Month: October 2015

Game Modes

• Lobby player cap has been increased to 8 players! When two players are done with their game, the winner will continue playing while the loser will drop back to the bottom of the play queue. The next player up will have a shot at the winner.
• Spectating has been added to lobbies! If you’re not participating in the fight currently going on in a lobby, you’ll automatically spectate the current match.

Dev Notes: Spectating is still a little rough around the edges, but it’s a work in progress. There are a few known issues, such as some audio stacking when catching up to real time. Also, the loading screen does not accurately reflect that it is waiting for the game to start before spectating. Lastly, joining a lobby during the variant selection phase of a match will cause the replay to desync from what is actually happening.

Crow

• New S2 variant! Dire Sting is quicker than Core Puncture and creates some juggle opportunities in the corner, but it’s slightly less damaging and more vulnerable if blocked.

Dauntless

• Reduced forward throw launch height to avoid dashing under opponents when using Kinetic Advance in the corner.

Dev Notes: Previously, dash-canceling Dauntless’ forward throw caused inconsistent behavior against different characters. This change should keep Dauntless out of the corner consistently against the entire cast.

Edge

• Reduced base Health and Stun from 1000 to 900.

Dev Notes: Fighting game characters with high mobility, damage, and mixup potential traditionally have lower health, so we feel this change suits Edge’s play style thematically. These numbers are experimental, but Edge has remained a dominant character for quite some time now, and this gives us an opportunity to introduce more health/stun diversity into the roster.

Talos

• Increased Magnetic Buster stun and meter gain slightly.
• Increased Aerial Magnetic Attract range, damage, stun, and meter gain slightly.

Dev Notes: Magnetic Buster is underused among Talos players, compared to Spartan Rush. These changes are meant to make S3v1 a slightly more enticing option.

• Increased base Health and Stun from 1100 to 1200.

Dev Notes: Talos has been struggling a bit since the recent changes to S1v2 and S2v2 armor startup. Boosting his durability gives him a few more chances to take risks, without forcing players to choose a specific variant. We feel that Talos’ S1 and S2 variants are much closer to equal viability now, so we hope players start getting more use out of all of them.

Performance

• Numerous performance fixes that help frame rates for all players. Our min-spec laptop in the office has been able to more consistently maintain 60 fps and most of the time runs over.
• Frame rate of the game has been uncapped from 60 fps to allow players to match their monitors refresh rate more accurately. You can still turn on VSync to cap the frame rate at your monitor’s refresh rate.

Dev Notes: This should have no impact on actual game play. Even though we render the game more often when running about 60 fps, gameplay-related updates still occur at 60 fps.

• New client support for additional ping filtering settings. We’ll be adjusting the settings and monitoring the data throughout the week.
• After meeting with his old friend and colleague, Zib’s head remains clouded. “Patches couldn’t… he just couldn’t. But he was so dismissive… so defensive….”

Visual Improvements

• Slight recovery pose improvements for Crow’s far s.M and B+M.
• Slight camera transition improvements for Talos’ Overdrive initial grab.
• New look for dust VFX across most of the game.