Hi everyone! It’s been over a month since the release of the previous big Survarium update, and it’s time to share with you what’s coming in Survarium 0.57.
A New Weapon for the Renaissance Army
As a result of the holiday Faction Challenge event we promised to implement a new weapon for the winning faction, and what suits the Army better than a legendary AKMSU weapon? Legendary in a sense that the weapon is not in the GRAU index, and only a few actual copies of the weapon exist, one of those being in the Royal Armouries Collection. Some people think this weapon never existed (as a piece intended for use in the Soviet Army) and was made in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Some people think this is a secret rifle that failed to pass the tests. Anyway, even if it’s a myth, the weapon will make it into Survarium.
The choice of weapon is also largely attributed to the fact we’ve wanted to introduce new types of modules into the game for a long time. And so these modules fit other weapons, we chose the AKMSU as a piece that has some cool looking parts which could fit other AK rifles. Among these modules will be the following: extended magazine, pistol grip, light-weight bolt carrier group, charging handle and buttstock.
The Extended magazine increases the number of bullets, but reduces reload speed. The Light-weight bolt carrier group increases rate of fire and recoil. The Buttstock reduces recoil and increases spread when firing from the hip. These are only examples, we will have other new modules in Survarium 0.57. Also keep in mind that parameters of the modules can be changed based on the PTS testing, or in one of the upcoming Survarium patches and balancing updates.
Balance Changes
Since we are talking about balance, we want to make some changes to the parameters of some weapon types, because even after increasing recoil when using x6/x8 optical sights, assault rifles are still very popular across all tiers of equipment. We would like to see you using a larger variety of weapons in Survarium, so we will be decreasing effective distance of assault rifles and increasing pistol damage.
We are also looking into increasing effective distance of submachine guns and shotguns, but first we’d like to see if reducing effective distance of assault rifles is enough. After all, we do not want to go from one extreme to the other (veteran players should remember when everyone used to play with a shotgun).
The changes will also be made to some of the less frequently used supplies. In addition to its current effects (reducing bleeding damage and stopping power affecting your character), Anesthetic will provide total immunity to fractures. Duration will be unchanged: 10 seconds. Moreover, Anesthetic could become more useful because we will introduce new skills which increase effectiveness of traps, mines and grenades.
Technical Skill Tree
We announced two more skill trees in addition to the three existing ones a few years ago, but the team always had tasks with more priority. Well, enough is enough: it’s time to finally spice up the game with some new skills!
While designing the new skill tree, our goal was to come up with more interesting abilities than simply increasing a characteristic by 1%. Of course, not all technical skills will introduce new gameplay mechanics, but we tried to create enough abilities that do. Some of them may seem too strong (and they probably are), so we are going to change them based on the PTS test results. Additionally, expect more balancing and fine tuning after the skill tree hits the public server.
Please see the examples of new abilities below.
The Last Chance. If you have a grenade, you will drop it upon death. The grenade explodes dealing reduced damage (compared to usual grenade damage). More points in the skill increase the damage.
Capacitor M2. Upon destroying an anomaly with a capacitor, you will pick up the artifact (if you have space in the backpack).
Experienced Sapper. Your character does not activate allied traps and mines.
Metal Detector. Enemy traps, mines, C-4 and grenades are highlighted in radius (meters). More points in the skill increase the radius.
Jagged Edges. Traps, mines and C-4 always cause bleeding.
Updated Grenade Smoke and Other Improvements
We continue to work on the new renderer, and one of the most prominent changes will be a new visualization of the smoke grenade particles. The smoke is darker and more dense, so it’s possible to spot other characters in the smoke only at the distance of a few meters. We are also fixing a few annoying UI issues causing incorrect display of players post-match and various bugs with the loading screen.
These are only some of the upcoming new features and improvements. We will publish the full list of changes in Survarium 0.57 shortly before the update is released to the public server. We plan to have testing on the Public Test Server next week to gather your feedback about the skill tree and balance changes.
Stay tuned for more news next week!