War Mongrels News

NOTE: Unfortunately your old saved game states are incompatible between the old and new version due to the amount of changes all those fixes required. We apologize for this, unfortunately due to technical limitations it was unavoidable.

Your overall campaign progress remains, but you will have to restart the last chapter you haven’t finished yet.

Changelist 40918:

• [Optimization] Optimized physics calculations during character rotation. Lowers CPU usage.
  

• [Tweak] Multiple adjustments to the save system. Most notably, the issue with being unable to save the game should occur less frequently. We're still working on the final fix.
  
• [Tweak] Made several improvements to AI that controls your characters in Combat Mode. They will no longer activate the alarm themselves, lol.
  
• [Tweak] Display the current keybinds for Quick Save and Quick Load on the related buttons in the top right corner of the UI.
  

• [Bugfix] Fixed an issue causing characters to exit and enter vehicles multiple times in a row.
  
• [Bugfix] Solved issues with challenges depending on kill counters, such as killing 10 enemies with the environment.
  
• [Bugfix] You will no longer be able to enter any multiplayer features if you fail to log-in properly. Happened mostly for EGS players who launched the game outside of the launcher.
  
• [Bugfix] Fixed an issue with all quest markers getting enabled again when changing the "Show Quest Arrows" option during gameplay.
  
• [Bugfix] Fixed an issue with "Reset Camera" action improperly working after rebinding the key.
  
• [Bugfix] Greta's "Gas" skill will now make the affected enemies lose the ability to hear. They were able to hear before and it allowed them to alarm other enemies when they should not.
  
• [Bugfix] The enemies will now properly return to patrolling their designated area after loading a save game.
  
• [Bugfix] The chat will now respect user settings even after a map change or a recreation of the widget. Issue caused unwanted messages to show up.
  
• [Bugfix] Corrected several localization errors.
  
• [Bugfix] Achievement "Eat Lead!" will now properly count officers and can be unlocked.
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter I - You can cut through the fence if you didn't kill the nearby guard watching.
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter I - Planning mode tutorial will no longer get blocked in multiplayer.
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter II - Enemies arriving by truck will now properly shoot with their weapons in their hands.
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter II - Lukas and Ewald no longer hide in the bushes after escaping from the bridge explosion. You can now complete that challenge ;)
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter II - All the guards will now leave their positions after the explosion. Sometimes some of them remained, which was not as designed.
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter II - Trees now have proper collision channels and the characters behind them will have an outline like when they're behind any other obstacle.
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter III - After the bomb was placed it could explode as soon as you hid in the wardrobe. It shouldn't do that. It will now only blow up after you exit the building.
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter III - The last wave of enemies will no longer spawn twice, which previously made the level much harder than originally designed.
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter IV - Fixed matching of the visible building geometry with the actual geometry used by perception and AI. Solves many cases with movement, visibility and AI in this chapter.
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter IV - Enemies can no longer shoot through the walls of certain buildings. Cheaters.
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter IV - Added a reminder about suspicious behavior in civilian zones.
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter IV - Fixed a problem where enemies could see and detect you through a truck.
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter V - Fixed a notorious bug with guards not leaving Greta alone in her cell.
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter VII - If you get the key to the Armory before freeing Joachim, the game will continue.
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter VIII - Michelle's group will now reach their designated destination without getting blocked on the way.
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter VIII - Michelle's group will no longer become alarmed when they hear a nearby shot.
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter IX - Inside the Mansion your walking speed is reduced. However it did not restore to normal when you left the Mansion. This is now fixed.
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter IX - Fixed Flare Gun not launching an attack after saving and loading a game.
  
• [Bugfix] Chapter XI - The tank no longer sees characters in bushes.
  

• [Crashfix] Not really a crash but a hang: Rarely when rotating, the characters could enter an infinite loop. This code has been cleaned up and optimized.
  
• [Crashfix] The client crashed when it received information that a character died, when the killer was also already dead. No longer happens.
  
• [Crashfix] Fixed several cases of crashes that happened when a player kept pressing keys while disconnecting from the host.
  
• [Crashfix] We’ve allowed you to open your store profile even if you failed to log-in properly. This caused a crash. We now prevent you from opening that overlay link in such a case. Happened mostly on EGS when launched outside of the launcher.
  
• [Crashfix] Further stability improvements, fixing remaining crashes, prioritized by their frequency of occurrence.
  

• [Info] We're still working on multiple other issues. Next round of hotfixes early next week.

We’d like to thank all of you for your support for War Mongrels. We’re actively monitoring your reports and feedback, working around the clock to address the identified issues.

Today we’ve deployed the first round of fixes, mostly addressing reported crashes we’ve been able to replicate. You can check the patch notes here.

Rest assured we’ll continue working on the game and you can expect more bug fixes and improvements in the coming days. We’ve also compiled a list of Known Issues, which we’ll continue to update. We’re now focusing our efforts on:

• Continued improvements to game stability
  
• Squashing bugs of all sorts, including online co-op issues
  
• Tuning the save game system, including auto-saves
  

In the meantime, if you like War Mongrels, but have encountered issues or bugs, please give us a bit of time to make it great. Your reviews are very important to us and we’d love for you to let us read them after you’ve had a chance to experience the game of a quality you’ve come to expect from us.

Having worked hard on War Mongrels for a long time, we’ll continue supporting it like we did for our previous games. Stay tuned!

First one in a series of hot-fixes, contains the stability improvements that were most often occurring.


Changelist 40818:

• [Crashfix] Fixed several memory related access errors which caused the game to crash.
  
• [Crashfix] Prevented the game from crashing when improperly removing more skill charges than were available to use.
  
• [Crashfix] Rarely, when a client disconnects the game crashes due to the fact that the server still sends function calls. Client now ignores those old and irrelevant calls.
  
• [Crashfix] Temporarily disabled keyboard navigation in the menus. It's a feature closely tied to controller support, which currently doesn't work properly and it crashed the game.
  
• [Crashfix] Prevented the game from infinitely calling a recurrent function when a specific set of conditions occurs.
  
• [Crashfix] Allowed the minimap system to survive null entries in it's rendering table.
  

Enjoy and let us know what you think on Discord or in the Community Discussions section!

**Planning mode**
Planning mode comes in very handy. It allows players to handle more complex, multiple character actions, and even synchronize them.

See, you often encounter multiple enemies. For example. two soldiers are having a conversation; if you kill one, the other—unless they are particularly self-centered—will immediately notice his interlocutor missing ;) In planning mode, you can synchronize your characters' actions to execute them both at the same time.

But there's more to it. Planned actions can also be triggered separately for each character. So, imagine there's another enemy looking at those two guys talking. You can use the planning mode to queue one character to distract that newly discovered enemy, execute this action first, and then trigger the previously queued kills simultaneously.

Last but not least, it has extra utility. In single player, planning mode toggles slow motion, so players have as much time to plan their actions as needed. But in multiplayer, each player has their own planned order queue, so planned actions can be even more complex.

**Dynamic action mode**
We still aren’t sure if Combat Mode in its current form was a good idea. The team was very split on it, actually. Letting players completely switch the control of the game in play was a risky decision. Having the possibility of shooting everyone in a game based on stealth mechanics is also risky as hell.

The goal of this mode is to give players an opportunity to shoot themselves out of problems or simply erase some small part of the level if stealth becomes burdensome.

We're looking forward to your feedback and opinions on this! :)

**Gameplay variety and replayability**
As a real time tactics game, War Mongrels features puzzle game elements. The entire level is like a big puzzle and that puzzle is separated into smaller chunks - we call them "arenas". Basically, each level consists of smaller, separated areas where if a player gets past a certain "checkpoint" they can consider everything behind them solved and can focus on the rest of the level.

Our goal was to make sure that each arena in a level has multiple approaches. As a rule, for each chunk of the map there are at least two different entrances as well as two exits. This means that some chunks of the entire level are optional and the player gets to decide which parts they feel comfortable dealing with and attempting to complete.

Now, to solve these puzzles, players get two types of tools.

The first is the skills of the mongrels they control. Each hero has their own set of skills. Some of them can climb high walls and buildings. Others can brute force their way through a locked door and so on. Levels are designed around those skills, so the player gets to choose solutions for each conundrum they encounter.

Secondly, levels can sometimes provide their own tools in the form we call "environmental hazards".

For example, a level can feature a big stack of barrels that the player can push down on unsuspecting enemies, or, if they are inside of a dark building, disable lights so that enemies will see much less with their viewcones reduced. So, when it comes to the mechanics of the game, there are a lot of different ways you can experiment with.

See you in the game!

Add “War Mongrels” to Wishlist:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1101790/War_Mongrels/