Chernobylite Complete Edition News

Chernobylite Rev 21232 Hotfix Change Log

Overall:
- Problem with black screen after using inventory should be resolved
- We have corrected a very annoying bug with the volume of storm and lightning.
- Minor changes on Kopachi should improve optimization
- A lot of small bugs related to level geometry have been resolved
- Resolution scale can be changed by single percent, which gives more freedom. Even a slight decrease in this parameter strongly affects performance.

Important note: to make the whole game working smoother, updating faster and requiring less space on your hard drive, we've strongly altered and optimized the general structure of the game build. This means that with current patch you'll need to re-download the whole game content which is about 28 Gigabytes of data after compression. But from now you'll have more free space on your hard drive and the next patches will be smaller and more effectively downloaded and installed.

General fixes:

• For everybody willing to make perfect screenshot or virtual photography without the game interface: we've added the option to disable UI using the CTRL + ALT + [ combination of keys. This shortcut disables the UI completely and permanently, to invert it you need to reload the game. We are working on a more elegant solution.
  
• Compression and Steam packages optimization made game build much smaller. Instead of 45 GB right now it should occupy about 30 GB on the disk.
  
• Not all gameplay mechanics were clear to you, especially those in Base and after death. We've added some new tutorials to explain them.
  
• Items and containers now have a small overlay that appears before we pick them up. This should facilitate scavenging and looting soldiers when several items are close by.
  
• Compass UI is a little more subtle.
  

AI and combat:

• Soldiers should now behave more naturally when they find the body.
  
• Takedown produces sound. Killing a few soldiers next to each other should no longer be possible.
  
• Black Stalker uses the laser and no longer shoots using debug tracing lines.
  

Fixes:

• Beating dolls should no longer cause a crash...
  
• Equipment size can no longer be expanded indefinitely.
  
• Tarakan should now appear correctly in the database when using retrospective branching.
  
• Exiting the game at transition levels should no longer cause damage to save if you do so after the indicator disappears.
  
• We've fixed a whole bunch of smaller bugs you have reported. Thanks!
  

Survival:
The flow of survival is one of the most important elements of our game. Unfortunately, not all of our design decisions were presented clear to you. Many of you asked, "why if the meaning of the game is to survive in Chernobyl, then the game lasts only 10 days?". Well, the game was not limited to 10 days, we rather wanted you to replay the story missions with branching and retrospections, which is best seen at repeated transitions. Today, we are not sure if this decision was correct. Therefore, as part of the experiment, we raise the limit to 100 days, additionally introducing several changes that should emphasize on survival aspect:

• Over time, Chernobylite storms are becoming more frequent. Build a Q-wave generator to defend against them.
  
• As a result of chernobylite substance activity, the zone is becoming more and more radioactive every day. Moving around it will be more and more difficult.
  
• Raw materials for crafting are slowly diminishing in the following days, which will result in fewer and fewer of them with time progress.
  
• There will be fewer and fewer animals over time. Hunting for food will be more difficult.
  

Stealth improvements:
We often hear from you that unfinished AI is one of the biggest problems of the game. However, the problem is much more complex. To make AI better, we also need to improve patrol roads, level design and many game balance parameters. So far we’ve chosen 3 places for testing. If you like it, we will improve the rest of the game in a similar way:

Center of military base on Eye of Moscow:



Near the hospital at Prypiat Port:



Western part of the resort on Kopachi:



In addition, we have introduced the following changes in combat:

• When we hide in the bushes, they become slightly transparent. It's easier to move around and watch soldiers.
  
• New takedown animation. Only one at the moment, but it shows the direction in which we want to go. It is slower, more emotional and emphasizes more on the fact that Igor is not a killing machine.
  

Psyche system:

• We have finally started to work on this mechanics. Treat these solutions as prototypical, it's just a base for the future, which will ultimately hinder survival:
  
• Igor's lack of food allocation results in a decrease in Psyche
  
• When Psyche is at 0 the player starts to drop health points, down to 1 point.
  
• We've added the ability to craft alcohol in a laboratory that raises psyche.
  

Remember about our virtual photography contest that ends soon:
https://steamcommunity.com/gid/103582791463995837/announcements/detail/1663444077006171888
Many stalkers already provided their great artwork, you can still contribute and win the trip to the real Chernobyl Zone with us!

The only thing you need to do is to make a beautiful virtual photo / screenshot within the game and post it on our Steam community forum or your Twitter with the #chernobyliteVP hashtag. Alternatively, put it on the Discord channel (https://discord.gg/mehRmzY in the special #chernobylite-virtual-photos channel). The deadline is Halloween, October 31st, 24 pm PDT. If you’ve already posted some cool screens from the game, feel free to upload them again with the hashtag to take place in the contest.



Just to let you know, to make a Steam screenshot you press F12 (by default) during playing the game (then you can upload it to the community forums). And if you’re more ambitious and you owe NVIDIA graphic card, you can use the NVIDIA’s Ansel
tool, activated by Alt+F2.



To give you an idea of what you can achieve with these simple steps, check the few screens captured by our talented friend Eul Keke (you can check his Twitter for more beautiful virtual photos he’s making on regular basis).



You don’t need to have any extra software, just your copy of Chernobylite and the will to capture your best game moments. We don’t recommend using Photoshop or other software to make your pictures look better – anyway, we want to let you show what you like in the game at its current state.

The best work judged by the devs will be awarded the trip to Chernobyl Zone together with the dev team (requirements: you need to be +18 years old, you need to have valid international passport and you need to go to Kyiv, Ukraine or Gliwice, Poland on your own – the other things, including travel, food, overnight stay, photo equipment, and permissions will be covered by us and the dates can be anywhere within next 12 months). The winner will also receive a Chernobylite t-shirt and printed physical artbook. At top of it, we’ll give away 3 physical artbooks and 3 Chernobylite t-shirts for the following best photographers.



By the way, if you owe the game but still didn’t review/vote Chernobylite on Steam, we’d like to ask you to do so, especially if you like the game 🙂

Hey stalkers!

It’s been a long week. Likely the most busy and the most fruitful time in the whole project’s history. We’ve finally released the Early Access of Chernobylite on Steam and GOG and it was just the beginning of the next big stage for the project. Now we’re pushing hard to keep improving the game after the feedback gathered from all of you. And because the game became popular with so many players buying it and joining our communities, we’re both extremely happy and quite overwhelmed because of that much of the data to process nowadays.

Please keep playing the game and reporting us any suggestions, issues and ideas – we can’t always answer all of them in real-time, but we’re definitely reading all of them and trying to sort out for the execution of our work plan.

Last few days we’ve prepared and released 3 big patches with several additions, modifications, optimizations and improvements over the existing content. All according to your requests, bug reports, discussions on forums, and the reviews we’ve received. Among others, we’ve added many language localizations as this was one of the main requests: now you can play Chernobylite with English voices (at top of Russian that was already in game) and subtitles/interface in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Hungarian and Polish. The next localizations are on their way soon. We’ve improved a lot the optimization thanks to your feedback and hardware reports, removed many crash-related issues (thanks to your bug-reports, again).

The key question now would be – what next?

The most important: we plan to regularly update the project with three types of content packs:

• Monthly content updates: every month we want to deliver a huge content update, like a new weapon, location, gameplay feature, mission pack and so on.
  
• Weekly updates: every week we plan to release a smaller patch with the fixes and improvements for the most important aspects of the project that deserve to be delivered as soon as possible (like yesterdays weekly patch with English dialogue voice-overs).
  
• Minor updates: without any time obligations, if we’ll see there’s something worth of throwing update just-in-time, we’ll do it (like it happened twice during last week with optimization and bug-fixes updates).
  

Please take a look on the preliminary roadmap here once more if you missed it yesterday.



The plans that we’ve originally had are a bit adjusted regarding the order of delivering you different content packs, but the overall game idea shaped earlier together with our Kickstarter backers remains intact. We definitely need to better address few fields of the project that was mostly reported as requiring more attention: AI, combat balance, technical issues, language implementation quality, save and progression system. We plan do add possibility to access different game areas more easily without need to restart the whole game. We’ll keep working on optimization and animations quality, as well as on soundtrack and overall gameplay balance. Basically, almost all of what we’ve done already makes us proud considering the time and budget we had, but personally none of us is 100% happy with the idea to stop fixing, improving and polishing the stuff. So expect small, but noticeable changes to keep popping-up all the time.

Stay irradiated!

Localization:
- We've added English Voice Over. The language of the voices can be changed in the game settings.
- Spanish language version has been added.
- The line about killing “single Russian” changed to non-offending.

Chernobylite Storms:
Bad balance combined with bugs caused that this element is identified by you with time limit. Our goal has never been to make a time limit, but only to let you feel the breath of your main nemesis - the Black Stalker - all the time. We are listening to your feedback on this element of the game. That is why we have made the following changes:
- Now you can build a Q-wave generator in the base, which makes storm less common.
- The Black Stalker is now much weaker, and its appearance time has been reduced from 2 minutes to 30 seconds. Its AI and operation is a prototype. Will change in the coming weeks
- The clock has been turned off. Now, to know when the storm comes you must observe the sky and changes in the world.

Optimization:
- Overall regardless of the settings, the game should work a few percents better.
- We've optimized the memory management method. This should resolve most sound issues and make levels load much faster. FPS drops will also be less frequent and less severe.
- We're working on Ultra settings. Although they are still a prototype, they should work much better on slightly weaker machines.

Retrospective branching (also called “new game plus”):
- Collected evidence should no longer disappear after players death
- Player perks should no longer disappear after his death

Improvements/Additions:
- Adrenaline can now be crafted in the base laboratory

Fixes:
- Fixed an issue where players could get stuck during training with Mikhail
- Due to numerous errors and crashes related to hacking, we decided to temporarily disable it.
- We've fixed a bug that allowed you to gain unlimited experience during the Tarakan quest
- Quest Unearthed documents should now be a bit easier to complete.
- Fixed an issue that prevents Unearthed documents from being completed during the next attempt
- We've fixed several issues that caused the marker to not always work properly during the mission in Pripyat.
- We've fixed a whole bunch of smaller bugs you have reported. Thanks!


If you have any feedback for us, don't hesitate to give it. Finally, a small dessert - we finished work on our Roadmap. You can see it below: