Next Fest takeaways
Welcome back, agents! To start things off, we wanted to thank everyone who took the time to play Deceive Inc. and leave their feedback and suggestions during the Steam Next Fest. We’ve had an unprecedented amount of it to go through and we came away with some obvious key areas we’ll want to act on.
We also want to set expectations on changes and tweaks to the game. The march open Beta will feature crossplay with all platforms including consoles for the first time! This great opportunity also comes with the added constraint of ensuring compatibility between all versions of the game. What this means is that you should not expect any major change for open beta apart from server-side tweaks to the game. While we are already working on solutions and features to address some of the main feedback, we want to be clear that these tweaks can take a bit of time to materialize. We will keep you informed on the state of these changes as we move forward in the game’s launch and beyond.
With that said, let's get into it.
Early Fights and Spawning locations
We know that the current spawn systems for agents are not granular enough to ensure a good experience every match. We are adding new hooks that will allow us to better hand pick suitable locations and drastically reduce fights in the first seconds of a match. While the initial setup of this system is not a purely server-based change, further iteration on it once in place will allow fast action on problematic player spawns.
Pacing/Spawn Balancing
While our recent tweaks to balancing did work in slowing down the early game pace a bit, we are still not exactly where we would want to be. We put in place a suggestion on reducing intel spawns in Guard rooms during next fest and were overall happy with the results. It was clear though that we needed a bit more iteration on this guard room balancing to ensure less cases where almost nothing is in these rooms.
We also had clear feedback that Diamond Spire did not have enough intel spawn and as such we are upping its loot pool significantly.
Jump Fatigue
We heard the message loud and clear: The new jump fatigue balancing is way too severe and obtrusive. We are both reducing the lowering of agent speed built up by jump fatigue and shortening the time it takes to recover from it. You will also need to jump closer in a row to trigger it.
Jump Fatigue is intended as a solution to mashing jumps infinitely in a gunfight, we do not want it to impede navigation in normal gameplay.
Weapon Stats
There is a huge demand from you all on having a transparent look into the weapons of the game. We are already hard at work in making that a reality. There are two main aspects to this we are working on. This is not something we can just wedge in a short time table, but expect this as an update after the initial launch window.
Training Range Tools: We are adding damage numbers to the dummies in the training range/ in the pregame lobby. You will now be able to test weapon damage at a variety of different ranges with all characters. Theory craft away!
Weapon Tooltip Redesign: We are early in the process of redesigning weapon tooltips in agent select entirely. We want to expose every element of a weapon’s stats from damage to fire rate and everything in between in a 100% transparent form. We will share advancement of this with you all as it moves up in development from concept to reality.
Shooting down innocent NPCs abusively
We’ve received this feedback many times over different playtests but the influx of players new to the game brought it up even more in this playtest: It does not feel appropriate for the theme of the game to have players just shoot any innocent NPC coming into a room without any penalty.
We have an internal prototype of a mechanic to help deal with this. We want to make the intent clear: We do not want this mechanic to interfere at all with players playing the game normally and guessing wrong from time to time on who is a player. We are building a mechanic that specifically targets players who voluntarily eliminate non-guard NPC in numbers that are beyond normal gameplay.
As you can probably imagine, a mechanic like this is easy to get wrong. This is why we have been playing with it in our internal playtest for a while and are continuing iteration on it. We will show more of this well before it makes its debut in-game to make sure we do not miss the mark on this one.
Guard Annoyance
We often get the feedback that guards are both too annoying and not strong enough. It’s a difficult dilemma to parse, but we have some good angles we want to put in action:
Range of action: Depending on where you pick a fight, guards can come from seemingly nowhere in infinite numbers. We already have a tweak for this that will make sure that guards come from a far more predictable range in all situations. This should mostly affect fighting in public areas or near large rooms.
Dying by guards: We are working on a new system that affects guard accuracy depending on more factors. With this, we can make sure to give players more chances to survive when low on health against guards. This should also limit greatly dying from guards after a clutch fight.
Overall Threat: We want guards to be a bit more dangerous overall when you do encounter them. After removing the aforementioned annoyance, we will look into how to make them a bit more significant. Our top priority is to make them less annoying and more reliable before this.
Vertical Audio
We’ve had plenty of feedback around the difficulty of understanding where fights are occurring in vertical situations. We’ll dig into this to find the best way to make audio more easily understandable for players.
Another thing that goes hand in hand with this is ensuring NPCs do not trigger fear through different floors which can lead to even more confusion on where a fight is coming from.
Package Carrier Vision
We’ve had repeated feedback that carrier vision is currently too strong. While we definitely need it to be very strong for players to even consider grabbing it, there are a few things we can tweak to make it less lopsided.
We are toying with tweaking ranges on the detection but also changing what you see while scanning. We have a working version of this internally where you now see the spy instead of the npc disguise they have while scanning. What this means is that quickly scanning an opponent does not give a guaranteed identification of what they look like if they are in a crowd of npc.
We hope this will give more opportunity to bamboozle the carrier while keeping the ability strong and game defining.
And that’s a wrap! As you can imagine this is far from all the feedback we received, but in the spirit of keeping things tidy we had to choose the main subjects we will be looking into.
Once again, we’d like to extend a huge thank you for playing Deceive Inc. and the valuable feedback that was sent to us. See you on the field!