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Supply Drop #3 - Patch Notes

Supply Drop #3 has just landed! Many fixes focus on the vicious crashes you’ve been experiencing and will hopefully let you have some smoother sailing ahead while you slay dinos. 

Aside from that, we’ve brightened up the world after receiving feedback on it being too dark, and you should now have the door open for you in the Black Site mission, making it possible to complete for everyone. 

You can see the complete list of fixes below, and remember if what’s bothering you isn’t on there - report it here, and if you have reported it, know that the team is looking into it and will push a fix once there is one ready.

On May 27th, Pre-Season 2’s contract will become available, both for Xbox players who’ll get their first shot at them and for Steam players who had their window cut short last time they were available. Worth noting is that you’ll have to complete all the Pre-Season 4 contracts to get to Pre-Season 2’s, which will follow from beginning to end (any previous progress on Pre-Season 2’s contracts will not be carried over). This means that it is possible to complete the same contract again, possibly resulting in duplicate cosmetics for some. If that happens, it’ll be fixed in a future update. 

We hope you enjoy the fixes and as always, let support know if you run into any issues and continue filling up the feedback channels on our Discord with your great ideas and feedback. We read all of it!

[h3]General Improvements[/h3]
  • Added Seasonal Contracts from Pre-season 2. They will be available from May 27th.
  • Adjusted the controller rumble settings ⭐

[h3]Achievements[/h3]
  • Can't Touch This achievement will no longer be granted after the tutorial mission is completed

[h3]Crashes and black screens[/h3]
  • The crash that occurred when players were using the map during a mission has been fixed
  • Players should no longer crash in 'Basic training' during combat with dinosaurs
  • The crash that occurred during multiplayer sessions in the Homebound mission has been fixed
  • Fixed an issue where players ended up with a crash after killing an Acid Raptor
  • The crash that randomly happened after a few minutes during the mission or expedition has been fixed
  • Random crashes from explosions while in combat should no longer happen
  • Fixed an issue where players ended up with a crash while staying idle in the respawn insertion map ⭐
  • The game no longer freezes if the user signs out while in the Privacy Policies screen
  • The user is no longer stuck on a black screen after returning to the Title Screen from the Main Menu

[h3]Gameworld[/h3]
  • Fixed the issues that caused some parts of the world to be very dark ⭐

[h3]Menu, HUD, UI, etc.[/h3]
  • Button's Label 'Toggle Rewards Preview' no longer disappears after activating 3 contracts from the Board
  • Button's Label 'Find Random Player' is displayed properly
  • Excessive Settings buttons are no longer displayed when navigating in the 'Main Menu' 
  • An error message is now prompted when the LAN wire is disconnected while the user is in the Main Menu
  • Players now get displayed a user-friendly message about lost connection whenever the connection is lost during an online session
  • The text in the Newsfeed menu is now scrollable

[h3]Missions and progression[/h3]
  • The door in the Black Site mission should no longer remain locked, making it possible for you to complete the mission ⭐

[h3]Multiplayer[/h3]
  • The matchmaking system should no longer fail to search for additional players


⭐= Changes made from community feedback and reports.

Доступный в Game Pass шутер Second Extinction достиг миллиона игроков - разработчики рассказали об успехах

Кооперативный шутер Second Extinction от студии Systemic Reaction привлек в свои ряды уже 1 миллион игроков. Об этом команда объявила в официальном микроблоге проекта.

War Effort FAQ

Hello, Extinction Elites!

We’ve been getting a lot of chatter regarding our War Effort, the community-driven meta-game that wraps around our game. It is an aspect that players have been engaging with, and there are some great Reddit threads out there where players have been discussing it exactly how we hoped. However, there’s still justifiable confusion as to what exactly is going on and how to affect it. We’ve talked about it at a high-level concept, but we haven’t gone into the nuts and bolts of it publicly. So here are a few of the most commonly asked questions to set that right.

[h3]Can we win/lose?[/h3]
In its current iteration, the War Effort is a never-ending tug of war between Humans and Dinosaurs. Technically it is possible to get an all red or all green map, but there are mechanisms that skew that not to happen. Having an all-red map means no one can insert into it, and all green means you won’t have much of a challenge. We want players to feel like they’re impacting the world but also need to find some consistency for the sake of an enjoyable player experience. We may have more concrete goals for players to work towards both as a community and as individuals in the future.

[h3]What activities affect the War Effort? Can we get the formula?[/h3]
We can’t give you the exact formula as we’re tweaking it all the time and don’t want to be held accountable to the ravages of time, but I can tell you that individual results are based on a combination of these factors;

  • Anything that gives the player research is tallied and tied to the region in which it was acquired. E.g., completing mission objectives, activities, and murdering dinosaurs.
  • The above total is divided by the number of knockdowns you receive in that region.
  • That total is then converted to a number between 0 and 1 based on A MAGIC NUMBER.
  • A mission failure or victory then subtracts or adds a hefty chunk to that normalized number. The final value determines whether that region has a victory, remains neutral, or receives a pushback.
  • These victories and failures are then logged, with the average result of all players being what determines the outcome for all players.

[h3]At the end of the mission, we can see how a zone is affected by your actions, but no stats about this or how it was determined? Is what is shown on the map what my session brought to the coming war effort update? If so, could we get more info on why the results look like that and what I did to make it so?[/h3]
As of Pre-Season 4, the War Effort mission summary has been updated to include icons that indicate the actions your squad undertook that contributed to that region’s outcome that session.

[h3]I'm wondering if a one-player army could change the war effort efficiency by killing tons of Dinosaurs?[/h3]
As mentioned a couple of questions up, the result when the War Effort updates is a culmination of all the community’s victories averaged out. This is to try and make sure the results don’t get skewed too heavily as the player base may fluctuate.

[h3]When I play the map showing my progress after, it does not reflect what I’ve been doing, I get enemy pushbacks where I’ve done all activities and unchanged or victories where I’ve not been focusing. Is it a bug or intended not to make sense?[/h3]
It is absolutely our intention to make sure you understand how you’re affecting the War Effort and are well aware that we are coming up short in this area. We recently made a key hire with a User Experience (UX) designer whose area of expertise is making sure information and systems are communicated clearly and intuitively.

[h3]How do the War Effort and the effect on the map change depending on if you play a mission or expedition mode?[/h3]
  • The most important aspect of the War Effort as it works at the moment is the shuffling of content and difficulty around the map to add variety across multiple play sessions. The types of Activities (those side objectives like Hollows, Downed Dropships, etc.) you find in a region are all determined by its Threat Level, as are the Regional Assignments you find in Expedition Mode. So you should only find T-Rexes roaming high threat areas and, as such, the associated Regional Assignment.
  • Insertion and Extraction are the next most noticeably affected systems. You can’t insert into a high-threat level area, and extraction takes longer or requires completing an activity in the highest threat level.
  • You will find different configurations of enemy spawns and reinforcement waves during a mission depending on the region’s Threat Level.
  • The flow of a Mission doesn’t change much, but the idea is that the world around its more static structure of an objective does, encouraging different routes taken and approaches.

[h3]If a player is disconnected, does it have a negative impact on the war effort?[/h3]
Unfortunately, it does. Whether by crashing out or disconnecting, not finishing a mission counts as a mission failure that we definitely don’t want to happen.

[h3]Will the War Effort become more sensitive to change if there are fewer players?[/h3]
See above in some cases! As also mentioned, the number of players shouldn’t affect the outcome too much as it's averaged out across everyone. However, many variables and unexpected events can and have thrown it off and have required us to step in and manually change the outcome. The introduction of Expedition Mode made it much easier to complete a mission which skewed the map green, and a sudden influx of new players pushed us in the other direction. This is all why we are in Preview and Early Access, so we can gather up all that delicious data, figure out what to do with it, and hone it better. Some of that may be that the maths of what we count as a ‘victory’ is too harsh, or it could mean that we need to build better fail-safes into the system itself.

[h3]Why is it designed to get fewer events and an easier map if we do well and get better?[/h3]
Mainly because that’s the most intuitive way to interpret that players are pushing back the dino threat. There is some stuff going on under the hood, though, which means if one side gets the upper hand, then the update will start to push back harder in the other direction. Think of it like trying to hold a boogie board underwater; you can hold it down for only so long before it wooshes back up and cracks you in the teeth.

[h3]It seems that sometimes the map gets the same Emergence Events multiple times in a row, weren't they supposed to be random?[/h3]
Only new Emergence Events are random. Existing ones have a chance to spread if kept unchecked. If you see the same one cropping up multiple times, it has likely come from one that already exists on the map.

Hopefully, this gives you all some insight into what is currently going on with the War Effort. We’ve been keeping a close eye on it as devs and gathering as much data and feedback as possible to best make improvements. I look forward to being able to tell you more about those in the future.

Cheers,
Simon Vickers
Game Director

State of the Game - May 7

Hello, Extinction Elites!

A big welcome to everyone in our Xbox community and welcome to the crew. With both Xbox launch under our belt and Pre-season 4 out the door, it’s time to give an update from the team. As always, the State of the Game letter’s goal is to provide an open channel between you and us. Feel free to reach out at any time in the Discord, however.

[h3]What We Have Learned[/h3]

Shortly after Pre-season 3, we started our initiative to set up surveys to talk about specific things in the game and get your feelings. The last survey was very much focused on Difficulty - how you felt about the game’s difficulty settings. This is the result:



This is what we in the industry call a perfect bell curve.

To complement this survey, we also looked deep into our game data - what difficulty level do you play at, how successful are you. This information was crunched on a per mission basis per group size.

Let’s take Homebound:



For people playing solo in Homebound, nearly 90% of all solo players went in on Normal difficulty… and weren’t very successful. But then, in Pre-season 3, we tweaked the difficulty settings, and you can see a much greater proportion of runs were successful (the bright green bars on the bottom). 

At two-player parties, the colors begin to change:



About 75% of 2 player parties went for Normal difficulty. As you can see, party wipes were extremely common across all difficulties (the medium green), but disappeared when we released Pre-season 3 and its updates.

Then with 3 players, you all did good - lots of mission success all over:



Still, however, a good 72% of the missions run were under the Normal difficulty setting.

Let’s dive into Expedition Mode:
Solo players loved Normal - with 75% of mission starts in this difficulty.



But the success rate before Pre-season 3 was a bit rough: 67%. After Pre-season 3, you were successful ¾ of the time! And you can see a bit more confidence coming in once Pre-season 3 launched, with a greater chunk of players trying out Insane.

2 Player parties really chomped into Insane after Pre-season 3:



Success rates for Hard and Insane jumped 13% after Pre-season 3! You guys are good…
And then half the 3 player groups chose to go Insane:



Where Insane actually had more popularity than Hard.

So what does this mean? First, we’re in a good spot when it comes to Difficulty in general. I don’t have enough space to go into each mission, but the results are pretty similar. Also, if you recall the State of the Game back in March, where we looked at the popularity of Expedition Mode, it was very popular with solo players. And now we can see that a significant proportion of solo players are playing in Normal and doing pretty well.

We will do another check-in on difficulties a little later when we get information from our Xbox players, but ultimately we’re in a good place.

[h3]What We Are Doing[/h3]

Our attention has now turned towards more meta experiences.

First, matchmaking has suffered. We introduced matchmaking filters in a previous update, but we’re seeing that using those filters negatively affects actually finding a match, especially for Steam players. We’re looking into temporarily removing those filters in a future update so that it’s easier to get in the game even if it's not running the mission you want to run. It’s temporary until the Lobby system comes into play in Pre-season 6, coming in September. Again, we encourage you to find others to play with in our Discord if you cannot find an adequate match ingame.

Hand-in-hand with this is problems around networks and disconnects. Hoo boy, yes we understand how rage-inducing it is to run a mission only to be kicked out and lost all the progress and stuff you just gathered. We are a peer-to-peer service (not driven by servers, in other words), so we are looking into ways that some measure of progress is saved if this scenario happens while also looking into ways we can prevent disconnects from happening at all. This is probably our top priority in the coming months.

We’re working on some small intermediate fixes while the big guns in the Pre-season 6 update are still charging up. Making solo play a little more forgiving is one such fix. We’ll let you know more when we get closer to those updates.

Second, we’re going to take a bit of a look into our rewards and loot items. There are cosmetic items in the game! Beautiful skins for your weapons and characters, but it appears we’ve been a little stingy in how we grant them. So, in conjunction with some gear preview improvements, we will see how we can make the game more rewarding with these customization elements.

Lastly, but certainly not least, we’re going to make some incremental progress on how new users interact with the game. The tutorial was our first big step; some early feedback we got from some players was that they didn’t understand what to do or how abilities worked, so the hope is that the tutorial helps.

Look out for an upcoming Dev Letter on the War Effort as well to fully explain this system.

And as always, we’re constantly working on improving the stability of the game. We have a Supply Drop #3 in the works currently to deal with feedback on the darkness of the game, on how night mode seems to be most prevalent, on problems completing Black Site and other contracts, as well as crash fixes and other bugs.

[h3]What We Want To Hear From You[/h3]

In a week or so, we will ask you to fill out another survey about Pre-season 4 content. It’s not scary or designed to collect all your data for marketing purposes; it’s really to see how you like the tutorial and Jack. If you, as a new player or remembering your experiences as a new player, have any feedback on your first impression of the game or things that were difficult for you, I highly encourage you to fill out this survey as well as add your voice to the #game-feedback channel in our Discord. I read everything written there and endeavor to act on it quickly.

Things we have heard that are common issues (in addition to the ones above):
  • Dealing with AFK players
  • Xbox Party adjustments to voice calls
  • Aim Assist adjustments/toggles
  • Frame rate drops
  • Crashes/Dashboarding

Some are easy fixes; others require a bit more consideration and investigation. But as always, any bugs that you experience are best reported directly to support so that they can be adequately prioritized and not mistaken for a suggestion.

[h3]One Final Note[/h3]

Pre-season 2 contracts will be re-introduced with Supply Drop #3, so that PC players have another chance to complete them and Xbox players have the same opportunity! You will need to have finished Pre-season 4 contracts in order to start the new ones, and your previous progress would have reset. But I promise the dates are accurate this time!

Some eagle eyes would notice that the timeline for pre-seasons has changed in our latest iteration of the roadmap. We will be releasing updates to correspond with War Effort updates now. As a fun function of shifting those dates to fall on a Monday or a Thursday, it just means that a change of a day could mean a change of a month! So it’s nothing to worry about, no significant delays, just some calendar fun.



Again, a big welcome to all our new players, and we’re excited to have you as part of our community. Thanks for being with us on this Early Access journey, and please consider joining us in our Discord!

Cheers,
Julianne Harty
Product Owner

Patch Notes Pre-Season 4 | 0.4.0.0

Pre-Season 4: Man vs. Beast is now live! The season highlights include a brand new Enforcer hero - Jack, who brings his own repertoire of skills to the table in the war against the dinosaurs. Read more about Jack’s abilities and how he was created by the team here. We also have a new Tutorial mission, especially beneficial for new players and brand new Seasonal Contracts!

As always, the team has been smashing bugs and cracking codes to up the experience even more. A complete list of fixes and improvements can be found below.

We hope you enjoy the update, and if you find any bugs, please report them directly to support here, and if you have any questions or feedback to share join our Official Discord server - the best place to get in touch with the team and become part of the community!

[h3]General Improvements [/h3]
  • Improved mechanics for big dinosaur projectiles ⭐
  • New and improved loot visuals
  • Increased time before loot disintegrates ⭐

[h3]Abilities and Perks[/h3]
  • Fixed an issue where bullets affected by the 'Smart Ammo' perk change trajectory when no enemies are present
  • Impact Detonator perk is now always triggered ⭐
  • Now it’s impossible to place a Static Barrier on top of the Supply Drops

[h3]Audio[/h3]
  • Localization and audio are no longer mismatched on the loading screen in the Contact mission

[h3]Contracts[/h3]
  • All contract tags are localized now
  • Contracts to kill dinos without reloading is now working in multiplayer⭐
  • Fixed an issue when 'Dead Shot' contracts can be completed without using the Scout Rifle (XB only)
  • Fixed an issue with unintended Increased fire rate after changing weapons (Community report)
  • Pistol and Revolver are now displayed as a requirement for the 'Small Arms Mastery' contract (XB / WIN 10 only)

[h3]Controls & Settings[/h3]
  • Pressing ESC in the Key Binding screen no longer takes the player back to the Lobby

[h3]Enemies[/h3]
  • Enemy reinforcements are now activated normally when players have triggered the extraction sequence
  • Fixed an issue where the Necro Kylo's and Flatback's belly sometimes looks visually incorrect
  • Fixed issue when multiple Rexes spawning at the same location ⭐
  • Now enemies can’t attack through the Dropship walls on extraction

[h3]Gameworld[/h3]
  • Extraction camp collision is fixed now
  • Fixed an issue when a player could be trapped in a Raptor Trap
  • Fixed an issue when supply drops can be placed on big dinos dead bodies
  • A floating box with no texture was removed from the map ⭐
  • Floating objects that used to appear in Altum Valley after sending up supply container are now removed
  • Lighting is now changed properly after entering a cave in a specific location
  • Now it’s impossible to climb on top of the raptor traps
  • Players can no longer respawn in a locked camp in Magna Petram
  • Players can no longer climb on the top of camp buildings

[h3]Graphics[/h3]
  • Fixed and polished animation for Jurgen
  • Fixed animation for Scout Rifle reloading, now it’s more realistic (the bolt wasn’t lifted before pulling back)
  • In-game visual blur effects are no longer following you to the lobby
  • The shotgun equip animation is now working properly

[h3]Menu, HUD, UI, etc.[/h3]
  • "Almost dead" overlay is no longer shown on the screen if the player resizes the window
  • All matchmaking filters are now localized
  • Arctic camo nameplate is unlocked and rewarded as intended ⭐
  • Bronze pack rewards are no longer overlapped with an information icon
  • Critical health should no longer display incorrectly when the player is in a drop pod ⭐
  • The information icon now always shows up when using the mouse in the Contract menu
  • Key bindings now have appropriate localization in the Settings menu
  • The Necrosis nameplate is not uppercased now
  • Players can no longer skip animation while rapidly clicking 'A' button during the leveling up process after the mission
  • Return to Lobby popup is now showing text correctly
  • Statistics overlay is now placed correctly on the Mission Result Screen if one of the players left the game before extraction
  • The contract navigation bar is no longer overlaying the loading screen if a contract is activated or completed
  • The gamepad image does not appear anymore in the settings tab if it doesn't belong there
  • The prompt to pick up placed Static Barriers has a clear description now
  • The SMG name is no longer cut off in the Armory menu (French language)
  • The text is no longer cut off in Rosie's ability description (Russian language)
  • The title text is no longer cut off in the War Effort update (French language)
  • The translation of terms "Handling" and "Stability" is fixed in the French language ⭐
  • Tundra Campaign title text in War effort update is now fully visible in Spanish localization

[h3]Missions[/h3]
  • Charged Extraction mission was incompletable in rare circumstances ⭐
  • Players could get the same dance reward twice after completing the mission
  • Server Lockdown prompt was shown even if the player never played the Black Site mission ⭐

[h3]Multiplayer[/h3]
  • Players can now rejoin the session if they exited to desktop ⭐

[h3]Performance[/h3]
  • Changing video resolution and window mode in the pause menu no longer disables gamepad input

[h3]Weapons[/h3]
  • It’s now impossible to buy the Rocket launcher twice ⭐
  • Mine seeding mines should no longer end up floating above the ground


⭐ = Changes made from community feedback and reports.