What’s next?
Agents, happy new year! The team is back in full force and is ready to share a sneak peek on what our focus is for our next patch. Let's call it…. Operation Overhaul.
Like we discussed in the state of the game post last year, we are carving ourselves some time to tackle core systems, polish existing elements and add new exciting gameplay elements that address long standing feedback from the community. While we currently expect everything listed in this post to be part of a single update, Operation Overhaul is a larger initiative that will encompass more changes than this across multiple future updates.
With that said, this is an early sneak peek in the feature set of operation overhaul. This is not the entirety of what we are working on and everything shown here is still actively work in progress and subject to change. Expect us to go in depth with these items over the next weeks to showcase the work of the team.
With all that said, let’s get into it.
A early look at Operation Overhaul
Combat Overhaul
Let’s start with the largest area of focus: Combat. The elements tweaked for this update cover a wide range of topic including, but not limited to:
- Reworking weapon animations and feel.
- Improving Recoil to make it smoother across the board.
- Improving reliability in melee range engagements.
- Reworking Aim Punch to be less disruptive.
- Increase clarity and directionality of damage received feedback.
- Reworked muzzle flashes and bullet tracers.
Major changes to the infiltration phase
A point of feedback we’ve tracked for a good while is the desire for players to spend more time and have more reason to look inside the vault areas of each map. With operation overhaul we will introduce a change to the gameflow of matches that will encourage players to explore the vault in search of a new gameplay element that will be key to opening the doors of the objective room.
We are still playtesting this change heavily and balancing it out to make sure it achieves the intended effect, but we think it will end up making the vault area fresh again!
Guards and heat tweaks
We are revisiting guards' behavior to scale their response based on heat. You can expect guards to be less of a nuisance if you behave as a perfect spy, but much more of a threat if you start shooting indiscriminately.
We are also looking at tweaking the effects of heat accordingly to fit this new reality.
Contextual Ping
Pinging specific items will now show your teammates a corresponding icon. This includes intel, keycards, doors and more!
First Aid Vials
Heal yourself on the go thanks to the all-new First Aid Vials. You will find them hidden around the map or you will be able to pay intel to get them in all staff rooms. This will be a new form of items that we call a consumable, able to be stored for later use in a pinch.
Map Rework Continued
Continued update to Silver Reef and all-new flanking routes and opportunities in Diamond Spire are on the menu for our next batch of reworks.
Aim-Assist overhaul for controllers
We are spending time to rework in-depth the way aim-assist works for controllers. This will change how we decide to prioritize targets and make sure that what is considered a target’s body is much more accurate than before.
Spy Bots
To help new players get a hang of the game, we will introduce spy bots to Deceive Inc! This will allow a smoother learning curve and will open up future opportunities by having a “player AI” at our disposal for further iteration. This has been a highly requested, but far from simple, addition to the game that we hope will make a lot of people happy!
As we’ve seen some questions around it, we would like to note that this is not a traditional update/catalog combination, as the team is focusing their efforts on the core loop. We look forward to sharing more with you in the days ahead Agents!