Update 17 - RE-ARMED

[p][/p][p][/p][p]Hey everyone![/p][p]We were listening very close to your feedback and worked hard on a ton of fixes, QOL changes and improvements. U17 has a strong focus on Fixes, P2P and in-game progression.[/p][p]
[/p][hr][/hr][p][/p][p][/p][p]Attachments V3 and Synergy items are a long way coming. While the previous attachments were well balanced and technically a good composition in a vacuum, attachments did overstep into items too much and strangely overlapped sometimes into item and ability effects, while often not having such direct effect on a weapon itself. [/p][p]So we wanted to make weapon upgrades more weapon based, and have items define more your overall loadout. Attachments V3 is cleaning up the systems, refinding the upgrade progression and putting things where they belong. [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][h2]⮩ Big Attachment Improvements[/h2][p]🔸New Attachments across the board![/p][p]🔸New Attachment Category for Energy Weapons: Cable[/p][p]🔸New Attachment Category for Launchers & Shotguns: Loader[/p][p]🔸New Attachment Category for Weapons with Underbarrel: Underbarrel[/p][p]🔸New Attachment Category splits between Burst, Semi, Auto[/p][p]🔸New Attachment Category for: Handguns / Starters[/p][p]🔸Attachments look more like attachments and add more weapon based effects[/p][p]🔸Attachments were sometimes overcomplicated, this has been improved[/p][p]🔸Attachments which felt like items are now items[/p][p]🔸Weapons now have more tailored attachment slots to their needs[/p][p]🔸Weapons with historically poor choices (Launchers..) now have much better upgrades[/p][p]🔸Improved Attachment UI with visible text for better understanding[/p][p][/p][h2]⮩ More Interactions[/h2][p]3 Systems Problem: We had been feeling a strange dynamic with the in-game progression where it felt like we had 3 different systems, mostly independent of each other. Items and weapons barely interacted, while (in comparison to S1) we now had powerful Perks from Terminals, which in hind-sight seemingly are trying to compensate for the lack of interaction between items and weapons.[/p][p][/p][p]Attachments V3 & Synergy items are now here to add more interaction between the gameplay layers.
With the latest changes to item upgrades being more prominent, and more item synergies being added, we now have a much deeper interaction between systems, which leads to more variation in builds, more weapons being viable and more desireable item combinations. [/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][h2]⮩ Better Starters[/h2][p]Starter weapons were rarely upgraded and rarely worth so. With new starter-based attachments this is helped but not fully solved. However since now the categories exist, we may expand on this as needed.[/p][p]We also liked the idea of having some "cross weapon" benefits which affect your handgun and all your weapons, like Recon Scope or Offload Cycler so we are testing these as optional Synergy items and which further benefit all your weapons.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][hr][/hr][p][/p][p][/p][p]16 Synergy Items have been added through the Alchemy shop.[/p][p]You also have a small chance to get one through the mystery (lost & found) crate.[/p][p]Synergy items act as normal items but are sort of like a "glue" in between items, weapons and abilities, often offering effects which works across multiple parts of a build.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]As example Ambrosia printer enhances all effects with the tag "Printing" and quickly recharges them.[/p][p]Missile control triggers from all missiles, including abilities and things like the Object 29 launcher.[/p][p]Synergy items allow for more synergistic builds and more build options and expand the item pool.[/p][p][/p][p]Items are and always were intentionally the main progression outside of weapons and they now take back their rightful place (together with the changes to item upgrade shop occurance), while previously the terminal perks have acted a bit as a "filler" to compensate for lack of item progression.[/p][p][/p][h2]⮩ Flexible Healing Item / +1 Item Slot[/h2][p][/p][p]We changed the healing ability to be an item and increased maximum item slots from 4 to 5.[/p][p]This means you have more choices with your loadout with the potential to share or recycle your healing item, or have a dedicated healer on the team even. [/p][p]If you prefer the previous hotkey behavior you can re-bind your key and or set the power slot setting to your liking.[/p][p][/p][hr][/hr][p][/p][p][/p][p]Predicting what will happen / "Network Prediction" is a notoriously hard challenge and has been iterated over a long time. With the latest upgrades to our kill and damage prediction, the feeling while playing is now extremely direct and virtually instant. [/p][p]You should feel an immediate improvement in the game feel when playing online![/p][p][/p][hr][/hr][p][/p][p][/p][p]After many player requests, we are testing a new Steam Peer 2 Peer (P2P) networking system to compare it against the current server-based solution, which includes improved prediction logic.[/p][p]We have been seeing good results internally, but now we need your real-world data.[/p][p][/p][p]We are especially eager to get feedback from players who have historically had issues with disconnects or connection stability on the dedicated server system. Please let us know how the P2P based networking works for you.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]The dedicated server system has been working solidly but a subset of players report repeated issues with connection to the servers. Next step for us to improve the situation would be to set up more locations and our own hardware instead of rented capacity, which is beyond the scope of Synthetik 2.[/p][p]P2P also would allow us to add modding in co-op, as such we are looking at this for the way forwards.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][hr][/hr][p][/p][p][/p][p]The base now has all buildings unlocked by default and is further streamlined![/p][p]Visuals have been improved and performance is greatly enhanced on most menus.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][hr][/hr][p][/p][p][/p][p]The main menu has seen many optimizations and also ingame we did a large pass on UI, to reduce spikes on low end from Interface updates. Since the game is already very optimized in most areas we are now going in very specialized areas. [/p][p][/p][p]As fun example; with a special shader, we encoded all these ability UI elements into just 2 materials:[/p][p]5! different charges images, No Charges Overlay, Cooldown Bar, Cooldown Ready effect, Cooldown Started effect, Cooldown Overlay, Duration Bar, Stacks Display, Hover Overlay, Click Overlay[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]All of this is just in one shader. By abusing the RGB color values as 'sliders' for the effects we completely avoid having to set any expensive images or shader parameters. Previously even animating one of these effects would cause a expensive ui canvas re-build. The only thing not causing a re-build of the UI is changing a color, so we use that. If you have 40 of such actions on screen in 4P co-op, this could previously cause quite some drain on a low end machine in the late-game. [/p][p]Networking also has seen varied optimizations across the board.[/p][p][/p][hr][/hr][p][/p][p][/p][p]You can now clear keybindings in the settings.[/p][p]Additionally the game now checks for duplicate bindings and blocks them correctly[/p][p]This however now creates a inconvenience when switching weapons, as weapon switch and scroll is double-bound, we are seeing if we can add a further improvement. For now, we added buttons to switch weapons.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][hr][/hr][p][/p][p][/p][p]Tons of general fixes based on your feedback! U17 had a large focus on Fixing bugs.[/p][p]This update had a large focus on fixes, so we have a large list of things that have been resolved, and we'll continue on this path to get things really smooth. [/p][p] [/p][p] [/p][p][/p][hr][/hr][p][/p][p][/p][p]Next up we are getting Engineer ready, more fixes and refinements as usual and the alternative environment for Arctic Base is also in the works. We'll keep the short update cycle from now on.[/p][p]Please report any issues you encounter with Update 17 on Steam or Discord.[/p][p]Have fun![/p]

• [p]Team FFG[/p]