Hello and welcome to our June Update! We'll first cover some of the features and improvements that we wanted to go into greater depth on, and after that are the rest of the patch notes. As always, please let us know your feedback - enjoy!
Bikes
The team is excited to bring you our second new feature to the game - Bikes! An iconic part of 80’s culture and a great source of transportation, Bikes will definitely change how you make your way across Östertörn. Available at every safe House, players can now interact with the Bike station to spawn their own “Cykel” Bike. This model comes in three different colors, with Sky Blue available immediately and the Emerald Green and Ruby Red variations unlockable by destroying certain machine types.
You’ll notice that this particular Bike performs better on the road than off it, so keep that in mind when planning your routes. And beware of machines, they still can and will attack you on sight! Lastly, as this is our first step with Bikes in Generation Zero - our plan is to continue to iterate and improve them over time based on your feedback.
Main Mission Improvements
As discussed in previous communications, in this update we set out to take a long look at Missions, based on feedback and data that showed that they were not working as expected. After digging into things, we decided to make some alterations “under the hood” to the Mission system to improve the experience for players now and in the future.
So, what does this mean for you? Primarily we’ve sorted issues where Main Missions (previously called Warboard Missions - Payback, Safety, & Answers) could get stuck in an uncompletable state. Therefore, if you are currently stuck or were at risk of becoming so, this fix will solve that. This means that players will now be able to finish the core game story without fear.
Of note, this fix does come with some quirks. One is that this update has the side effect of us resetting progress on your current Missions back to the first step of that Mission. Again this only affects players that are part-way through a Mission, so if you are at the first step you’ll see no change. Doing so was a necessary step to improve the system for now and the future - We apologise for any inconvenience it might cause in the short term.
Secondly, if you are someone who is currently stuck on a Warboard Mission from the region you logged out in, the Mission will disappear from your Log - But it’s not really gone! You’ll just need to fast travel out of that region then back for it to reappear. This is a late discovered bug that we’ll look into fixing for a future update.
Another benefit of looking into the Missions system is that we’ve improved some of the HUD / Map elements to make things clearer and easier to understand. For players, this means that your current Mission objective will now appear in the upper left of the HUD (which can be turned off in Settings). Additionally there are now more icons on the in-game compass at the top of the screen to help guide you to where Tracked Mission items are.
Our aim is that through all of these combined improvements, players will have an easier time getting through the game. Please let us know if we hit the mark or not!
Game Balance Tweaks
Based on player feedback from the last patch, we identified a few areas that needed to be touched up a bit as the changes we made didn’t quite land the way we intended. Please keep the feedback coming on these items as we continue to improve the overall game experience.
Explosive Damage
We heard from you that the tweaks we made to how explosive damage vs. machines was calculated made the difficulty swing too much the other direction. After looking into it, we’ve increased the explosive damage for all weapons, gadgets, and environmental objects.
Loot Containers
No more empty spawning loot containers! You reported some bugs but also mentioned that in general this just didn’t feel good, so we they’ve now been tweaked to prevent them from being empty when they’re spawned.
This means that any loot container that you have not looted within 4 hours of gameplay should contain at least one item when you open it. Keep in mind that loot is saved locally - which means that loot containers looted in single player will remain looted if you join a multiplayer game within the cool down period.
Machine Loot
Just like with loot containers, we wanted to make looting machines feel better. To that end we’ve made some more tweaks which we think are an improvement.
The biggest change is how much ammo will drop for all enemy types. We want the amount to better reflect the ammo cost of defeating them. This means that on average you should get back as much ammo as you used to best the machine you fought. On top of that, all machines can now potentially drop health items!
To round things off, all Tanks and Harvesters now have a chance to drop bonus items such as weapons and attachments. Item rarity is tied to machine class with C-class variants dropping the best items
Bug Fixes
Main changelog continues below:
Missions
- As mentioned, all Main & Warboard Missions have received retroactive fixes for stuck Missions. We want to specifically call out a few below as they were the ones with the most reports:
- “Flying Objects”
- “Flying Blind”
- “Spiking the Guns”
- “The Girl Who Cried Wolf”
- “Minken Bunker”
- “Uttern Bunker”
- “On the Road” is no longer blocked by claiming the safe house before destroying machines in the area.
- “The Hunter” now correctly triggers machine spawns as intended.
- “The Hunter” will no longer cause Mission items to respawn when reloading a save whilst on the Mission.
- “The Hunter” now has improved Mission description to make objectives clearer.
- “Flying Blind” will no longer have a chance of the bunker doors remaining locked after completing the Mission.
- “Flying Blind” has received an adjusted Point of Interest marker so that it is now correctly located on the bunker entrance.
- “Spiking the Guns” will no longer erroneously show two tracked waypoints.
- “Beachhead” received a rework of the Mission objectives to make them clearer.
- “Behind the Curtain” has corrected an issue that could prevent progress via a locked door if the session was restarted mid-Mission.
- “The Home Team” no longer has an issue that could prevent players progressing past this Mission.
- “Loud and Clear” has corrected an issue that could prevent Mission completion.
- “Loud and Clear” now has thetick jammer correctly located on the circuit box.
- “Break of Dawn” will now have correctly update Mission progression
- “Gas Run” can now be completed even if the gas station was destroyed before acquiring the Mission.
- Corrected issue that could remove the current objective message and place of interest marker when a player respawns.
- “The Old Guard” now correctly spawns machines related to this Mission inside the bunker, rather than on top of it.
- “The Old Guard” now correctly tracks Mission progress when carrying out objectives.
- “Courage, Power, and Resilience” now correctly tracks Mission progress when carrying out objectives.
- “Lost and Found” now correctly tracks Mission progress when carrying out objectives.
- “Over and Out” no longer has a blank Mission item.
- “Strength in Numbers” has a clearer Mission objective where it now states where machines need to be eliminated from.
- Updated appearance of Place of Interest markers.
- Corrected issue where displayed total number of tracked Mission objectives could be mismatched with actual total.
Multiplayer
- “Break of Dawn” now correctly appears in Mission log during Multiplayer.
- “Break of Dawn” will now have correctly applied Multiplayer progression.
- An issue was corrected that could in some cases block Mission progression when ending a session part way through.
- “The Girl Who Cried Wolf” no longer has a mismatch between single and multiplayer progression.
- When playing co-op as a guest, Mission progress will now correctly carry over to your single player game if you were on the same Mission step (or beyond) as the host in a Multiplayer game when you joined them.
Animation
- Corrected animation mismatch with pump shotgun when viewed from third-person.
- Improved machine “powered down” animations to better signify their status when EMP’d.
- Various improvements to machine movement and idle animations.
Audio
- Corrected issue that could prevent audio settings from saving correctly.
- The public emergency alarm will no longer loop continuously.
Combat
- Environmental gas no longer incorrectly causes damage to machines.
- Made improvements to prevent Hunters jumping through walls/ceilings/objects.
Environment
- Corrected collision on “platform” asset so players/machines can no longer clip through it.
- Corrected “shed” asset so that players no-longer need to jump to cross the threshold.
- Removed invisible collision area in the middle of picket fence gate.
- Corrected various locations where players could potentially get stuck in terrain.
- Corrected issue that could cause bunker doors that were tied to power activation to re-lock after starting a new game session.
- Various floating world objects corrected.
Experience
- Corrected issue that could result in less experience than intended being rewarded when destroying machines via explosive damage, such as:
- Exploding components, e.g. the fuel tanks on the runners
- Using deployed explosives, e.g. mines and gas tanks
- Explosive weapons, e.g. Granatgevär and hand grenades
Graphics
- Decals should no longer flicker on machines
- Performance improvements via decreasing the time of machine wrecks despawn from the world.
- Fixed a bug where Ticks spawned by other machines could live forever, bogging down performance.
Items
- Field radio should no longer jitter in place when associated relay beacon is destroyed.
- Large EMP cell now reacts more consistently when hit with bullets.
Key Bindings
- Multiple improvements to key-binding menu.
Photo Mode
- Corrected misalignment of UI features when used in Windowed mode.
- Text chat will no-longer incorrectly display when using Photo Mode.
UI
- The Multiplayer menu now correctly gives feedback when applying settings.
- AR and SMG barrel extensions no longer incorrectly show the suppressor icon in inventory.
- Made it easier to interact with “sitting corpse” asset when looting.
- Corrected issue that could cause “The Farm” objective icon to remain even after completing progress.
Weapons
- Green dot sight markers should no longer cause vision to be obstructed when used.
- Corrected issue that could cause trace effects to display long after weapon has been fired.
- Corrected misplaced muzzle flash for Granatgevär.
Thank you for reading!
/The Generation Zero Team