Agents,
With the first catalog update, Misery Empire, coming later this month, Deceive Inc. has compiled this brief to let you know about upcoming changes to mission parameters. Please note: This brief contains Work In Progress information about a future update and items are subject to change or be added.
Major Changes
New agent: [REDACTED]
Seasonal Catalog: Misery Empire
[REDACTED]
Heat System and collaterals
Deceive Inc. has been under increased scrutiny from its clients recently. In an effort to raise its operational standards, the company has introduced new rules that will make sure agents do not act too recklessly on the field.
Enter the Heat System!
You will notice this new bar under your health at all times. This bar will be filled when eliminating innocent NPCs. Everytime you reach one of the three thresholds, you will get progressively more severe punishment for taking out innocents.
First Heat Level
You will become 30% more vulnerable to damage for 12 seconds. This penalty is renewed on your next npc elimination while on this level.
Second Heat Level
You will become 50% more vulnerable to damage for 15 seconds. This penalty is renewed on your next npc elimination while on this level.
Third Heat Level
You have gone rogue! You will take 100% more damage for 20 seconds AND gain the exposed status effect, making you unable to recover for the duration. This is a SEVERE penalty that will only happen to the most unhinged of agents. Make sure it’s not you.
Heat will naturally start venting off when players get back into cover and stop taking out innocent npc. If you ever find yourself building a bit too much heat, you simply have to lay low for a short while to get back into the thick of it.
A final note: VIPs are a special case for the Heat system. Downing a VIP will build up a full heat level right away. Make sure you are certain that this Jati is not the real Jati, otherwise you might be in for a rude awakening.
Team Intel
After taking a look at overall analytics and getting more playtime in teams mode, it’s obvious that team matches often progress faster than solo matches. There are of course multiple reasons for that, but one obvious one is that intel is effectively tripled in teams vs solo because every team member can hack the same intel piece.
With this update, intel use is now once per team instead of per individual. This changes will have many effects on the gameplay we feel are beneficial:
- It slows down the extremely breakneck speed of unlocking vault terminals in the first phase.
- It adds strategy to team matches in who should take which intel to have the most efficient run.
- It adds incentive to split the team, taking more risks while speeding up the team’s progression.
- It gives a lot of value to finding keycards in teams.
While we expect this change will take some time getting used to, we feel it’s very much to the benefit of team matches and will make things more interesting.
Team Revive Mechanic
We’ve received a lot of feedback around the team's revival mechanic. Being able to revive just once is great to drive the incentive of not getting taken out, but it leads to frustrating matches where you can sometimes be out very early and have to watch your friends play without you for 12 minutes.
We are introducing a change to revive that, we hope, will keep most of the upside of penalties when getting taken out and give more playtime to you and your friends.
Every player will now be revivable 3 times in a match BUT they will take additive penalties to their max health. These penalties are as follow:
- 75 Max Health on first revive
- 50 Max Health on second revive
- 30 Max Health on final revive
This means that getting taken out is absolutely not free. You will be much less effective in any fight even from the first revive BUT you will be able to keep playing and contribute to your team.
We will watch the effects of this change on team matches and keep tweaking the balancing of this over time.
Vault Terminals Room Rebalancing
We are making some changes to the overall economy of vault terminals, field upgrades and keycards. Here’s what you can expect:
- Rooms that contain a vault terminal will NEVER have a purple or orange keycard
- Rooms that contain a vault terminal will no longer have a purple field upgrade chest.
- Rooms that do not have a vault terminal will have a guaranteed keycard (either purple or orange)
- Rooms that do not have a vault terminal will have a purple chest.
- Purple rooms in the vault will now have two purple chests per room.
- Green rooms have a buffed spawned pool to make them more useful in the overall flow.
The overall goal of these changes is quite simple: Make finding rooms without a vault terminal much more rewarding, but also to give incentive to find one of these rooms even if you got a vault terminal on your first try. This should make looking for the different vault terminals room a more worthwhile endeavor with a bigger impact on your overall success in a match.
General Changes
Jump Tweaks
One of the sources of frustration we saw popup since launch has been “air-strafing” players using the abundance of air control to jump and change direction mid-air in close range fights. This update, we are reducing air control when jumping to make jumping in a fight more predictable and easier to track.
To go with this change, we upped the air control multiplier when falling from high up (like when falling after a bounce mat jump or jumping from a rooftop) to keep movement precision for players when landing from up high.
Solo Matches XP modifier
From a purely mathematical standpoint, winning in solo is less likely than in teams. Couple that with shared XP sources in teams and you have a solo mode that is overall a less valuable means of getting unlocks.
To remedy this, we are adding a 30% XP bonus to all XP sources in solo. Winning in solo should now be a much more rewarding experience.
Character hit box tweaks
To make fights feel more reliable, we are tweaking hitboxes and hit regions a bit. Hitboxes for all agents have been adjusted to ensure they are all fair with their overall silhouettes and a bit more permissive on smaller characters.
To go along with this, we are removing limb damage from arms. Limb damage will now entirely be lower body damage. Hitting a player from the waist up will result in a body hit. We feel the addition of arm shots would lead to frustrating inconsistencies, especially on some characters that have a prominent arm presence in their silhouettes from up front (looking at you Cavalière). These changes are subtle, but should help to keep a more consistent feel to fights overall.
Recoil Work
A lot of work went into the recoil feel of most weapons in the cast. In general, the direction was to make recoil feel snappier and more immediate. We hope these changes will upgrade the overall weapon feel and make gunplay feel better.
Vertical Audio and weapon sound range
We have some audio tweaks coming in this patch. First of all, we have added a low-pass filter and tweaked the volume on weapon sounds based on the verticality of where the sound comes from. This should help with identifying that a fight is coming from above or below.
Additionally, we tweaked the overall range of weapon sounds on a per-weapon basis. This means that lower powered weapons won’t be heard from as far as powerful ones. This should help make the soundscape feel more diverse and add interesting wrinkles to pinpointing the location of fights.
NPC Danger Range
The radius in which npc are scared from weapon fire has been tweaked to better account for map verticality. Previously, npc could get scared from fights happening pretty high above them or below. This creates a lot of confusion when you see a scared npc running around because of a fight that is not happening on your floor.
Ink Menu Preview
This one has been asked for a lot since our alpha playtests and we finally had time to go and do it: You can now see your character’s weapon when changing inks in the agent select menu. This also works when inking gadgets so you will always know exactly what your new ink looks like in action right away.
Weapon Ink Preview
Gadget Ink Preview
Result Screen Rework
The mission report screen has seen a rework to make it clearer on what you achieved in a match and tell you exactly what you have progressed in the different progression systems. You will also see the exact amount of credits you earned in that round. No more guessing!
EXP source prompt
To go along with the added clarity in the result screen, you will now be able to see the XP value of your actions during a match. We hope this also serves the purpose of driving players towards actions that progress the flow of a match when they can see the exact amount of XP it gives them right away.
HUD rework
With the introduction of the heat gauge, the HUD overall has received some love. This new layout puts your Expertise with your loadout to better read the remaining cooldown and when it’s available in a pinch.
Increased gadget drop range
The range in which you can drop placeable gadgets has been increased. This should help not goo-ing yourself with the goo-pod and enable cheekier placements of gadgets overall.
Carrier Empowered Navmode Tweaks
Visual changes for much better reading. You now see spies instead of npc while scanning. Mimicked players now show up in empowered navmode view as a crouched spy silhouette. This gives the scanned players a chance to reposition in between scans and still surprise the carrier since they don’t know which npc disguise they have.
In addition, empowered vision now costs intel upfront, which means that quick scan repeatedly will cost 1 intel making less of an ironclad strategy.
Melee reliability work
Improved melee’s reliability in a variety of scenarios, especially when trying to hit someone close to a wall.
Vault Terminal Agent Alert
If two agents of opposite teams are in the same purple room with an active vault terminal inside, the vault terminal’s screen will glow red and play a short alarm sound. This goes both ways: Campers waiting by a vault terminal will alert the person entering and someone looting a purple room and getting a visit will know a rival spy just entered. This alarm is disabled as soon as the vault terminal is turned off.
Raised account level cap
With this update, the new level cap is now 300! Levels 200 to 300 will require more XP than before and a new completionist ink awaits you at level 300 to show off your insane spy skills.
Tweaks to cover regeneration timings
We are making basic cover regeneration a little bit faster, especially when standing still. While blowing your cover should have consequences, the current timing was long enough that even perfectly executed plans could result in you getting third party-ed after the fact.
We’ve found that players that can’t manage to get back into cover because it’s taking too long are often stringed along in a prolonged shooting spree that affects the entire lobby. While this is not a major timing change, we hope its effect is very beneficial to the loop of executing a well planned strike and disappearing back into the crowd.
Levels
Training range and Pre-game Lobby
Introduction of the dps screen. You can now shoot the dummies in both the training range and pre-game lobby to get an accurate representation of how much damage you deal at different ranges.
Silver Reef
Added props to provide cover in the submarine glass corridors to provide more interesting fire fights in the extraction phase.
Diamond Spire
Added visual cover in the main hall ground floor to make it less of a danger zone. Added cover to the ground floor courtyard. Added new exits to some meeting rooms that only had one entrance.
Doors that lead to the vault terminal room are no longer transparent, preventing you from knowing what lies ahead without entering.
Fragrant shore
Fixed doors that could not be opened on the first floor of the hotel. Replaced the purple door on terminal E room balcony by a one-way window openable from the inside. Replaced free windows into purple and blue rooms with one-sided openable windows like in Hard Sell.
Keep an eye out agents, as more intel will be dropping in the coming days.