We here at CloudGate are proud to announce that our first big update to Island 359: SECOND BLOOD!
This took us longer than we wanted, but some big things happened behind the scenes as well that are hopefully going to give us even more leverage as two developers to get content out to Early Access players much faster. We’re hoping to make updates like this happen a bit more frequently!
So, what’s new in SECOND BLOOD?
[WARNING: GAMEPLAY UPDATE SPOILERS AHEAD]
New Mission Type and Map: Big Hunt
This is an “advanced” mission for players who have already played Mercenary Mode. It’s much more difficult than the original game mode! Big Hunt is a stealth mission type where you have to use a recurve bow and arrow to hunt some big game dinos like our new Triceratops in a field of tall grass. Raptors also roam the field, so be extremely careful about engaging them in the open as if they swarm you here, you’re toast. The good news is the tall grass and the foliage in this map can hide you if you get your face down in it, so you can stay hidden as Raptors walk right past you. Stay hidden and move when the dinos aren’t looking your way to get close to the big game, and strike at their weak points (there’s a sign that shows you where to aim for, but it’s not easy!). A single arrow to any of the weak points will yield a kill shot which will cause the dino to bleed out. But be careful! They can still charge and/or bite in this state and they’ll definitely be angry!
Off to the sides of the field is a new lush jungle environment, complete with homes that the local population used to live in before the dinos took over. They’ve been collecting this strange new metal discovered on the Island, so look for it to pick up (store it like ammo) along with health packs and anything else you can find along the way. The “boys and girls back at the lab” really want to evaluate this metal so they’re using it as a score multiplier when you find it.
NOTE: We’ve locked Big Hunt out until you’ve completed Mercenary Mode at least once (make it back to the chopper and get a score better than last place on your local Leaderboard!). If you’ve beaten Mercenary Mode already, Big Hunt should be automatically unlocked when you play the update the first time.
New Dino: Triceratops
Get ready for a new enemy type! Technically Trikes aren’t your enemy; if you stay far enough away from them, they’ll just leave you alone. They’re herbivores! They don’t even like eating players. But they are extremely territorial so if you get too close, they’ll charge at you. Get out of the way, and shoot at their soft spots! Their armored head and plate are nearly bulletproof and arrowproof, so we wouldn’t even recommend shooting at them head-on as it’s not going to end well for you. Pro-tip. If you’re being chased by raptors, try shooting the trike, getting her to charge at you, and dodge and let her take care of the raptors for you.
New Weapons:
- The Brock: a black market fully automatic pistol with the most ridiculously awesome (and accurate) rate of fire ever. Be careful; you’ll empty the entire clip in under a second, and the recoil is murder
- AX-74: A mini-carbine that is fully automatic and has incredible stopping power.
- The Bow: Comes with unlimited ammo. Just reach over your shoulder and an arrow will automatically be added to your draw hand. Grab the string to draw bow. Release string to fire.
- Throwing Knives: Come in packs of 5, so when you throw one, we put your next knife immediately in your hand. Pull trigger to prep knife to “throw” position. Release knife to throw. They stack like ammo so if you pick up 3 packs, you can throw 15 knives from your one hand without switching packs.
New Upgrade:
Sniper Scope: Use for accuracy at extreme range. Probably not a great idea to slap it onto a fully automatic gun other than the lower rate of fire AX-74, but we’re not going to stop you from doing it. The manufacturer recommends using it on the Magnum, the Falcon, and the AX, because, BOOM, HEADSHOT.
Animation System Refactor:
This was so important to us we’re calling it out as a feature. We weren’t as happy as we wanted to be with our dino animations, so we rebuilt the entire animation system for every dinosaur so we get smoother interps. You’ll see it in the Raptors and the Allosaur especially, but dinos now have stalk animations, injured animation states, and should pathfind to you in a much less glitchy manner than our previous system. Oh, and the Raptors got a LOT faster. You’ve been warned.
And A Whole Lot More!
Besides a ton of boring stuff like how we build missions and modes, there’s a ton of perf improvements behind the scenes. We’ve mostly un-choked the CPU by optimizing how we do a ton of our systems, we’ve done a lot of first-pass foliage improvements (and more coming, soon). If you have the latest SteamVR Beta with asynch reprojection, you’re going to be able to push the graphics settings harder than you’ve ever pushed them before in our game. On our tests on our 970 cards, we were able to move the default graphic setting from Medium to High without any noticeable increase in dropped frames (nearly zero) using the latest asynchronous reprojection. We left the default graphics setting to Medium for now, however, as we’re still trying to improve our performance there. We’re within striking distance of true 90fps on Medium on 970s and we’re working hard to get it there if we can. Lastly, we’re hoping to sneak out some lighter bite-sized updates in the coming weeks on top of our future plans for larger updates like this one!
New Graphics Scalability settings will be coming online very soon as we have changed so much that we need to change some and tweak others, and we want to give you a way to save your selected settings so you don’t have to keep re-doing it every mission!
Known issues:
- Dinos can get stuck on some slopes and bigger objects due to the new animation system.
- Water won’t look correct as the water shader is broken.
- Arrows may still be left in world after dead dinos despawn.
Let us know in the Community Forum “Report Bugs” thread if you notice anything else, please!
Thanks so much for supporting us! We’re really excited that reception has been positive to Island 359 so far and we can’t wait to show you what’s next!
Steve and Jeremy