We've got another massive update for you! Items, Ragdolls, decapitation, new Hud, new maps, tons of improvements across the board make Synthetik 2 feel like a new game (again).
We added 20 new items and did a massive overhaul of the entire item pool. Items have a strong identity as part of a gameplay sandbox and matter more than ever.
We brought back supply hack databases with all items, weapons, shop perks and all attachments! Collect them all and check out their details! Weapons got new stat tracking as well! Supply Hack Tokens also were added in their first iteration.
Destroying machines is more fun than ever. Enemies can be knocked around on kills, their heads detach on headshot or you can even blast the legs off!
Around 10 maps have gotten a redesign or are new, with many others getting improved spawn points for better paced action.
With the change to items and some cleanup, we can now bring back the classic HUD layout with a more focussed view on health and ammunition. A ton of quality of life improvements have been added all across the UI.
Update 14 started as a sort of "spring cleaning" update, adding a lot of fixes, tweaks and polish, however quickly grew very large. Many core elements have been polished up, especially around UI.
We added ragdolls to humanoid enemies, making them fly around when killed and interactible by players for a time. Additionally for the previous 'explosion' system where enemies break into pieces, these pieces are now darkened and visors no longer show up as bright colors on the ground, reducing visual clutter.
With the item overhaul and the changed item slots, we added a variation of the classic Synthetik UI layout which does span a bit wider across the bottom screen, but gives a very focused sight on the important gameplay elements, putting health and ammo at center. The new item layout also makes items appear more important and more appealing to use.
With the item changes and some cleanup, we were able to bring back the classic layout, bringing a more focused view of health and ammunition, while making items more prominent.
We made a ton of quality of live improvements across the board with many smaller things adding up to the experience.
The buff bar now has a background, shows timers and a red circle on negative effects
Varied gameplay cues have been improved, such as a very visible enemy spawn effect with sound, globally audible rare squad spawns and better damage taken feedback.
We added the first iteration of the supply hack databases. The databases can show all Weapons, Items, Variants, Shop Perks and Attachments! If you find one of them for the first time, they will appear in the respective database.
Isn't it beautiful?
You can "token" things in the database you unveiled with a supply hack token. This token will increase the chance of the object appearing and makes it slightly more powerful. Tokens are right now limited and will be expanded upon in the coming update, where you will be able to unlock tokens and maybe do more with them.
The first 3 maps in the campaign now have multiple different types of loot progression instead of always a similar one. This is still being worked on and expanded onto the other areas soon.
For the environments, we are still working on refining the spawn points for more engaging gameplay and high action moments. Multiple maps with too far spaced spawn points were improved, allthough more are upcoming. We also reworked the weakest maps of the game and gave them a stronger identity. Most notably, the Power Plant ("Electro") had some issues which now should be greatly improved.
Varied class tweaks have been done across the board, but were not a focus. Most notably for Breacher and Riotguard.
Armor got simplified towards it's original implementation. As riotguard now got flat damage absorbtion, the complicated armor resistance no longer needed and armor simply absorbs most of the damage on deflected attacks now, while no longer granting a passive reduction. The overall power of armor should be the same.
We updated older models with our latest workflows to apply our lessons learned. At this point we are very happy about overwhelming majority of the lineup and only minor touches should be left.
A lof ot tuning and tweaking has been doen across the board. Weapon balance should now be in a great state, and the tierlists on discord also show very good results. From experience we know that once players rank objects very differently on the tier lists, the balancing is working as intended.
All explosions (real explosions, not ""spell"" explosions now have a minimum radius of 2.5m. Explosions with low explosive component (R2000, KVSK, A700 or low damage explosions) could end up with a 1-2m radius which would realistically never hit anything but still eat from the damage budget.
SB Technology medium range damage falloff was decreased, making it taper off less harshly on medium to long range, which should be a noticeable boost in the average medium screen engagement
You can see weapon details and descriptions in the database menus. We are tracking many stats for you to compare and you can even filter by them!
Some sounds have been updated.
Some cool new weapons coming in!
Full-auto lightning shotgun Powerful burst damage Low ammunition
Terrorlevel increases now get stronger later in the game and have additional weaker units as support. This makes the headhunters scale with the players a little bit throughout thegame instead of being the hardest at the start and then never getting stronger.
Changes to the second floor (after first boss) have been made to add more power fantasy in the first half of the second floor with more "trash mobs", and reduce the "high stakes", tactical feeling a bit.
Now has 3 charges with 20 seconds recharge and gives a powerful buff similar to before. Players or friendly units can steal the charges and get the buff for themselves.
Reinforcements coming in!
A lightly fortified missile turret with a slow and highly homing missile.
Items were still in their first iteration and lacking behind other elements of the game and could not compete with abilities. We did a huge overhaul, buffing all items from a little to a lot, to bring them on-par with abilities, while adding a lot of polishing and many new items. The item slots were reduced from 5 to 4 as the item inventory felt too much like a backpack to "stuff in the stuff you find" and less like a loadout of meaningful abilities which you need to manage. With the reduced slots and the new power, items feel way better now overall and have a clear role in the game.
The item design has shifted from "random" power increases to more of a flexible gameplay sandbox. The very first original intent in Synthetik 1 was to add more depth by allowing more activatable items, where other games would only give you 1 single ability to press, however the design of the items mostly followed something that seemed cool or just randomly came to mind. Items are now designed more with a "gameplay sandbox" in mind, where each item has a dedicated usage in a net of roles and builds.
Pic: In-development overview of item roles
There are dedicated mobility items, utility, summon, crowd control, raw damage, melee and so on, but more importantly, the items enable more natural synergies by interacting with other items (or other things). Examples:
A shield dome can be a powerful defense for your team, or can keep a vulnerable sentry turret alive.
Explosive Shots can be fed to your riotguard to make him into a strong damage dealer, or placed next to your suitcase sentry to make it gain powerful shots over a long time. It can enable lower damage weapons to be more powerful.
Shovel causes stagger on the enemy, which makes enemies weaker, comboing with other stagger effects. Shovel naturally works great with other melee items or abilities, but now the shovel also reduces item cooldowns on hit, giving it multiple dimensions of combo potential.
Power array now charges on ability use, compared to power bolt which triggers on weapon usage, giving them different synergies.
Certain items now offer a secondary passive benefit, this is often the case for damage items especially as raw damage by nature offers low combo potential. Some Examples:
Maverick now increases damage of all attacks by 50, which synergizes well with shotguns or certain abiltiies such as fusion blast, or masterkey as example.
Unstable current now gives your items a chance to not consume their cooldown, enabling new builds.
Uranium greatly increases armor penetration but at a massive cost of fire-rate, adding a strong twist to your weapons
We added many new items (even more below in the lost & found pool) and together with the rework of many others, the entire roster feels very different.
Keep in mind that there were too many item changes to list them all here.
Collect all items in the new databases!
We brought back the lost & found chest, remade updated items for the loot pool. These are more of "bonus items" which are less core to the sandbox. This pool can also be used to add fun gimmicks or other things without disturbing the main game pool. The chest can also drop a random class starter with an upgraded variant.
Some couple items now have 1-4 unique item upgrades. While this is a cool concept, doing this for all items or abilities is a gigantuan task, as such this is an optional bonus, but maybe in the future some update can expand this to more items and abilities, and this function is now open for modding as well.
Some tuning has been done to the bindings. Keep in mind that RMB still works but the core ability now shows 2 on the UI, as this is the primary binding. At best check your keybindings.
We are doing some tweaks on audio ranges. Certain important sounds would previously not be heard. We are doing more tweaks in the near future, especially on the falloffs of player shots. Let us know if you feel like certain sounds need more range.
Certain sounds are now only audible for yourself and not multiplied in coop. This makes coop far less noisy and cluttered in terms of audio.
We added concept of Lifetime for Actions so that there is one consistent point for status durations. This can be set in the editor and replaces making paths with timer and delete self actions. Delete self action DELAY is removed as announced previous patch. If you used a delay this needs to be fixed or the action will delete itself instantly or faster than you wanted.
You can now see the type of operands in the action editor! Float, Int or Bool so there is no more confusion which matches with which. We chose a simplified rendition of float, int and bool as we expect people with programming knowledge to already know by the name of the operand and this will help unexperienced users understand the core principle of the types.
You can now preview particle effects in the editor when selecting a particle effect.
Next up we are working on the Outgame, Lore and Main Menu. We are trying to tie the resistance base into the menu and add more outgame progress while working on the story. Tokens will also get developed more. Also we are adding a reward for the last defender and likely other things as well as usual.
