Greetings Champions!
With all the busy patching and hunting down bugs these past few days, the patch notes announcement here for last Friday’s build was delayed a bit, so here it is!
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Today’s update has a lot of quality-of-life fixes, more crash fixes and performance improvements. To start with, we’ve increased the size of “invisible walls” around the intended paths that players take, so there should be little to none of those “flying at top speed off a ramp and landing in lava crashing the game” situations. Instead, you should slam on an invisible wall and fall safe and sound where you should be. If any of these issues recur, please don’t hesitate to let us know and we’ll take care of it!
The final Dominion Boss was also something we looked at, and even with the latest change in VFX, we felt he still got lost in the battlefield, so we gave him a modest sizing. He should be much easier to follow now.
As far as performance is concerned, we’ve taken a look at a couple of things, including the speed at which the save data is read and saved, shader and material improvements, FPS improvements on enemy spawning, stage optimization, and changes to the graphics API.
We’ve also fixed issues with currency and achievement rewards, player revival with mouse and keyboard, UI fixes, and a smattering of others. Check the full list below:
GENERAL
The Revive button when using the mouse and keyboard should now properly revive the player.
Reduced out-of-bounds situations by properly blocking flying vehicles.
Increased the size of the final Dominion Boss by 20%.
HEROES
VEJIGANTE
NOTE: We are aware of the issues with Chupacabra and are working to fix them. He’s been a bad puppy, but we’ll have him trained and following the Hero properly faster than you can say… well… we’ll just train him up ASAP ;)
Vejigante will now properly unlock for all players in a multiplayer run when the final Dominion Boss has been defeated, regardless of who is currently dead or who gets the killing blow.
PERFORMANCE
- Optimized save data read/write speed for faster loading after runs. This was done by removing gift specific stats from other players in multiplayer, so for now you will see 0 damage when you switch players. This will be corrected on a later patch.
- Optimized enemy pools in order to significantly reduce FPS drops during spawning.
- Optimized shaders and materials on multiple stages.
- Optimized assets in the Downtown and North District stages to improve loading times.
- Improved Gift selection speed in both single player and multiplayer.
- Force the game to use Direct3D 11 for improved stability and performance across the board. Once we have tried and tested other APIs such as Direct3D 12 or Vulkan, we’ll enable them.
REWARDS
- There was an issue where only the player who got the killing blow on the mini-boss and/or the stage boss received the currency for it. This is not by design, so we changed it so that everyone can get those much-needed upgrades.
- Everyone in the run should now be properly rewarded with shards and dust.
Crashes are down to a minimum, but they can still happen. Please let us know if you experience these and we'll be on top of them!
Until next time, keep on driving, Champions!