
- Fixed the upgrade station interaction text to not always claim they are unavailable.
- Fixed a few issues with the text displayed by mission computer terminals.
- Boss Summoning stations should no longer show mission markers when the player is on a mission to use them if they aren’t active.
- Fixed an issue where gorlizards would sometimes go through doors.
- Fixed some issues with how different modules made use of player chosen dyes.
- Fixed some issues with creature health bars not always properly appearing.
- A lot of little gaps between assets have been closed up. Mainly for performance reasons, but in some cases these were also large enough to look through.
- DLSS settings should now apply and save properly.
- The screens surrounding the airstrike console should now also be off if the event is off.
- The panels around the central extraction event should now also be off if the event is off.
- Driving over a wind vortex should no longer cause your character to look as it gets pulled out of the vehicle.
- The warehouse lift could occasionally break based on how the map unlocked. It should now always function.
- The objective description for the ‘Running (for) a Gauntlet’ mission should now point out all the locations where energy cells can be located.
- Fullscreen mode should now default to native screen resolution.
- You should no longer be able to enter water treatment through the large pipe with pulse bombs if the area is sealed.