The Super Animal Royale Public Test Realm (PTR) is now available for you to take an early look at what’s coming in our next update and give us your feedback on it! We’re laying the foundations for v1.0 of SAR, so your input today will be fundamental in shaping the coming months and years of Super Animal World.
We wrote a deep dive two weeks ago into all of our design thinking behind the changes, so if you haven’t read that yet, you can check it out here on Medium. Make sure to give it a read if you haven’t since we’ll be focusing more on the specifics of the PTR itself in this post.
How to Join the PTR
Phase 1: Thursday, October 8th at 7pm PDT to Sunday, October 11th at 11:59pm PDT
The first phase of testing begins now! We’ll be running a second phase of testing next week as well, so there will be more chances to play before the update goes live if you miss this one.
To switch your SAR to the PTR beta branch:
- Right click on SAR in Steam Library list
- Select "Properties"
- Go to the "Betas" tab
- In the dropdown selector, choose the ”ptr0.96.0” branch
- The game will update to the PTR version.
- Start the game and hit Play!
Note: the PTR is only available for players who own SAR (Super Free Edition / Demo users are not able to use Steam betas). You can switch between the PTR and the live version of SAR at any time by following the same steps and changing the dropdown in the “Betas” tab to the version you’d like to play.
If you don't see the PTR in your Betas tab immediately, you might need to restart your Steam client (including fully exiting it in your system tray if you're on Windows). The PTR only has one mode available (the new S.A.W. vs Rebellion 32v32 mode) and one regional server for testing (based in NA).
Feedback
The PTR is all about getting your feedback on the changes we’re making, so once you’ve spent some time in the PTR, we’d very much appreciate it if you use the feedback button in the game’s main menu, or visit our Discord server and leave feedback in the #sar-ptr-feedback channel! We’ve set the new channel to slow mode so you can gather all your thoughts and not worry about them being bumped by conversation.
Patch Notes
New Game Mode: S.A.W. vs Rebellion (32v32)
Fight for control of Super Animal World as the S.A.W. Security Forces or Super Animal Super Resistance fighters.
- This will be the only game mode live during the PTR, as we look forward to fine tuning the gameplay with you and ironing out any glitches.
- Players will engage in large-scale 32v32 battles, with separate Giant Eagle flight paths and 3 flags to capture that provide a health regeneration buff and bonus EXP for your team (to contribute to your Account Level and Animal Pass). 2 legendary weapons will also drop upon the first capture of each flag.
- Your helmet and gravestone will automatically be set to match your team: S.A.W. Forces or Rebellion Fighter.
Animal Pass Season 0 and S.A.W. Shop are available for testing!
- The current UI/styling is a functional prototype (more theming to come soon) but you can test out the new system and let us know what you think!
- As you play matches and level up, you will progress through the 49 tiers of the pass. Some rewards can be earned for free, but others will require purchasing the pass.
- S.A.W. Shop has been added, where you can purchase several new cosmetic items using S.A.W. Tickets.
- All players in the PTR will start with 1200 S.A.W. Tickets. These tickets will be removed from your account after the PTR, but every owner of the game will receive starter S.A.W. Tickets as part of the new Super Edition.
- S.A.W. Tickets can be purchased in-game through Steam wallet. At the end of the PTR, your purchased S.A.W. Tickets will be returned to you along with a 20% BONUS as thanks for helping us test our work in progress systems. S.A.W. Shop items and Animal Pass progress will also be reset at the end of the PTR.
Earned Progression Systems Overhaul
- Cackling Carl's Cart is open for business! In this rotating shop you can spend Carl Coins (earned by playing the game) on different cosmetic items.
- The end-game mole loot drop has been removed, and most of those items have been moved into Carl's Cart. However, 69 of the items will remain as random drops, awarded upon leveling up.
- Any duplicate cosmetic item drops will be automatically converted into Carl Coins.
- Item trade-up has been removed, as duplicate items are now automatically converted into Carl Coins. We will have more info on this closer to full release.
- Super Serum rewards after matches are no longer random, instead 0.45 Super Serum is rewarded per minute survived (rounded). If you get more than one kill in the match, you'll be rewarded with 1 bonus Super Serum.
- Super Serum reward for leveling up has been increased from 3 to 5.
Weekly and Daily Challenges
- Weekly challenges have been added (and most are unique, new categories of challenges), and now all challenges provide experience rather than items. Re-rolling has been removed since the reward is no longer random.
- Daily and Weekly Challenges will now show up in-game in the Paws Menu.
- "Place top 5" type challenges now condensed into one challenge that is just "Get top placement in any mode".
The Great Gun Buyback
- As part of the Great Gun Buyback, all of the existing basic colored gun skins have been moved to milestones, and can be earned by getting kills with each weapon. The Hunting Rifle, Bow & Sparrow, and Sparrow Launcher now also have new colored skins for their milestones, and a new white color has been added as the final tier for all weapons.
- You will also be able to use the Hellfire SMG and Frozen AK skins on the PTR (but not in the live game until the update is live).
- You will, however, be able to use the colored weapon skins you earn in the PTR in the live game.
You can get all of the details on the great gun buyback here:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/843380/announcements/detail/2892957851495507252
Design Overhaul (WIP)
- The game's menus are being fully redesigned in order to provide easier access to all of the new and existing screens. This has been a big overhaul so it's still a work in progress and we will be continuing to update the UI throughout the PTR!
- The new menus are set in the Giant Eagle Airlines terminal, and come complete with NPCs operating each of the services.
- Milestones are now claimed in the redesigned milestones tab rather than automatically granted at end-game.
- The Discord button in the main menu now displays the number of users online.
- Probably the most important change of all: scrollbars in the menus have been widened.
- Added mouse-over sounds for many of the main menu buttons.
Gameplay Upgrades
- Added Rebel Caches that can be found around the map. When opened, they will drop a rare or epic weapon or level 3 armor, as well as some Super Tape or Health Juice.
- Added animated damage numbers when you hit an enemy, including armor hits and poison damage. They can be toggled on or off in settings if you prefer to play without them.
- Player collisions have been added (does not apply to teammates). As well, you can collide with emus and hamster balls while on foot. We will be continuing to test this during the PTR, and see how players are liking or disliking it.
- Can now ping campfires, coconuts, mole crates, and rebel caches.
- Pinging grenades, ammo, health juice, and tape will now show the amount in brackets.
- "Sparrow hits in one match" milestone objectives changed to 5/10/20 from 5/15/25.
- Creep zoom is maintained during creep roll.
- Creep zoom no longer works while on Emu.
- Added a 0.25s block on shooting after exiting a Hamster Ball (matches the same block on exiting Emus).
- Pressing reload while holding a charged bow will cancel the charge.
- Super Skunk Vial changed to now increase movement speed in the skunk gas and skunk bombs by 25%, and reduce their damage by 10%. Please let us know how you find this mechanic, as we are experimenting with different ways to make this item more useful.
- Bunny hopping (perfect rolling) now requires tighter timing (70ms rather than 100ms zone), and the movement boost is +3% per successive hop, up to 10% (previously it was a flat 10%). These changes should reward players who are able to continuously perform hops, rather than always having full boost.
- Downed players can now eat nearby bananas for health if they have a Banana Forker equipped.
- Max carried grenades is now 3. This should help reduce grenade spam, and provide a bit more incentive to use skunk bombs or bananas. Praise banan.
- Player markers on the map & minimap now face the direction that the player is looking.
- Adjusted a few spots on the map to have better pathing, collisions, and less things to get caught on.
- Added more grass in some forest areas.
- Bots will occasionally pick up level 1 armor.
- Bots will dance if they win a match.
Weapon Changes
The following weapon changes help reduce certain guns from hitting players at far ranges for very little damage, often shredding armor:
- Shotgun bullet range lowered to 45/48/51 (by rarity respectively) from previous values of 59/63/66. Due to having shorter range, damage has been increased slightly at these ranges.
- Epic JAG-7 bullet range lowered to 43 (previously was 63), with per-pellet damage of 4 at this range (previously was 3.75).
- Legendary JAG-7 bullet range lowered to 47 (previously was 66), with per-pellet damage of 5 at this range (previously was 4).
- Pistol bullet ranges changed from 94/102/111/119 to 92/96/100/104. Damage is slightly increased at these new ranges.
- The SMG's bullets were previously able to reach 120 range, but were doing 5/7/9 damage at that range (depending on rarity). They have now been adjusted to be 102/106/110 range and doing 9/10.5/12 damage at those ranges.
- Epic Thomas Gun bullet range is now 115 (from 120), and 12 damage at that max range (previously 11.5).
- Legendary Thomas Gun bullet range remains at 120, but instead will do 13 damage at max range (previously 13.7).
Additional Weapon Changes:
- Recoil when firing guns is now a preset pattern rather than random. This should provide more ways for players to learn individual weapons and have more calculated shot patterns, in addition to predicting player movement.
- Due to this change, the Sniper can be very accurate with every shot, and so a brief movement slow (that applies in roll) will apply after shooting it. We’ll be monitoring the results of this change and your feedback on it to see whether it’s necessary or needs further balancing.
- Weapon rarity will also once again affect the recoil spread amount.
- Purple rarity weapons have a reduced spawn rate in the world (excluding Sniper and Sparrow Launcher), but have an increased chance inside Rebel Caches.
- Hunting Rifle damage at max range increased from 70/75/80 to 75/80/85.
- Sniper damage at max range increased from 85/91 to 92/96.
- Magnum clip size changed to 6, and Deagle to 8.
- Magnum breaks 2 armor ticks now.
- Magnum base bullet speed lowered from 210 to 195, in order to differentiate it more from the Deagle.
- Lowered Magnum spawn rate (spawn weight reduced from 30 to 23 since it is more powerful now).
- Lowered AK spawn rate (spawn weight reduced from 20 to 15).
- Shotgun move speed while shooting lowered from 82% to 77%.
- JAG-7 move speed while shooting lowered from 84% to 81%.
- Bow & Sparrow damage increased from 34/36 to 55/57, but armor penetration lowered from 60% to 40%.
- Sparrow Launcher damage increased from 36/40 to 57/60, but armor penetration also lowered to 40%.
- Sparrow Launcher projectile speed increased by ~6%.
- Maximum sparrow ammo is now 35 (from 25).
- Both bow weapons now spawn with 12 ammo beside them (up from 10).
- Poison Dart Gun attack speed increased from 0.5s to 0.44s.
- Lowered Poison Dart Gun spawn rate slightly (spawn weight lowered from 10 to 9).
- Melee attacks now do 50% damage through armor.
- Melee swings only slow movement to 80% now (previously was 73%).
- Minigun is only available in legendary rarity tier now.
- Reduced range of grenades & explosions destroying bananas by about 25%. Praise banan.
Additional Changes:
- We've redesigned the Beta Blue Beanie to be more unique/special (for all of you who played in the beta back in 2018). Since the Beta Blue Beanie is now more unique, we've added a basic blue beanie to the random drop pool (rewarded upon account level-up).
- Minimap fades when moused over to make it easier to line up your shots with the enemy is in the top left of the screen.
- In order to reduce phantom hits as well as desync-related hamster ball deaths, we are testing an aim lead system for high ping players: going over 180 ping will result in "high ping mode" for the player, where all of their bullets fired as well as hamster ball hits are calculated server-side. What this means is that they will need to lead shots (and hamster ball) on targets in order to hit them. The amount to lead depends on the ping.
- Increased maximum simultaneous audio sources from 32 to 64.
- Made a bunch of performance improvements to several parts of the game, especially memory allocation that was happening mid-game, sound loading, and line of sight calculations.
- The S.A.W. vs Rebellion mode, however, can be a fairly taxing game mode, so we will continue to look for optimizations during the PTR.
- Adjusted lighting so it more closely matches the original art assets (especially less over-exposure in the snow biome).
- Fixed a bug where other players were not visibly charging their Bow & Sparrow properly.
- Fixed a bug where players with altered system clocks were having daily challenges constantly trying to reset.
- Fixed a bug where lag during the Eagle would sometimes result in being disconnected once landing.
- Fixed a bug where some milestones would notify the player as being completed despite the game being over.
- Fixed a bug where some ground-level sounds could be heard while in the Giant Eagle or parachuting.
- Fixed a bug where players would drop empty ammo boxes upon death.
- Fixed a few rare soft crashes.
Translations are not quite ready yet in the PTR, but will be added over the course of the PTR.
Thank you so much in advance to all of you who join us for testing. We hope you all have a ton of fun with the new mode and the changes, and look forward to reading your feedback via the in-game feedback form and in our Discord!