Hey Runners,
Today it’s once again update-time! One of the main focus of this update is “Man vs. World” balancing, as we saw a bunch of people showing interest in the gamemode but unfortunately it being too hard for most to even pass the first stage. We enjoy hard difficulty ourselves but surely there are ways to make it more accessible to everyone! Therefore we added a new casual difficulty setting which reduces the accuracy of the enemy as well as adding a new self-healing item which is specific for this gamemode – the bandage!
You can’t find it in the armory, it’s a enemy soldier loot drop. Make sure to keep your eyes open to not miss them, they can easily decide the outcome of the campaign! You’ll also find them in the hard and veteran difficulty modes, just at a lower drop rate.
Next, we took the first steps into implementing some of our upcoming usability improvement plans to help (new) players get into the game more easily.
One part of it is the backpack design which didn’t always make sense in it former state. We found out that especially new people were confused about the abrupt speed and accuracy penalty for having e.g. 1 extra weapon in their backpack and not realizing where the penalty comes from, leading to the decision to tweak the encumbrance system.
Now the accuracy and speed penalties increase linearly as you can see in the following chart where you can compared the old (1.64) and the new (1.65) ways.
As for a typical example, when you carry an extra stock weapon in your backpack such as a M16A4, in 1.64 your moving speed was reduced by 20% and your accuracy by 15% (respectively the dotted blue and red lines). In 1.65, the speed penalty would be 10% (blue line) and the accuracy 0% (red line) as it just starts to kick at 20% encumbrance.
Therefore having an alternative weapon in your backpack and nothing else would only affect your movement speed by 10% but not your accuracy. Having more items in the backpack will affect your movement even more and the accuracy will start to reduce too.
Visually, your character will have a visible small backpack on his back once the encumbrance reaches 20% and a big backpack once the encumbrance reaches 50%. We also added a backpack HUD icon with the encumbrance percentage below so that you won’t have to check your inventory to get that information.
For online players, profile passwords have been another source of confusion since forever, and we’re now switching to another mechanism that avoids a manual password input while achieving the very same thing by utilizing Steam. For new players or profiles on servers, you no longer need to come up with a password, instead you just pick a username and get into the game. For old profiles, the game requires you to supply the password once more after trying to join with the existing username, or, if you have used the “Remember me” option the game will automatically feed it.
In the last update (1.64) we added some new experimental netcode techniques which should help with synchronization issues some people have, especially when their network performance tends to fluctuate. We were rather cautious about those additions, therefore we didn’t apply them as a default setting but only optional via command line. During the last 3 weeks, we activated the mode on some official servers, which ran surprisingly smooth without causing any issues that could have come along. We’ve now made the netcode mode the default setting for all servers and clients.
For Pacific, we’ve optimized some maps to avoid certain crash issues due to RAM consumption, and made a variety of gameplay changes.
Most of these gameplay changes are ‘quality of life’ for weapons – raising the effectiveness of certain firearm classes,
or reducing the performance of some of the incredibly powerful weapons. Additionally, commonness of some of the extremely-rare guns has been raised,
so that they might be encountered slightly more often. The player’s version of the Sentry Vest has been nerfed (the enemy AI remains the same),
and there is also 1 new weapon variation – a rare Type 99 Light Machine Gun outfitted with a Scope.
For a complete list of changes, check here
