Good morning Mercenaries,
As you know, our team has been working endlessly on improvements for LEAP; reading through all your feedback and how you all have been playing the game during your streams and the community events. Based on our weekly gaming sessions, there are a lot of community suggestions that have helped us focus on core elements that can make the game more accessible for a larger audience.
As a result of a lot of feedback and gameplay sessions, this update focuses mostly on improving gameplayability. We are still striving to hit the best performance benchmarks for our players. With that being said we have a lot of updates we would like to implement to create an overall better experience for our community.
We ran a dev stream on Friday that gave a sneak peak at a few of these updates, alongside our team’s progression in LEAP. If you missed out and would like to watch the video going over today’s update please
click here [h3]Expect the Unexpected[/h3]
Our PVE mode has received a nice update that will allow for randomized maps and objectives to spawn when you load into the server. Originally you would be faced with the same starting map Red Rock, but now you’re entered into the unexpected with randomly generated maps/objectives. Have fun not knowing what’s next to come Mercenaries!
[h3]Spin me Right Round[/h3]
We’ve added a nice little rotation to our Armory weapons, now you’re able to get the full 360 low down on each weapon, take a spin and whirl these weapons around to see them in their full glory!
[h3]It’s New and Sparkly Captin’[/h3]
Our UI has been updated to make instructions crystal clear when running daily tasks and complete missions. Be sure to keep an eye out for the flashing star by challenges - you’ll have something shiny to pick up!
[h3]Weapons and Abilities[/h3]
- Fixed issue with burst AR skin rarities
- FOV and weapon/player mesh clipping improvements
- Most weapon maximum magnetism strengths reduced from 1.0 to 0.75
- Most weapon maximum magnetism maximum ranges increased roughly 33%
- Most weapon horizontal recoils matched to vertical recoils (approximately 25% increases)
[h3]Maps[/h3]
- Fix for satcom tower collision
- Fixes for some AI spawning inside meshes
- Tweaked environmental effect colours in Cataclysm, to conflict less with the enemy outline colours
- Shooting range match duration lasts up to a week
- Fixed Cataclysm stairs and removed textureless cable on Cataclysm main tower
[h3]Programming[/h3]
- Several fixes to the party system (Joining friends in games, party reconnection when in the main menu, parties breaking when you want to click on other players’ avatars, parties becoming out of sync due to various different reasons)
- Added ADS as a toggle option in the gameplay settings
- Largely reduced memory footprint of several assets
- Cleaned up log outputting and optimized away code that could cause hitches on low-end devices
- Optimization passes have been done on several different areas that should impact overall players’ experiences
- Added a better weapon visualization flow in the armory
- Added the ability to mute players in-game from the scoreboard, to both text and voice
- Fixed a few issues when claiming and displaying rewards, such as the daily bonuses and challenge rewards
- Added more gamepad support to the UI
- Fixed a re-join issue where players could be kicked once if they joined a server they were previously in
- Fixed some in-game UI elements not properly adjusting to the current game state when players join an ongoing match, such as the VIP identifiers on enemies not being colored correctly or objectives showing on top of the lobby screen on Special Operations
- Map rotation can now be randomized, which allows Special Operation servers to offer different map progressions for PvE players
- Fixed some issues with some PV’s skins being overridden with a team-colored skin variant
- Fixed a camera movement issue when hopping onto your personal vehicle
- Changed how weapon placement reacts to field of view changes so they don’t show clipping
- Fixed one issue regarding ability configuration that could make it so abilities ran out of ammo when they shouldn’t
- Melee and Grenade animations are now easier to configure, which should help modders designing new weapons
- Fixed one issue where Special Operations could stall if the last alive player was kicked
- Fixed issues with server-wide bans and unbans not being properly addressed
- Fixed issues where the AI from Special Operations wouldn’t reliable target players in their personal vehicles
[h3]Misc[/h3]
- Improved grenade materials
- Implemented language support for Italian, Spanish, and German
- New streamer graffiti
- Fixed some sounds not responding properly to volume levels
- Improved headshot registration accuracy on cowboy player skins
- Setup important flags for announcer data, for better audio clarity
- Fixed several UI issues such as navigation, state tracking of buttons and other elements not properly reacting to player input
- Improved UI update for contract rewards
For anyone who would like to join our Discord, I've added a link below for you to join. We're encouraging people who would like to interact with fellow Mercenaries to jump in, the dev team is also in the Discord and can help provide feedback and support. Anyone looking to seed servers or would like to find people to jump into matches with we have a section on the Discord for that. It's not a permanent solution, but as we work to grow the game and push towards bigger and better updates these are ways we can help LEAP grow!
