Done blowing up everything in your sight on your run? Good! Now, do you have what it takes to do it on a higher tier?
With the introduction of Crisis Levels you get to up the difficulty of your run. Provided you've already cleared the preceding Crisis Level of course. On each run you will have three levels to choose from, each progressively giving your Combat Shell more of a stress test.
More enemies will be called in to stand in your way. They'll be able to take more punishment while dishing out more to you as well. Your own shield capacity, mark duration and ammo received from drops will suffer on higher Crisis Level.
Of course all this high risk comes with high rewards back at HQ! Besting the corps at a higher Crisis Level will allow you to unlock more powerful HUB upgrades. Clearing both levels, including defeating both bosses, at maximum Crisis Level will earn you a special weapon skin to flaunt your victory! Shotgun skin for the Soldier and Peacekeeper skin for the Hunter.
Think you've had enough practice on the default difficulty? Then raise that Crisis Level and prove you've mastered the use of your Combat Shell!
Deadlink Patch Notes
2022-11-07"📢"
marks the changes suggested by the Deadlink community[h2]New Features[/h2]
- Crisis Levels with three difficulty tiers (described in the next section)
- 📢 Fall animations and fall damage added to enemies
- 📢 Added option to display run info on HUD (Crisis Level and the number of areas completed)
- New VO was added to the Phoenix Apex boss
- New Soldier’s Shell Upgrade: If an enemy is killed within 2 seconds of being hooked, the cooldown for the GripWire Rappel is reset.
[h2]Bugfixes[/h2]
- HUB was heavily optimized in case of CPU and GPU consumption
- Fixed a bug that prevented launching the game while the VR headset was connected to the PC
- Fixed the aspect ratio issue after watching cutscenes on ultrawide resolutions
- Fixed the highest damage telemetry stat that often was equal to 0
- Fixed the sometimes-invisible container on the Torantula boss arena
- Fixed annoying laser sound on one of the Watts-Rucker arenas
- Fixed Mothership and Hound data displayed in Codex and after being killed by these units
- Fix the issue with incorrect ammo stacking when using Electrolaser
- Fixed the wrong name of the Combat Shell during the tutorial
- Fixed a bug that resulted in detaching the camera from the FPS view
- Fixed the gamepad usage in HUB
- Fixed the footstep sounds that sometimes persisted after killing an enemy
- Fixed the bug that could cause a player to kill himself with a shock damage
- Lots of arenas’ collision and minor fixes
[h2]Tweaks[/h2]
[h3]General[/h3]
- 📢 Added max grenades HUD notification
- 📢 Changed tutorial popups to be closed with the ESC button
- Tank enemy; weak spots added, HP increase x2
- Rikishi enemy; weak spot added, HP increase x1.5
- Reduce teleport frequency of Geisha enemy
- Hound enemy; projectile explosion improvements - no longer obscures player vision
- Neuralboosts:
○ Weapon Damage removed
○ Headshot Damage removed
○ Primary Weapon Damage lowered to 10% from 20%
○ Secondary Weapon Damage lowered to 10% from 20%
- Tweaks to enemies’ movement and path selection. Many collision issues were resolved
[h3]Soldier [/h3]
Shotgun
- 📢 Improved initial pellet distribution. Targets very close to the player will be easier to hit
- Improved shotgun pellet collision logic. This should provide better consistency at close to mid-range shots
[h3]Hunter[/h3]
Peacekeeper
- Lowered recoil recovery speed, recoil halftime decay increased from 0.14 to 0.24
- Base damage reduced to 50
- The headshot damage multiplier lowered from 1.75 to 1.5
- 📢 Headshot mod: headshot bonus damage increased from 50% to 300%
ARC
- 📢 Decreased charge-up time for all ARC mods
- Increased fire rate of Matter Converter
- ARC mod Particle Accelerator will zoom in and slightly slow down time while charging
- ARC mod Particle Accelerator damage increased from 120 to 150
Translocator
- 📢 Improved post-swap enemy positioning (enemies will be placed at the exact player’s location instead of slightly above)
Decoy
- Explosion now marks enemies and penetrates armor
- Lifetime reduced from 10s to 5s
- Enemy melee damage instantly activates the decoy explosion
- Explosive Decoy mod:
- The Skill Power multiplier increased from 1 to 3
[h2]Crisis Levels[/h2]
🗨️
Dev comment: First of all, please keep in mind that this is the first iteration of the difficulty tiers system, and we plan to build upon it based on your feedback.
In the current state, the difficulty comes from higher enemy stats (HP, attack power) and higher enemy numbers and composition (fights will last longer), and also lowering player stats (mark duration, shields dropped from enemies, and ammo dropped by anchors). We know it doesn't really sound exciting, but we have to do this so that the game can keep up with your HUB upgrades (flat dmg/hp/shield boosts).
To incorporate difficulty tiers more into the game, we've connected them with HUB upgrade tiers, so you will have to beat the game on the higher difficulty in order to unlock more powerful HUB upgrades.
Higher difficulty tiers also offer better rewards (XP and Tokens) to make it worth your time. You'll also get something special for beating the game on (currently) the highest difficulty.
As we move forward, we will experiment with adding more variety to the difficulty tiers by implementing new abilities for enemies, handcrafting encounters for maximum pressure, and adjusting HUB upgrades.
[h2]Hunter, Neuralboosts, and Bonus Damage calculation[/h2]
🗨️
Dev comment: Hunter is still very much overpowered; to be more precise - Peacekeeper is still very much overpowered. It has high ammo capacity, no fire rate (shoots as fast as you can click), very low recoil, extremely low reload speed, and is good at both close and mid-range. No cons. It's just too good to be a primary weapon, really. Most of you (and us) don't even use ARC at all in order to beat the game. So we've looked closely into Peacekeeper progression, and we've made some changes based on our findings:
[h3]Identity Crisis[/h3]
Peacekeeper was supposed to be a precision-based weapon, but it turns out it can be even more effective by unloading the whole clip into the enemy body. At the same time, we'd like to keep the feeling of fanning the hammer into tankier enemies.
So we've decided to keep Peacekeeper as a "ratatat machine" by default, with an option to turn it into slow firing, head-popping cannon using weapon mods.
[h3]3 Neuralboosts is All It Takes[/h3]
We noticed that it took very little effort to turn the Peacekeeper into the best weapon in the game.
When choosing a Neuralboost, you had too many options to buff Peacekeeper damage, and it could get out of control quickly. Primary Weapon Damage, Weapon Damage, Crit Damage, Headshot Damage + Elemental Damage boost (if you had elemental weapon mod). You would start the game and deal 150 headshot damage during the first two arenas. In some scenarios, just after 3 arenas, you bring this damage up to 600. Combine that with an unlimited fire rate, and you've no reason to pick any other upgrade for the rest of your run. That's why we’ve removed the Headshot damage boost and decreased primary/secondary weapon boosts.
[h3]Multiplication Goes Brrrrrrrrrrrr[/h3]
The other thing connected to Neuralboosts is the overall damage calculation. All damage boosts were multiplicative; for example, you have a fire damage mod on your Peacekeeper, and you're about to deal 100 damage to a marked target. You have a 20% damage boost to marked enemies and a 50% fire damage boost. The system would multiply everything like: 100 * 1.2 * 1.5 = 180. Because you had multiple sources of damage boosts, this would cause your damage to skyrocket later during the run when you would gather dozens of different multipliers.
We've decided to make all damage boosts additive, so in the same scenario, you would do 100 * (1 + 0.2 + 0.5) = 170 damage. This will help keep player damage in line with increasing game difficulty and eliminate the issue of one-shotting everything deeper into the run. You can still create a pretty OP build by combining Shell Upgrades, Implants, and Neuralboosts.
All in all, Hunter's weapons are now more balanced, and while you can still stick to the Peacekeeper on most occasions, it will be more difficult to get it to the state of a godlike weapon and maybe convince you to use ARC more often.
[h2]Fall Damage[/h2]
🗨️
Dev comment: This was an interesting suggestion from the community and turned out to be a fun little gimmick. Falling enemies will take damage based on traveled distance and their max HP.
[h2]Community Q&A[/h2]
"Where co-op?"Deadlink is a single-player experience, and it will stay that way. We have no plans to add any form of multiplayer.
"Where melee class?"Deadlink is a first-person shooter - not a first-person slasher. Gunplay is at its core, and we've put a lot of effort into making shooting a great experience. While we probably could make a pure melee class, we don't think we could bring it to the level of polish that guns have. At least not in a reasonable timeframe.
Having a melee class would also mean that we have to redesign some of the game's core mechanics - for example, the Torantula boss fight. Good luck slicing this bad boy up with a katana.
While we have planned a class that will be encouraged to stay close to the enemies, it will not be a pure melee class.
There's still a lot we can and want to do regarding gunplay, and we can't wait to share more details when the time is right.
