As a massive cold front hits the United States, the world of VAIL also got hit with a blizzard. Enjoy these wintry updates and if you have any feedback or just want to chill, please Join us on Discord!
Winter Maps
Several maps were hit with a blizzard! Snow covered versions of the armory, Volt and Khidi are now available for a limited time.
SNOWBALLS
In addition to the snowy maps, we added lethal snowballs. Snowballs will deal enough damage to kill the opponent in one hit. We've made them respawning in the snowdrifts on the snow maps. Snowballs are a seasonal feature, so make sure you invite your friends to a snowball fight while you can!
Impact Grenades
In addition to the new snowy features, we added an Impact Frag that will be a permanent feature. The impact grenade looks like the frag, but you can differentiate the two based on color. The frag has an ORANGE glow while the impact grenade has a BLUE glow.
The impact grenade is activated just like other grenades by hitting the trigger, but it will only detonate after you throw it and it collides with an object, You can also shoot the impact grenade mid air to protect yourself from one thrown at you. Our sound designer is still finalizing special sounds for the impact frag, but we couldn't help sharing it with you, so stay tuned for exciting updates!
Weapon Balancing
We've heard the feedback from the community regarding our guns. While we are generally happy with the gunplay, we are always working to tune things and to improve based on feedback. It's clear from our beta tournament and since launch that the biggest concerns that many of you have are regarding recoil and peeker's advantage.
Many believe our recoil is too low, that our guns are like lasers and require no skill to shoot. While we've put lots of effort into our recoil to make it as realistic as possible (we often go shoot real guns for experience), we recognize that many of you are looking for something that requires more skill. And generally, as a competitive shooter, we are always striving to have a higher skill ceiling.
In addition to that, a meta has emerged called the peeker's advantage where a player will wait, listen for footsteps, and then swing out and kill the opponent before they can react. There's a lot of factors at play here, but we believe we can address both of these issues with one solution.
We are experimenting with a recoil stabilization penalty that increases the recoil of each gun based on your lateral movement. The best way to understand this change is to try it for yourself, but essentially you'll have a harder time controlling the gun's recoil as you shoot while strafing. The gun's recoil will move almost with the weight of the gun as you move side to side, making it harder to control while peeking, which is also more realistic. Your first shot will be the most accurate, and you'll have to stand still to maintain that accuracy.
We will be tuning this feature based on feedback, so let us know how it feels for you and your favorite guns!
Other Changes
- Adjusted Weapon Movement Penalty slightly to bring each gun class closer to each other
- Adjusted APC9Pro and Vector's damage to torso to be lower at pointblank range but still a higher dps than rifles at pointblank. Will do the same damage at longer distances that it did before.
- Snowballs got a unique grab sound and impact, make sure you have your audio settings right for the most immersive experience!
- Added new patreon names to the wall
- Applied centrifugal force to mag-flicking calculation
Map Changes
Este:
- Made ladders easier to climb
Khidi:
- Added Winter Mode with snow
- Fixed missing blackface and incorrect collision on A-site wall
- Adjusted hanging Cloth wind intensity being crazy
- Fixed up misplacement in the route to the museum
Volt:
- Added Winter Mode with snow
- TDM- Adjusted spawn locations and added many new once
- Added additional cover on sides of map
- Adjusted all cover in map to be more forgiving/less open sightlines
- TDM/FFA/CTO - Adjusted and added more spawns
- FFA/TDM - Added new launchpads in upper spawn buildings
- Adjusted collisions on Volt near ladder
Miru:
- General map improvements, such as: fixed up splotches on the landscape and LODs
Armory:
- Added Winter Mode with snow
- Added Impact Frag to the gun table - it has a blue color
- Added more basketballs to the play area
Bug fixes
Since the last update we fixed 5 public facing bugs in addition to lots of bugs that we found and fixed before you had to deal with them!
- FIXED - Scoreboard layout wrong for Picnic and FFA Modes
- FIXED - Can grab tacticals off your same wrist during match start
- FIXED - Cannot mute players of the opposite team in FFA or 1v1
- FIXED - Crash when hitting specific items on Este
- FIXED - if host changes maps during match start, players will be stuck and cannot move