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Greetings, Brokers!
We have a big patch today, with a LOT of exciting changes. Let’s dive right into what’s new!
USER INTERFACE EXTRAVAGANZA!
For a long while we’ve been working on an updated UI for the game. Our old UI was designed to be flexible and was primarily meant for faster iteration. Enough cycles have passed that we’re much more confident in the choices that matter and how we want to frame them for our players.
We’ve reworked the core play UI towards the new look and feel. We wanted to push to be cleaner and more modern while moving towards a more defined and clear color and shape language. Element icons have changed, colors have been updated, and a lot of the previously boxy UI has shifted to be free.
When we think about the UI, our goal is to solve usability problems while also bringing in some of the narrative framing of the game. You’ll see more of this narrative artification happening over the next few months as we drive to an experience that immerses and is fun to interact with.
We’ve changed almost every element of the play UI so rather than list them all, we encourage you to jump right in and test it out yourself!
We are super excited about this latest release and would love your feedback. Usability testing is a critical part of the Alpha development and we really do appreciate and listen to your thoughts on UI. Join the Discord if you haven’t already and join the conversation!
THE SHARDSTORM (i.e. THE ZONE)
A shrinking zone is an important factor in every Battle Royale game and we are no different. We want the match to end with a single surviving agent and the storm is going to make that happen.
Previously we had our temporary hex zone in the game, but that was never intended to be the final form. We knew from early on that we wanted a stormy Shard-inspired effect that intensified as the match continued. With 1.9.4 we are finally bringing the first version of that to life.
Every five rounds the storm VFX will intensify highlighting the drive towards a conclusion. We’ve talked with the community about adding in end-game damage, and, while that’s not part of this release, it’s right around the corner. We hope you like the effects and please let us know what you think!
As a reminder, you can turn off these effects in the Settings menu if you’re sensitive to flashing lights or just prefer a more austere battlefield.
ELEMENTS EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE
Digging into functional changes to the game, we’ve added in a new mechanic to the battlefield - Element drops. Element drops are a new way to get Elements in your power up phase. Each time you harvest a shard or KO a player you’ll receive a random Element added to your hand that can be deployed in your next Power-Up Phase.
We want to make pursuing your victory conditions even more exciting. Going on Survive should be an active choice that trades off victory condition advancement for health and safety and we think the Element drops will add more interesting choices to make during your play.
IMPROVED / SNAPPIER DEPLOYS
We’ve been receiving feedback for a while pointing out that, once certain Agents hit a large number of actions, the animation speed was frustratingly slow and was preventing people from making all of their deploys. To respond to that, we’ve tweaked the way deploys work. Everyone should see a dramatic increase in both the speed of deployments and the ability to churn through large numbers of actions later in matches.
STABILITY
We’ve been spending a lot of time over the past several weeks squashing bugs around stability. We’re pretty happy with where we’ve gotten to for the culmination of the Accord Wards Trials with very few problems coming up during play.
Special thanks to community members grackle, protonprime, beezneezy, gina, Cephalon, Risotto Groupon, DuneSeaDaimyo, Goose, Sarise, and Gutterslush for helping us track down the double-click bug and the Ben/Dusana loading bug.
Please continue to submit bugs, especially game breaking ones. As we add more players we see more hardware variants so please keep us informed if you run into critical issues.
Smaller Fixes and Improvements:
• Mostly resolved the Doubleclicking bug
• Fixed an issue where some Agents weren’t properly generating rank mission progress
• Resolved the Ben/Dusana Lobby bug
• Addressed a Trial bug that was causing incorrect Finals to be generated