A new patch for Primal Carnage: Extinction is now available on Steam!
Today's patch includes numerous gameplay tweaks and fixes, including improvements to melee hit detection and human weapon accuracy.
It also marks the end of our special festive event, with the Winter Finale store rotation...
Check out the highlights or scroll to the bottom for a full list of changes...
Melee Madness
We introduced melee abilities for all long guns with the December update, unfortunately they didn't function as reliably as we'd hoped. As of the January patch we've implemented a new way of doing melee traces for weapons, which is much more consistent and efficient. That means no more being unable to whack a dino that you've netted to finish it off because you just.. can't... quite.. reach it.
Finally, managing to land a killing blow using your primary weapon's melee ability will now return a good chunk of your stamina back, as a reward for pulling off such a feat. So if you were forced to use your last ounce of energy to take your enemy down, you are now newly reinvigorated with bloodlust!
Chainsaw Carnage
Speaking of melee improvements... the Pyro has a new ability!
When using the chainsaw, he now has a degree of damage mitigation. Certain attacks from smaller dinosaurs only deal half their regular damage so long as he keeps the blade spinning to block them. Raptor slashes, Cryo and Bruiser bites are among the damage types he can resist. So, if you see a Pyro revving their saw, you might want to think twice before engaging!
Larger attacks such as Bruiser *secondaries* are unaffected and it won't help him against Tyrants. His new ability is also balanced out by the saw overheating slightly faster than it did previously, and the chainsaw does not have such a long reach now.
After receiving positive feedback during testing, we're interested to see how this update to Pyro's toolkit plays out in the wild!
Muliticoloured Menagerie
A new addition to the customization screen for dinosaurs is the ability to modify the colour tone of your dinosaur skin, adjusting the hue spectrum and intensity. This works for the majority of dinosaur skins and allows a lot of new possiblities when tweaking your dino.
How noticeable the difference is varies from skin to skin. A black and white raptor won't suddenly turn red if you adjust the slider, because there were no colours to adjust to begin with. You can also change the colour of dinosaur eyes with this update to customization!
Many skins use the eye layer of the dino shader for their glow effects, so adjusting eye colour tone on those may change the colour of their glow (with the exception of Ultimate skins).
We hope you like this colourful new feature! This is just our first pass at implementing a wider range of colour customization into Primal, we'll be continuing to improve the feature and are also considering similar adjustment options for human clothing and hair colour in future.
January Store Rotation
The winter event has concluded, but we still have a few frosty friends showing up this week such as the simply magnificent Aurora Spinosaurus and majestic Ice King Rex.
Since we opened up submissions for Royal Dilo variants recently we've had a flood of great designs appearing on the Workshop (link). Today we have two new Royal Dilo skin sets - the Generation 3 triple pack and an Alpha Royal double-pack who bear noble fringes running down their spines.
For the humans, we have a unique remodel for the Desert Eagle, a "premium weapon skin" that gives it a radically different appearance. Pick up the Antique Desert Eagle Bodykit in-store today...
Freebies!
As you may have seen in the announcement video, we have a fresh collection of free drops entering the game with the January update....
These new drops range from the wild and wonderful Howling Cerato, to the understated Cooler Pachycephalosaurus, to the intricate Paisley Double Barrel and even a cheerful Winter Bobble Hat.
All of these will start dropping soon in-game so keep an eye out!
First Signs of Spring
You may notice some new foliage types on a few maps with this patch. We're looking to improve the visual variety in certain areas going forward, so that everywhere doesn't look green and brown if you squint. There were some sprinklings of flowers in the past, but areas like Airbase now have vast fields in bloom to help break up the monotony.
Expect to see more varieties of interesting plant life decorating the world as we get deeper into the year!
What's New In 2022
We have a lot of ideas on how to improve and expand Primal Carnage: Extinction in future. Some of these we've mentioned before such as Sandbox Mode, but for the time being we're going to be focusing on polishing and fixing up issues with the game as it stands. These fixes and tweaks will be making their way to PlayStation later this year and will be taking up the bulk of our time.
Having said that, our rough goals for the first half of the year include:
- Finally finishing the Tupandactylus class, giving it a unique secondary ability
- Polishing off major revamps of the Contingency & Marsh maps
- Adding more customization options for humans and dinosaurs
- Further updates to Survival mode gameplay
- Fine tuning dinosaur camera controls to be smoother
- Implementing even more gamepad options and control schemes
- Improving network efficiency and optimizing game download size
That last one is important, as we hope to eventually deliver smaller bug fix patches that do not require large downloads. We managed to reduced the install size of the game from ~30GB to below ~10GB in our testing, and once the issues with the new build process are resolved we hope to roll it out ASAP.
We'll also be continuing to do small visual improvements wherever possible, such as adding new color grading to differentiate each map and updating one or two of our older dinosaur models. One of these is the classic feathered raptor base model. You can see a work in progress render of the new mesh below...
In addition to all that's going on with the game itself, we're also still hoping to launch a Primal Carnage Merch Store this year that will sell official posters and apparel inspired by the game. We're already working with community creators to make some beautiful artwork you'll be able to wear and drink from before too long if all goes well.
That about does it for now. You can read all of the January update changes in full below.
Until next time!
-The Primal Carnage Team
Full Changelog
HUMANS
- 200% increase in maximum camera turn speed for humans
- Fixed a bug where scoped weapons were using an overly long fire interval when aiming
- Pyro now receives 50% less damage from non-tyrant primary melee attacks when revving the chainsaw
- List of damage types that are reduced when chainsawing:
- TupaPeck
- PteraPeck
- CarnotaurusBite
- RaptorBite
- OviraptorBite
- CryolophosaurusBite
- Reduced time til saw overheats to 2.75 secs
- Decreased range of chainsaw
- Bleed damage from heavy melee now behaves the same as bleed damage from bear traps for consistency
- Heavy melee attacks can now be used instantly after firing a gun
- Implemented a new trace method for heavy melee hit detection
- Humans now receive a jolt of stamina back when they successfully kill a dino using heavy melee
- Updated assault rifle first person melee animation
- Fixed muzzleflash appearing in 3rd person when using heavy melee
- Fixed heavy melee timing interfering with fire interval for m4 when scoped
- Made sure fire interval for m4 is the same whether aiming or not
- Should now be able to reload immediately after assault cannon fire animation has completed
- Reduced ammo for bow secondary fire from 6 to 3
- Reduced unscoped (hip-fire) spread on sniper rifles
- Increased crouched spread for sniper rifles slightly
- Doubled the damage falloff distance for sniper rifles
- Increased maximum range for the following guns:
assault rilfe, double barrel, dual pistols, m4, shotguns, snipers - Fixed a reloading issue with shotgun
- Updated third person trapper pistols run animation
- Updated flamethrower over-pressure particle effect to be a more intense blue burst
- More intense generic explosion light effect
- Increased arming time of thrown zap traps
- Reduced time between zaps for zap traps
- Reduced damage radius / shock radius of zap traps
- Reduced trigger delay of bear traps snapping shut
- Small reduction to scale of land mine model
- Timed grenades can now be thrown further
- Fixed being able to throw your throwables while holding LMB or RMB
- Fixed throwable items phasing through dino healing corpses
MAPS
- PC-Airbase: test adding more varieties of flowers
- PC-Airbase: updated helipad material to be two-sided
- PC-Borealis: adjustments to collision in some areas
- PC-Borealis: blocked humans from jumping on top of a shipping crate
- PC-Borealis: added more detailed ice meshes to cave area
- PC-Borealis: lethal icicles are now placed above the water outlet
- PC-Borealis: various content optimizations
- PC-DesertionPoint: fixed humans climbing on top of rock formation
- PC-Docks: possible fix for a CTE weapons blocker still being present in TDM mode
- PC-Snowbound: fixed having dirt footsteps instead of snow steps in many areas
- PC-Transfer: prevented a human exploit (the truck)
- PC-Transfer- fixed an area lacking collision around the outside of one of the acid pits
- PC-UtilityBase: increased tree density outside the main compound and added new foliage assets
- PC-Waterlogged: numerous collision fixes and exploit fixes
- PC-Waterlogged: optimized stylized lighting and shaders, details pass
- PC-Waterlogged: fixed player spawn points not working correctly
- PC-TheFalls: added more varieties of flowers
- PC-TheFalls: now uses a toned down version of Airbase's color grading
- GTTC-Docks: dinosaur player starts for point B have been moved further back
- GTTC-Docks: enabled Airbase style colour grading
- GTTC-Ruthless: returned the Brachis to the summer background vista with new sequences
- Made resupply amounts consistent for health and ammo pickups throughout all TDM maps
- Fixed overly long respawn times for health and ammo pickups on several TDM levels
- Tweaks to post processing on Ubase and DesertionPoint
- Tyrants no longer roar over and over again on the main menu
- Main menu map optimizations
- Updated a few environment textures
DINOSAURS
- Adjusted charged spit gravity scaling / arc, now travels further
- Slowed down speed of spit projectiles, fully charged spit should be much easier to hit now with larger globules at the tip
- Carnotaurus now accelerates to sprint speed more quickly
- Tyrants now take a little longer to accelerate to max sprint speed
- Camera shake now appears when receiving heavy melee damage as dinosaurs
- Updated Tyrant footstep particles for walking through snow
- Softened Tyrant footstep sounds when walking on snow
- Added sounds to Pachy digging taunt
- Fixed a stutter in the Novaraptor run animation
- Minor fixup for Acro bite animation
- Added option to customize colour tint and saturation of dinosaur eyes + skin texture
- Fixed several Rex and Carno skins that did not have the correct specular maps applied
OTHER
- Optimized waterfall particles
- Updated rotation and position offsets for a few cosmetic items
- Added official social links to the main menu, click to open in Steam overlay
- Fixed a crash that can sometimes occur while in class selection
- Possible fix for crashing when autobalanced
- Added option to disable screenshake (may not apply to all camera effects yet)
- Deprecated support for 32bit operating systems
- Updated sorting algorithm for scoreboard: - players with zero contribution are now placed at the bottom - sorting order now takes kill assists into account