The Anacrusis News

Left 4 Dead remains the high watermark for co-op shooters. Atmospheric, varied, and able to encourage teamwork without clunky or intrusive extra mechanics, it's testament to the very best of Valve's game design principles. Both L4D and Left 4 Dead 2 succeed at subtly, almost invisibly making you want to work together. It's not about combining skills, abilities, and unique moves - you want to help each other because you love the characters, and because the drama and presentation are so intense, you get an intrinsic need to escape and survive. Now, 15 years later, Chet Faliszek, one of the co-creators of Left 4 Dead, as well as Portal 2, the Half-Life 2 episodes, and CSGO, returns with independent studio Stray Bombay and a new co-operative FPS. This is The Anacrusis.

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Co-op shooter The Anacrusis has arrived, and you can sign up to be a modder

The Anacrusis is a co-op swarm shooter from Stray Bombay, the studio co-founded by former Left 4 Dead developer Chet Faliszek. It's currently making its way through Steam Early Access, but Faliszek says he "will never do Early Access again" due to "how player counts are seen by steam and then downwind by the community."

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• Enhancements to eggs in Versus mode
  
• General performance improvements that should show gains across the entire range of supported hardware
  
• Significant performance improvements during large hordes
  
• Changed graphics presets to be more aggressive at the Low and Medium settings. If you’re using a 3GB GPU and experienced crashes when you ran out of memory, you should run on the Medium or Low setting depending on available memory
  
• Preliminary support for audio mods that can replace any sound in the game. Try the mouth sounds shotgun mod in the Workshop!
  
• Using Discord rich presence shouldn’t result in a ghost member of your party anymore
  
• Bots should be less talkative when they’re shooting each other by accident (don’t worry, bots don’t do damage to each other)
  
• Grabbers can no longer fire their primary attack if they’re not on the ground
  
• Added a UI toggle to disable audio mods in-game.
  
• Updated episode thumbnails for Episode 4 and 5
  
• Final fancy lighting render and previs enabled on Episodes 1, 2, and 3. Episode 4 will be done in time for next week
  
• Fix occasional massive hitches that were especially prominent in Versus mode. If you see significant stutter in this release, please send us logs!
  

• Reworked pretty much all the primary weapon sounds with the goal of improving their impact and feel. More of the guns make sci-fi appropriate gun sounds now and have more of the punch that you’d expect from a modern shooter
  
• Rebalanced most background noises so there was more dynamic range for the guns. If you hear weird/loud sounds after this update, please take a screenshot and post it to #report-a-bug on Discord or the Steam forums. Likewise, if you used to hear sounds in an area that you don’t anymore, please let us know about those too
  
• Added more flavor dialog to things like special weapon pickups
  
• Added subtitles for the new dialog we've added in recent months. There are a handful of bugs in the subtitles, which are entirely Chet's fault
  
• Added Eggs to Versus mode. They should spawn at the same place and same quantities for both teams
  
• Weapon spawns should be in sync between rounds in Versus mode now. We carved off a few more edge cases that caused the two teams to get different weapon drops. There are a handful of bugs that can cause this to happen that we’ll continue working on
  
• Fixed an issue that prevented login for people who were playing on PCs with protected system folders but not using admin accounts