Survarium News

Please find the complete list of changes of the update below. Have a good time playing the game!

GENERAL CHANGES

• Introduced unique loading screens for all locations variations.
  
• Ricochet damage increased by two (from 25% to 50% of full damage).
  
• Objects icons on the minimap reduced for lower screen resolutions. The lower the resolution, the smaller the icons size.
  
• Training with bots no longer ends prematurely because of high score difference.
  
• 1 day Premium voucher for daily missions no longer activates automatically upon receiving.
  
• Lowered the delay before a thrown medkit appears on the ground.
  
• Added additional notifications when receiving messages and match starting:
  
  • If the game window is active, the sound is played (the same as before).
    
  • If the game window is not active and the user did not switch to other application, the OS automatically switches to Survarium window.
    
  • If the game window is not active and the user switched to other application, Survarium icon on the task bar will be highlighted.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/355840/Survarium/
Download Survarium 0.69d and check out the update! Hopefully you'll like the changes.

See you on the battlefield!

Though it probably doesn't make a lot of sense now. But we're still going to release a couple updates with community requested changes. So, having said that, here is a new Q&A regarding forthcoming changes to the game.

New useful perks. I know a lot of high level players with characters of all prestige level 10, and they have no abilities to purchase with their skill points. I think you can add something new.

Even in this case there's not enough skill points to learn all abilities. Moreover, we are against adding new perks to further strengthen high level players. On the contrary, we are thinking about making some perks more accessible to lower level characters.

Add back the old shop. The shop used to have precise prices, and now everything is in dollars, so when players try to purchase say a 200 UAH item, they then have to pay 220-228 UAH.

There were no changes to the shop. If you started seeing prices in another currency, perhaps you are using a VPN or even moved to another country? Moreover, the final prices depend on the payment methods. Some methods have no commission, some have a significant one.

In 0.30 there used to be The Last Stand game mode, is it possible to bring it back, at least as an event mode, but as a battle royale?

What do you mean by battle royale, a single life? One of the problems in The Last Stand was that everyone was camping, and with just one life they would do it even more. There wouldn't be heroism of any kind.

Or are you talking about adding a shrinking zone? But Survarium maps are not made for this mechanic. Even if we could implement it technically, the locations are too small to have a shrinking zone in them.

Finally, this was the least popular game mode in the game history, why would we bring it back? Especially since we just removed Paintball – another unpopular game mode.

Introduce a status menu with all the bonuses from equipment sets, perks, etc. So when you take a look, you see bonuses from everything, simply speaking, improve the menu we have now.

"Simply speaking" is well put, ha-ha. First of all, it's a tremendous amount of work. Secondly, we display only a select number of parameters because showing everything simply confuses the majority of players. Visualizing this information in a convenient and readable way is a very hard task, and this is why modern games rarely have a status screen with every single parameter.

Bring back camos to Steam packs, why is the AK-74 is not available?

We will add the blue AK-74 as a reward for league tokens.

Bring back the chat. There used to be a time when you could see private messages in matches. This was useful. Now the chat is in a sad state, and sometimes people don't notice private messages for hours. There's no flashing, and no notifications, aside from a strange sound that you can not always notice.

Are you perhaps talking about a feature that was removed in 0.40 when the UI was totally reworked? We will try to improve the situation, but if this has to do with the UI, it will be hard to change anything. Basically, we would have to rewrite the UI from scratch, which is not an option.

Allow the player to select ammo pouches, so it's possible to take more pistol ammo.


It was possible before, as you could use a slider to distribute the ammo between the primary and secondary weapons. This was removed because the feature was doing more harm than good and was distracting the players from other things. We don't see why we would bring it back.

Improve ricochet damage by 30-50% since at the moment it's pretty much impossible to kill with a ricochet, but there's even an achievement to do that.

We will do this.

Increase recoil when firing from the hip so it has at least some effect.

Shooting from the hip is already less efficient than when aiming down sights because of higher dispersion. Why would we also increase the recoil?

A suggestion: show chat ban time in in-game notifications.

A suggestion: follow the rules, so you don't receive chat bans.

Add weapons to hard missions.

In the boxes, you mean? That's a good idea, we will do that.

Add a module for a weapon. Add a weapon. Add a module. Add a camouflage or a premium weapon. And other similar requests.

There are several dozen weapons in the game and more than a hundred modules. Given the situation, we see no point in adding more. Perhaps in very specific cases: for instance, when a weapon desperately needs a bigger magazine since all available options are too small.

Add a voice chat for everyone in the Gun Race mode.

So you scold other players in the voice chat too? That's a bad idea.

In the shooting grounds, display armor and HP for bots, so you could see the damage every gun deals. This will be useful, especially for the newbies who have no idea how they are killed across half the map.

How can this help the newbies? To understand which weapons with which modules kill across half the map, you first need to have that weapon and go to the shooting range with it. But in that case you don't need to see the bots' HP to know that the weapon kills them in one-two shots.

Add an option to reload while sprinting by lowering the speed, perhaps introducing a perk for that.

A perk is a good idea, in that case lowering the speed might not be necessary. We will look into that.

Add a squad bonus when playing with clanmates.

There's a squad bonus already, and one can get it simply by inviting random players. It would be nice to have a similar, but bigger bonus (at least +35%) for playing with your clanmates in a squad, this could make the clans more appealing.

Clans should be appealing because of teamplay and coordination during a match, not a bonus. It is already more profitable to play with clanmates rather than with random players since your performance is more effective.

Increase bonuses for older decals. There are a lot of cool decals in the game, but they are forgotten by the players because of bad bonuses. I suggest increasing them to the level of the new decals. And the premium decals as well. They can have bonuses of up to +25%.

We've been thinking about that for some time, specifically reworking the bonuses of all old decals and bringing them in line with the new decals. But given the recent news, we see no point in doing that. And you have to decide for yourselves what is more important to you: the bonuses or the visuals.

Deal damage to enemies by falling on them, like in real life. By falling on a person from a five meter height you could easily kill them.

We are sorry, but do people often kill each other in real life by jumping from five meters? Humanity has been inventing new ways to kill for thousands of years, but a trampoline is not one of them. Besides, Survarium locations don't have many spots where you could jump on an enemy.

-END-

After almost ten years since the start, the time has come to close the book of Survarium. This decision has been under consideration for a long time, but we delayed it as much as we could because we realize how important and special the project has become to many of you. And thus is a decision made with a grieved heart.

We are immensely thankful to every player who has been with Survarium throughout its history - for your support, your constructive criticism, for the time devoted to the game - these have been fantastic years together! We believe and hope to continue this mutual path together in the future - with the Vostok Games projects to come. Subscribe to our pages on Facebook and Twitter to stay up-to-date on future announcements and be the first to get access to the new games by the studio. On a separate note, we would like to particularly mention the players who have greatly contributed to the development of Survarium. Your efforts and support will not be forgotten!

In the meantime, our current game plan is as follows:

Until the end of March the game will continue functioning in full scope: we’ll proceed with releasing updates, and most of those changes will be based on your ideas and suggestions from Survarium’s official Discord channel. The technical support service and web-store will function accordingly.

Beginning of April we will cease to provide technical support and will switch off the monetization (web-store and in-game store), however the game servers will continue working. We will distribute 50 000 gold and 500 000 silver to all the players, so that each of you could obtain and try any weapons and equipment you like.

Finally, in mid-May we will start an in-game event dedicated to the closure of the game, following which the game servers will be deactivated. The game will also be delisted from Steam.

After the closure of Survarium, the team of Vostok Games will fully focus on the new project already in development.

Thanks again for all the support throughout all these years!

Always yours,
The Survarium Team

Hi everyone!

We would like to hear from you about one important topic: teamkill in Survarium. Friendly fire has been in the game from the beginning, but perhaps it's time to change it? If the community decides to remove it, it can still be an option in custom matches. Please take part in the vote.

https://strawpoll.com/rffjx97v4

Voting ends on Sunday.

Developers discussed with the team the suggestions from our Discord and answered some of the most upvoted ones. They couldn't answer all because there were a lot, but we left them for the next time. For your convenience, we translated the suggestions and their answers to English.

1. Finish the work on PvP as soon as possible. According to the Survarium development plan back from 2016, PvP modes were 80% complete, and now the game has everything the developers were talking about.

I think that finalizing the remaining 20% in 5 years is totally possible. Besides, PvP content is good enough for the majority of PvP fans, and further balancing should take less time. I want more from the game than just PvP, and if I am not alone, please support my suggestion so the developers reply to it.

We hear you. We think that the PvP is done. However, this doesn't prevent us from making balancing changes (including map changes), experimenting with the game mode (Paintball and clan wars among the latest ones), and making other changes.

2. Remove increased first shot recoil from MP7 and AKMSU.

We won't remove the recoil completely but will make it more controllable.

3. Remove all maps from Team Deathmatch except for Tarakanovsky Fort, School, Vector Laboratory, London and Cologne Bridge, plus return all their variations Remove from London the variation that has the central entrance to the skyscraper blocked with boxes.

We are afraid that leaving only five maps in the mode is a bad idea as you will quickly become bored with them. Some variations were removed because on those maps a certain team had over 55% winrate. At the moment in PvP modes (not ranked!) all balanced maps are available (meaning that on those maps no team has a winrate over 55%).

4. What do you think about launching the game on Epic Games Store?

We are totally in, but adding a game to the EGS is not as easy as to Steam. And it has to deal more with the platform's policies than technical limitations.

5. What do you think about publishing tools for modders? Because many games (Stalker, DayZ) and others are kept afloat for many years due to having fan modes and servers.

Since the game is developed on an in-house engine, creating mod tools would take a lot of time and effort which we simply cannot afford right now.

6. If the game is minimized, then message sound is not played, but you can hear the fridge and the environment. I think playing message sounds even when the game is minimized is a good idea.

We will make it so when the game is minimized, you can hear only message sounds.

7. Create several versions of crosshairs. The players could choose a crosshair they like to increase the fun, make shooting more comfortable.

We supposed the players would be mostly shooting when aiming down sights because it increases accuracy. The crosshairs are to provide a basic understanding of the area the bullets would hit. Generally, the crosshairs can be changed only in singleplayer games, since in multiplayer it could provide an unfair advantage. The same goes about third party software: using it to change a crosshair should be punished.

If you're speaking about collimators, then their crosshairs/dots are the same as in their real life counterparts.

8. Make an option to disable icons of the artifact, batteries, and the control points on the mini-map in the corresponding game modes. At low resolutions they are getting in the way and obstruct a major part of the mini-map, even making them transparent doesn't help.

We assume you are talking about 1280х720 and 1366х768, aren't you? Because in bigger resolutions (which are used by 90% of the player base) everything is displayed correctly. We will solve the issue in another way: by reducing the icons' size at lower resolutions.

9. Make unique loading screens for each variation of the map, while showing their key differences on the screenshots as it's done with CNPP.

That is a great idea. We already created screenshots of all the variations, and we will release them to the public with the next game update.

10. Add 30/40 cartridge magazine for AS VAL.

As far as we can see, 9x39 cartridge magazine for 40 bullets doesn't exist (there might be some specific versions, but not a mass production). We will try adding a 30 cartridge magazine from SR-3M.

11. Fix premature match completion. If a half of your or enemy team leaves the battle, then the match is over after 30 seconds. What needs to be fixed: if you have less reinforcement points than your enemy, but it's the enemies who leave, you lose, not them.

But it's only logical: the team that has less points loses. And the players who leave the match are already penalized since they receive no rewards.

12. Make something with league tokens already. They are being accumulated, but all items are already purchased. Make the tokens useful for something, let us change them for some stuff. Be it spare parts, be it modules, be it special weapons. Maybe some boosters. Introduce at least something for the tokens.

We've been thinking about adding more items for the league tokens. We will add something.

13. Remove premature match closure from training with bots.

Will do.

14. Remove experience and reputation boosters from Team missions rewards. If the player has level 10 and all prestige levels at 10, the boosters are useless.

If you are talking about rewards from the boxes, we can't set them up for each player individually. But we will think about converting the boosters into something useful.

15. Finish the economy on lower levels. You have a single equipment tier, but no single reward tier. After the special weapons were introduced, it makes sense to play on lower tier levels, but the rewards are really small.

First of all, there's no single equipment tier. The matchmaking tries to find players with equal equipment first, and if that's not possible, the search criteria is widened.

Secondly, the rewards are a stimulus to purchase higher tier equipment. So if you are after rewards, you should play with a higher equipment tier. However, if you want to kill less experienced players on lower equipment tiers, you can't expect us to promote that behavior by buffing the rewards.

16. Add Guns Race as a separate game mode or at least to custom matches. It's a fun mode and suits well to warm up.

We already did in 0.69с. We also plan to buff the rewards in Guns Race, since right now they are worse than in other PvP-modes.

17. Improve the contents of the box you get for completing daily missions, and also make the missions themselves harder. Increase the number of kills with a weapon to 5-6 or even 10, up the number of wins to 3-5, play 5 matches instead of one and so on. Improve the contents to three random items including weapons, armor, boosters and whatnot. Because right now you complete the missions and receive 30 spare parts, this is so low.

Daily missions were planned as an opportunity to receive an additional reward by playing just a couple matches. And these missions are mostly suited for the people who can't play for a long time. If we were to make them harder, more casual players would be left behind, and daily missions would provide even more rewards for the players who spend whole evenings in Survarium.

18. Update the login screen, there are no changes since 0.30.

The time that would be needed to update the login screen is better spent for some gameplay features, don't you think? Besides, is the login screen really that bad?

19. Add protection from explosives as first skills to the technical tree. That would make more sense and would be in line with anomaly protection in Knowledge of the Forest or stamina bonuses in Physical. And to keep it balanced, introduce it as at 1% increments, 5 points (5% bonus) total.

We reworked the skill trees last year, but that's a good suggestion, and we will keep it in mind for future changes.

20. Remove sniper rifles for the Slaughter game mode. That's not normal when some people run and gun, and some sit at the respawn during the whole match and keep looking at one point. Or make a limit of one sniper rifle per team.

Doing this is more tricky than limiting the number of smoke grenades in the mode which we did before. Banning sniper rifles is a bad decision, because some people might have only one profile with one main weapon. What would they do? Likely leave the match.

Besides, this limitation would not prevent people from sitting with any other weapon. So the problem is bigger than simply sniper rifles, and needs to be treated with other anti-camper measures. We are thinking about the best way to do that without hurting players' experience.

21. On Radar station in Slaughter mode, prevent people from shooting through the gap in the container that is to the right from the hangar because it's imbalanced. Any player can kill opponents coming from their respawn point, but it's impossible to kill the shooter because one simply can not hit him through that gap.

We will add an object before the gap or close it in some other way. The same with the similar issue on Vector Laboratory.

22. When players are afk (left the match) replace them with bots.

Bots in Survarium move only along graphs (predefined waypoints). Thus, if the player leaves a match, it's possible to replace them with a bot only after killing or teleporting the character. Besides, since matchmaking accounts for Elo ranking, replacing an afk player with a bot can bring more unbalance (for instance, the bot could be more effective in dealing damage than the player).

So we don't think that's a good idea. Moreover, we try to minimize the number of bots when matchmaking. Why would we add them later in the match?

23. Reintroduce the silencer for the SVU. As we know, the SVU has a sound suppressor. So why don't you add -80% demasking radius parameter? The same as on VSS. That would make the carbine more unique in its class.

We can't promise that, but will think about the idea.