Season 2 Preview
Agents, it’s time to get a first taste of what is coming for season 2! First of all, thank you for all the feedback we’ve received over the span of season 1. While we could not possibly hope to address everything that was brought up by the player base in a single season, the changes outlined here are directly linked to the continuous feedback we’ve been reading over the past months.
Before we get into the specifics, keep in mind that this is a preview: things are still subject to change and we are not yet ready to dive into agent and gadget changes/balance. Stay tuned for more details on those as we get closer to the season 2 release.
For now, let’s go over the more general changes to the game you can expect to see in the near future:
Major Additions
New Agent Joins the Roster
A new tracker agent joins the roster in season 2! This agent will bring an entirely unique weapon type to the game and a relentless playstyle that allows opportunities for ambushes and zoning.
We can't wait to welcome this new agent to the roster and see the plays you'll pull with them on the field, but you’ll have to be a bit more patient for a full reveal…
New Catalog & Progression
A new Catalog will be added with 50 levels of progression and completion rewards. We want to keep the theme of the catalog under wraps for a bit longer, but expect some wild new styles for your favorite agents and more high-value rewards.
General Changes
Heat Changes
Heat is evolving once again from feedback we’ve been gathering around the release of High Alert. While the overall sentiment seems to be trending much closer to a good place for heat, the majority of feedback is still showing you want a bit more consequences. With this update, we are bringing some spicy changes to how you generate heat!
- Downing a civilian, staff or technician will now give a full heat level.
- Downing the VIP will now give 3 Heat levels
- Guards will remain the same at about half a heat level per guard.
- The idea with these changes is pretty simple: We want to give value to going back to lower level cover and not encourage staying as a guard the entire match. Wrongly guessing will now carry bigger immediate consequences that will encourage players to better analyze situations.
- For the VIP, we want to give more meaning to coming across them and give them a place as a disguise option. With this change, shooting any VIP on sight will carry huge potential ramifications that could lead to your immediate defeat. Think wisely.
In addition to these changes, we are adding a buffer of time to prevent situations where you could hit multiple NPCs at the same time with a single shot leading to a huge amount of heat generated. This should help keep things clearer from a player's perspective.
We’ll monitor how this affects the game in the days following the release of the update to bring adjustments as needed.
Spawn Economy Rebalance
For this season, we’ve spent some time rebalancing resources spawning in a few key ways with a single unified goal in mind: Slowing down the overall pace of matches and giving some reasons to look around the vault before going to the objective.
These changes touch three major components:
Keycard Spawns Changes
- Purple keycards will no longer spawn outside of purple rooms. This will prevent early game loots that would dramatically speed up a match.
- A small amount of keycards can now spawn inside the vault. This will give some chance for players that did not have much luck in the first phase to scrape back an advantage during the infiltration phase.
- The Golden Keycard will now spawn inside the vault. This will prevent players from having a full keycard deck before the vault is opened.
Ammo Spawn Changes
- Reduced Overall Pool of Ammo Spawn in All Maps.
- Reduced chance for ammo to spawn in public areas.
The reduction in ammo pools is not massive, but we feel it is currently too easy to stay full of ammo without any specific efforts in looting. This also devalues ammo dispensers quite a bit. We hope making the ammo economy tighter will result in a more interesting play experience overall.
Food Spawn Locations
- A final new addition on this topic is the addition of more “fixed” food locations on maps. You will find more snacks around kitchens, restaurants, and places where you would expect to be able to eat. This should help players running nutritional supplements to have more surefire ways to get a snack.
Purple Chest Tweaks
In season 1, we introduced the purple chest spawns in rooms without a vault terminal. While the effect this had on the game was overall very beneficial, a side effect of it was that now the purple powerup was actually rarer than the gold during the opening phase of a game. We are now spawning two purple chests in non-vault terminal rooms to compensate for this.
This also means that arriving second in one of those rooms in a solo match will still carry a reward instead of leaving you empty handed. We hope this change will allow a more interesting use of field upgrade builds overall.
Account Max Level Increase
Max Account level is getting raised up to level 400 with the release of season 2. An all-new progression ink has been added for players that will reach this new milestone: The Malachite ink!
Updated XP Values
We’ve upped the values of XP sources all around for a smoother progression with more rewards from the different lootables and interaction with in-game objectives. We’ll keep watching the progression rate and player feedback to make this aspect of the game more pleasant for all types of players.
Performance Work
Continued work to improve performance with a long list of optimizations. We expect these new tweaks to have the biggest impact on medium and high graphic settings. It’s our hope that they will allow more people to play at medium instead of low for example to get a similar result.
We will keep monitoring how performance evolves on the wide variety of hardware that the community is using to continue making further improvements.
New graphical options and automatic hardware detection
We’ve added new functionality to better choose starting settings for players getting into the game and exposed more granular graphics settings for you to tweak at your leisure.
Agent Select Menu Rework
One recurring piece of feedback we’ve received ever since the alpha days was the desire to get more precise information about the nitty gritty details of all elements of a build. This update is another major step in that direction.
We’ve reworked the weapon tooltips in the agent select menu to showcase every single stats they have in a completely transparent way. This showcase is directly fetched from weapon stats, that means that live updates to balancing will be directly shown in this menu without a client update.
We want to give this transparency treatment to more elements of the game as we continue updating it, so stay tuned for more developments on that front.
Inks Menu Rework
In the continuous theme of making menus better, we’ve reworked the ink menu both from a UI standpoint to better showcase the weapon and from a lighting standpoint to give a more accurate representation of how links look in the game.
Additional Field Upgrade Decks
We’ve doubled the amount of field upgrade decks you can customize to give you better control over the finer details of your builds.
Enhanced Controller Settings
Adding controller settings has been a major talking point for our console players and with this update, we are increasing the amount of tweaks you’ll be able to do to better tailor your experience.
You will find new settings for disabling controller vibrations, aim-assist, and tweaking the finer details of the “quick-turn” mechanic that triggers when holding your joystick completely to speed up turns when holding your joystick in a direction.
Please keep the feedback coming on what you would like to see in terms of future controller features and we will be continuing our work to expand the options over time.
Melee Shot Delay
We’ve received quite a bit of feedback on some deadly combinations of high damage weapons with a charged melee. For example, a charged melee with a king shot from an ace could be devastating on the receiving party without much change to counterplay.
In this update, we now have a stat that allows us to tweak the delay before firing after a melee on a per-weapon basis. This means that the overall high damage slow rate of fire weapon will have a slightly longer delay before firing again to give a bit more reaction to a victim.
This is not just a one time tweak, but a new tool in our balancing toolbox in the future.
Fragrant Shore Tweaks
We’ve updated Fragrant Shore to prevent some free room skips in green rooms around the level. This made the bounce mat a bit too good of a pick. Coupled with keycard changes, this should slow down matches significantly.
Having these green room skips also led to the side-effect of having spots in the map with extremely high concentrations of combat because multiple players would head to the same skip location. This was particularly true with the green room on the ground floor of the hotel.
Vault terminal Alarm
Back in season 1, we added an alarm to vault terminal rooms when two spies from opposite teams were inside the same room. This was made in a time when heat was very weak and nobody but the VIP could enter these rooms. This meant that someone waiting inside could shoot anyone coming in with absolute certainty that they were not an NPC.
This is no longer true with elite guards and the VIP giving 3 heat levels when shot. We feel the vault terminal alarm removes mind game potential and occasions to bamboozle rivals.
We will monitor how this change affects the game, but we feel it will lead to more uncertainty and more interesting encounters.
New Credits Cosmetics
In addition to all the skins and intro poses that a new agent brings to the table, we are adding more inks to the credits offering players can buy or gain in a loot briefcase. We hope you enjoy them!
A few notes about balancing
While we are not quite ready to dive deep into the details of balancing, we still wanted to give some reassurance on some of the top items of chatter in the community on the balancing front.
First and foremost: Larcin. Both from a community sentiment perspective and from an analytics perspective, Larcin is the top performing agent currently and feels quite oppressive to play against. You can expect adjustments to him to put him more in line with the rest of the cast with catalog 2.
Our focus with this update is really to raise the lowest performers of the cast (Yu-Mi is currently at the bottom of this list) and adjust the top performers.
You can expect a similar treatment to gadgets. The shield-brella is getting a much needed nerf to its deployed form and some less used gadgets like the hack-trap and the drone will be getting fun new wrinkles to make them more competitive.
We’ll be diving into all the details closer to season 2’s launch.