Second Extinction™ News

How is the war against the mutated dinosaurs going out there? Are you ready for some refreshments?

Last week we shared the updated Roadmap with you and that our first pre-season First Blood’s Supply Drop #1 is embracing for impact. If you’ve kept updated this is what your eyes will have spied...

• New Contracts and New Clues -  Something stirs in the dark… Complete new Contracts to unravel the first narrative threads behind the dinosaur menace.
  
• Are You Hard or Insane? - Turn the pain up to 11 and earn new Nameplates in two new difficulty settings.
  
• Fix Up, Look Sharp - various bug fixes for graphics, audio, and UI among others.
  

Supply Drop #1 will land on November 18.

Until then share your best plays and gameplay clips so we can feel confident in your competence and not throw you to the wolves when the new difficulty settings arrive. 

You can share your clips on our Twitter or in the #community-brags channel on our Discord.

Welcome to Freak of the Week!

Here you get to take a closer look at the mutated monstrosities that have taken over earth.

Next up is the Raptor who's buffing his buddies - THE ALPHA RAPTOR! Take this hype beast out first unless you like more enemies and more pheromones (don’t answer that).



[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Hey, Extinction Elites,

Time flies, and it’s already been three weeks since we launched into Early Access. While we continue to push out minor patches and listen to your feedback, we wanted to start looking to the future and talking about what’s in store for the upcoming Early Access period.

Before launch, we published the first draft of our roadmap to whet your appetites and give you a glance at what we had in store. Since then, we’ve made a few adjustments and started to cement the timeline for our releases.

Without further ado, here is our November Updated Roadmap:



Our plan for the coming weeks and months is to alternate our updates between Supply Drops and Pre-Seasons. A few weeks before these releases, we will refresh our roadmap asset with more information on the approaching update.

Supply Drops will primarily focus on implementing feedback from you, as well as improvements, polish, and general fixes. We will also continue to tweak features, and on rare occasions add new ones based on feedback or pre-existing plans, such as the Difficulty Settings for the November update.

Pre-Seasons, will, on the other hand, focus primarily on content, which can include new enemies or enemy mutations, heroes, weapons, cosmetics, and more. They will be thematic in nature and give some context to the world - looking to expand on the lore. These will be accompanied by the usual minor fixes and updates.

Expect more information to come regarding the November update in the coming weeks, but until then, keep fighting the good fight and send us your reports from the front lines.

//Second Extinction Team

Hello Recruits,
We hope you’re enjoying the game and taking care of the Emergence Event so we can get back to lower threat levels. We have a hotfix going into the game right now to improve the experience. Here are the details:

BUG FIXES

• Fixed shutdown crash issue when the game was closed very early after launching it.
  
• Fixed a multiplayer crash that happened after rejoining a session.
  
• Added a notification to show up when the game runs on a PC below the min spec requirements.
  
• Updated the graphics engine and fixed rarely occurring crash issues.
  
• Fixed issue where players with multiple GPUs experienced a crash upon startup.
  
• Fixed an issue with matchmaking requests sent to PlayFab.
  
• Changed the wrong textures on decals to the right ones.
  

IMPROVEMENTS

• Revert popup time got extended from 10 to 15 seconds.
  
• Small improvements were added to video settings. This should also solve input lag issues for some players. The default window mode is changed to borderless now. It was fullscreen before.
  
• Improvement for lobby handling for joining and creating a session was added.
  
• Extending handshake time to a minute.
  
• Adding the cancel button when joining a session.
  
• Matchmaking popups are now shown only for the host.
  
• Fixed overlapping popup issue for players waiting for users.
  
• Increasing PlayFab Quality of Service (QoS) timeout to enable a higher likelihood of matchmaking with other players.
  

Hello, Extinction Elites!

It’s been two weeks now (wow) since we launched the game in Early Access. The reception has been incredible, and it’s been amazing to see how you have responded to the game.

Launching a game is equal parts exciting and terrifying, as we both get to see your reactions to shooting dinosaurs first hand, but also need to face performance unknowns that come with the myriad of PC builds and configurations that are out there. While things went smoothly, it’s not to say everything went perfectly. Our last two patches were meant to hopefully fix most of the issues that caused problems. With that said, anyone who is experiencing crashes, load errors, and other performance problems should reach out to us via Customer Support so we can try to find a solution. Please be patient with us - we are a small team, after all, and our poor QA team is juggling a lot currently.
Ultra-wide support (i.e., 21:9 resolution) was an unfortunate oversight on our part, but now you should be able to play in all that widescreen glory! Same thing with some key remapping.

Another thing that we’re keeping an eye on is matchmaking. Second Extinction is predominantly a co-op game, so being unable to find others to play with is not a great experience. The last patch removed some of the barriers for matchmaking, so hopefully, you’ll notice a change; but I’ve heard some of the suggestions around matchmaking - like custom lobbies, an LFG-type browser - and we’ll look into scoping that out for implementation.

As much as it is a co-op game, solo play is quite popular! The missions aren’t really intended to be played solo - only for those who enjoy a significant challenge - but we can’t argue with the players :) Hopefully, the free roam mode that’s on our roadmap will help satisfy those solo play desires in a less... intimidating environment.

Speaking of significant challenges, I’ve noticed a few people setting up their own. That Pacifist Challenge was pretty cool… and we look forward to seeing what creative solutions you come up with to continue doing these sorts of activities when we introduce the MIssion Difficulty settings in the next update! We’ll have a bit more information for you on that next update soon.

Lastly, one of my favorite things to do has been reading all the feedback and suggestions from the player base. I’ve noticed some common threads:

• A desire for in-game communication
  
• Melee weapons
  
• Better information when it comes to upgrades, dino health, and weapons
  
• Reload cancellation
  
• Longer loot pickup times
  
• Bestiary
  

All the feedback we receive will be looked at and evaluated - that’s part of the fun of Early Access. While I can’t say just yet when or how we will implement these suggestions, know that we are listening. You'd be surprised at how deceptively complex some of these are to implement, especially in any short time period. But we’ll keep you updated, I promise!

Keep on killing those dinosaurs, and thank you for being part of our Early Access process.

Cheers,
Julianne Harty
Product Owner

P.S. If you haven’t already, go follow our Twitch Channel. We stream the Weekly Action Report on Tuesdays and Gameplay Fridays (including previews of what’s coming up).