The long-awaited Update 15 “Grand Operations” is finally here.
Update 15 isn’t really a update as we do them normally but rather the big push of bringing Synthetik 2 finally close to the launch state and a massive complete overhaul, bringing many things to a new level.
This is not the final state of S2 yet, and some things will still be ironed out, but we’ve now hit all the major beats we wanted to hit with Synthetik 2, will now focus on fixing and your feedback, and are going towards launch. This really has been a massive amount of work, we hope you enjoy!
We overhauled many maps which greatly improved gameplay. Cover and enemy encounters across the game have been improved, for better and fairer combat.
The difficulty system got overhauled and instead of just stats, now offers challenging new Directives with entirely new enemies and strong gameplay changes. Directives can be found after missions!
Phantom One is the new base of operations and comes with varied new menus and features. It is fully walkable but can be used through a menu as well. It adds visual meta-progression and shows the human resistance.
Collect Blueprints and unlock new menus and game features! Discover new features such as the radio station, tech center and more. The base visually grows and gears-up with your progression!
Many asked for deeper meta-progression, so we’ve designed new elements with a wide mix of quality of life, new gimmicks, new features and a touch of survivability, for the new higher difficulties without breaking the balance.
A new quest system now unlocks the android classes and additionally adds new gameplay elements, such as the signal ping terminal or the heavy alarm wave pole.
We massively iterated our graphics and art pipelines to be much higher quality, much less maintenance, greatly reduced memory and build size, reduced shading costs and are way faster to make.
We did a ton of work on networking and lobbies, you can now quickly replay, use matchmaking and have more stable and higher performing gameplay!
We did enormous amounts of work on cleaning up the project, fixing bugs, refactoring code, reducing the project size, improving pipe-lines and making Synthetik 2 faster, easier to maintain, mod, debug and expand.
Basically everything in the game got a major overhaul. Items, weapon balance, variants, weapon perks, attachments, shops... We added new weapons, new shops, new enemies, enemy abilities, new items, new perks, new class abilities and so much more.
The new Directive System overhauls the old Difficulty Modifier system and adds many new gameplay difficulty mutators. The new ones can be obtained at random at the end of a run, and are consumed on usage. As example, Orbital Attack Zone will attack you with strafing orbital lasers, while Machine Military Presence will add new Military Soldiers and APC vehicles.
Directives are dropped if a run went further than the first boss. Directives can be pooled from the team, so it is extra efficient to use them in co-op.
There are many directives and they add real gameplay changes, not just stats or slight perks to enemies. Many new enemies and effects were added.
You can have up to 3 Directives at a time, for a truly insane challenge but this is not recommended.
Unlocking the Escalation tower unlocks the Directives system. Additionally the Escalation levels got a major UI cleanup and slight rework.
The Last Defender now grants a new type of loot which are the new Divine Blessings. They have certain strong benefits which makes going into loop more interesting than before.
Added new weapon upgrade workbench which offers 3 special choices affecting all weapons, can appear with a chance in later areas, and the Kernel Shrine, which can also rarely appear.
We brought back the variant override and unstable randomization! These will appear in the Tinkerer Shop, so you can now replace Weapon Variants and even have 2 Variants at once!
We split the ability / item upgrade compositor into two shops again, the combined shop now only spawns in loop, This is because it was not only overwhelming with choices and clunky to operate, but also lead to way too predictable and repeated behavior in terms of upgrades, where people kept upgrading the same things every run, and also often neglected items over abilities. We keep monitoring this change. We also increased the amount of weapon drops in general.
We have tuned the loot better and you will now get more items and weapons overall, especially in co-op sessions.
The big highlight of the Update, apart of all the gameplay improvements, is the new Base of Operations, Phantom One. It replaces the Main Menu.
Phantom one is a military base of the human resistance, and introduces their distinct art style and even some of their faction vehicles, such as the Buggy, HSTV-L Tank and Anti-Air tank.
The base has multiple voice acted characters and a much higher production value than our previous content, as such it marks a big new step for us as a team.
You now unlock new menus with the construction building. Boss kills grant Blueprints, which in turn allow unlocking new menu features, like the radio station.
You can now unlock certain upgrades which give permanent unlocks for your future runs. These elements should be obtained to play on the highest difficulties, however will not make the game easier than it was before. The strongest effects are obtained very early and then later upgrades focus more on refinement of skill, so we are not breaking balance or adding unneccessary power creep.
In response to the Machine Legion's arms race, the Asian Pan-American Defiance (APA) is constructing a supercomputer concealed near the Legion's sphere of influence along the Vietnamese coast. The construction introduces a minor questline which unlocks new gameplay elements and is now the key to accessing new android classes.
The nice thing about the quests is that they not only give you new class unlocks, but they also introduce permanent upgrades to your run, by adding new elements you can optionally use, like the alarm pole.
Discover new music at the Radio station, get daily data at the mail, check out technology stats at the tech center and more! Have a look for yourself!
Virtually every map in the game had it's cover placement checked to provide more cover and allows enemies to swarm and split up more, leading to better gameplay overall. We continue monitoring this aspect but the changes have greatly improved the game so far.
Varied maps in the mentioned environments got overhauled, especially in the Police Academy level for better gameplay and visual clarity.
Majority of the environment assets have recieved a graphics and performance upgrade, now using our new shaders, and some of them recieving a major cleanup in amount of different materials and general complexity, making the environments have more consistent quality, performance and are more maintainable.
The graphics upgrades not only make the assets look a lot better, but they also require less texture samples which means better rendering performance and the overall V-RAM requirement is noticeably reduced. The rendering performance might be felt mostly on the low end however.
We've got many details about the optimizations at the end of the patchnotes.
Classes have gotten varied improvements, however Class changes have not been a priority for this update and more class updates are to follow with the next update.
We are feeling that the baseline inaccuracy in the game is a little bit too hard-core and larger than in Synthetik 1, so we are making it a little bit more forgiving. We are keeping an eye on this however.
Riotguard has been broken in the last update once you reached the synergy perk, this has been fixed, so he will no longer be almost indestructible and in line with the prior update. Overall, all specialization abilities of Riotguard have been improved in varied ways, making his kit more diverse. We'll keep a close eye on his performance, especially on co-op and make some adjustments after the patch.
Machine Hunter has gotten the Striker drone ability as it is sort of a "pet class" and the drone does heavy armor piercing damage, making it very fitting for the play-style.
Recon has got some changes in his perks and will get more improvements with the coming update. After many complaints about the drone it has been removed for now. Machine Hunter retains the drone as optional ability. We'll see about brining back a different drone in the near future.
Breacher has seen a lot of improvements across the board, with new sounds, VFX and a lot of quality of life improvements, putting Breacher into a proper Synthetik 2 version without changing his core.
Most noticeably, the faster dash and the improved shields are a huge boost to his power.
Gunner has gotten varied quality improvements as well, and the speed increase dosn't sound very large but makes a really big difference. His specialization abilities also have seen improvements across the board, with a focus on offering Gunner a defensive choice, so make sure to try all Specialization abilities again.
The class has seen a couple of tweaks but did not get much spotlight in this update yet.
Eliminator got a new interesting gadget with the beacon of light, offering a different approach to positioning and some other tweaks.
The class has seen a couple of tweaks but did not get much spotlight in this update yet.
Commando has seen many improvements but also a nerf on the blade, making him less of a one-trick and giving him more balanced options all around. More abilities and kits are now more viable in more scenarios.
While we have a massive amount of weapons, some people felt like the early loot pools could be more diverse, so we shuffled some things around to make early loot more varied and get some little-used weapons more showcase.
The weapon menu got some more refinements such as the new recoil indicator, icons and general polishing across the board.
Weapons have not been a large focus for this update but we have some solid tweaks based on community requests. Overall weapons should be in a good state outside of some outliers.
Varied smaller tweaks and loadout changes have been done to handguns across the board.
There has been a pass on attachments with further refinements. Overall the state of attachments seems quite good outside of some outliers. With some further cleanup and plugging some holes, this should now be a really strong upgrade sandbox. Custom slot attachments will get a pass in the future also.
A good bunch of variants have been changed to make drops more consistently interesting.
Some cool new weapons coming in!
Semi-automatic handgun with stunning ammunition High damage per shot
Modified Imperial Police revolver with faster fire-rate Slow reload but powerful firepower
3-Round burst handgun with extended magazine. Good in close-quarters.
Single-shot crossbow firing large arrows Great accuracy and mobility. New Machine Hunter starter.
Experimental rifle with burst or auto firemode and light caliber Anti-material ammo – ideal against light armored targets.
Commando starter. Dual micro-SMGs with a very high fire rate Low accuracy, best for hit-and-run tactics.
Finally we had some time to improve the boss fights and do varied tweaks. Overall the Bosses should feel more polished and also more challenging.
For the damage and health scaling throughout the run, we reduced damage scaling to allow a slightly slower pace in the lategame and increased health scaling to reduce the times where enemies get killed in 0.1 seconds in the lategame. This should be a tweak in the right direction, but let us know what you think.
The lategame Chrono Squad has seen varied improvements to make it more balanced, more difficult and less punishing.
We made all sniper style lock-on units a distinct and clearly visible lock-on effect to improve on the readability of the gameplay.
The new Directives add varied new enemies to the game!
We added varied new voice lines, and especially added death voice lines for the first time.
Reinforcements coming in!
After the big item overhaul, we did some further refinement on the overall roster. Overall it appears that the items do provide the gameplay sandbox as intended, however some items required more tuning to be more desirable. Also summon items consistently overperformed. We are doing a lighter nerf first before we go onto more heavy nerfs if required.
Overall this buffs around every less-desired item and should offer a vast array of more options, so we are closing many holes and making the overall experience much better.
We’ve reviewed the networking code and optimized the send rate and bandwidth usage as well as interpolation. This improves the experience for most players especially with not optimal connections. Also new is client-side damage and killing prediction meaning when you hit somebody you will immediately see the change to the HP bar.
The backend for managing lobbies, chat and the other things has practically been rewritten to improve overall scalability and especially address situations causing out of memory issues that materialized as lobbies not starting properly.
We did a ton of improvements on the in-game menus and on the HUD all across the board and added new settings and cursor styles as well.
We improved varied elements of the hit feeling, making shots even more impactful and have better visibility at the same time.
We did a major cleanup on a lot of old particle effects, reducing a lot of complexity, while unifying the pipeline, making things more clean, polished and maintainable.
We improved the cursor and damage text and added new settings for different variations.
Enemies now have emission shaders which make them stand out more from the environment, especially in darker areas. The destroyed chunks of enemies also are now dark, making them blend into the environment and causing less distractions.
Pickups caused a lot of visual mess and confusion on the minimap since everything was littered with low-priority loot, such as dogtags, ammo powerups or similar. We added the functionality of having different durations for pickups, as such we are adjusting each pickup to have a shorter or longer duration based on what makes sense.
This should reward agressive play (the original intention between pickups dropping) and reduce bloat on the ground / minimap and reduce unneccessary backtracking. Also it will reduce the amount of missed upgradekits and ammo.
We replaced a couple tracks and added many new ones. We also added a content-ID setting to enable or disable content ID tracks, so we can again add such music to the game without hurting Youtubers.
As normal player, Enable Content ID musik in your settings.
Settings now shows a frametime graph and had some polishing in varied texts. We also added the long time awaited setting for screen effect strenght.
We did many improvements on controller support but are still not done.
Some more fixes and improvements are coming soon.
Global Chat now has multiple channel support like in a MMO game, where party and global chat can run simultaneously. We also did work on our moderation and user account backend, making moderation much easier.
We did a bunch of optimizations on the localziation. Our old fonts for asian character sets were not of the best quality so we organized some better looking fonts which fit the game much better.
We added language support for the following:
We did varied smaller optimizations and some larger optimizations.
The new HUB is also a test for our new pipelines based on modular parametric materials.
The new Base uses our newest pipelines and compared with the older tutorial level, it loads at around twice the speed. The new shaders also have around 95% reduced shader variants, which means less shader compilation and stuttering on new updates (however there are still many old ones in use, it just means that the new pipelines are much more efficient). You currently see many games plagued by shader variant compilation.
Assets being upgraded from old to new using our baked shader now only use 2+2 texture samples where they would use 6+2 prior. This reduces memory usage by around 10-30% depending on the asset and textures and should reduce shading costs noticeably on the low end. A stronger GPU might not really care about either however in the first place, and the game was never shading or VRAM bound to begin with, still its the right thing to do.
We’ve optimized the IK setup of the humanoid characters. IK is the system that in our case manages matching weapon handling animations to the actual weapons used. Meaning it makes sure that especially the left hand of the characters goes to where on the weapon the actual grip position is. In our previous system this was done in a suboptimal way leading to a lot of unnecessary CPU computation to resolve the animations.
Shadows and lights now use improved culling systems for better rendering performance and less memory usage.
During a round of testing in April we noticed consistent crashing to desktop caused by issues in the exports. The version of Unity we’ve been using since than was practically at the end of support meaning any fixes from the to prevent it would likely not have been made accessible to us anymore.
At this point we’ve made the decision to upgrade to Unity 6, the next major version and have to deal with the month of testing to find any subtle changes in the engine causing problems for the game.The upside is Unity 6 does improve a lot of pain points in rendering performance CPU side by introducing a new multithreading system that much better splits the load over many cores compared to previously using mainly a single render thread. This leads to depending on your CPU roughly 5-10% better overall frame time compared to the previous release.
A major benefit of the new version is now also improved DirectX12 support which finally makes Unity DirectX12 perform slightly better on all our machines compared to DirectX11. This comes in at another roughly 10-15% improved CPU frame time overall. Unity is improving DirectX12 performance in future release further so we expect to see more improvements in future updates past full launch of Synthetik 2.
(Shaders define how a object is rendered and which kinds of textures and surface definition an object uses and displays)
We did a major engineering effort based on all the last 8 years of experience / research and created a cutting edge shader pipeline as evolution of our previous masked shader pipeline. Our previous masked shaders were already very flexible but the new are on a whole different level in terms of optimization and quality.
The new vertex shader pipeline allows texturing an infinite amount of assets with the same materials at a high quality without texture requirements. This is good for larger assets especially.
The classic high-detail baked version uses only 1 texture per asset and requires 0 texturing work being done outside the engine, with both being truly next-gen approaches which are not really seen anywhere else yet.
We started to replace most old shaders on half of the environments and simplyfing the pipeline quite a bit. Where we had previously a 100 different shaders in the Project (some other games might have up to a 1000), we engineered smarter approaches to this problem and now we have only a handful of shaders which can be used to render about anything you will ever need. These also share many sub-graphs which make them easy to iterate.
These + the VFX master shader allow us to make about any asset and surface possible while keeping complexity very low and quality high and consistent.
Due to the simplicity of the new shaders, we have a very low amount of shader variants, which reduce shader compilation stuttering. However currently in the project are still a lot of old shaders which are still being loaded as they are not completely replaced yet.
With the unification of the shader subgraphs / nodes, we added branches for the low quality setting for many of the effects, giving us simplified shaders for low end devices. On most average GPUs this might not make a difference but on low or super low-end this will improve rendering performance.
We cleaned up a on of unneccessary materials, textures and other things which were just used once or not really needed. Together with the new shaders and more efficient pipelines, we greatly reduced the V-Ram required to run the game, but also about halved the build size.
We worked on many Unity Editor tools which helped us optimize and clean up the project.
Texture tools, audio, mesh, animation and many more. We added all sorts of validation and checking tools to track issues and resolve them.
We have a new system which tracks project dependencies, caches them to a library and allows quickly replacing all sorts of assets like textures or materials or scripts with others. This should be a engine default but unfortunately not available so we had to write it ourselves.
We sort of had to update the Mod-IO browser as it was very outdated. This means we have a new UI but this is currently unrefined and a bit rough.
We have done varied improvements on the Editor, making working more convenient and efficient.
You can now create a copy from the search field (finally) this will make working on actions or similar inside classes or weapons much faster. Instead of having to go to the actions tab and create an action and then go back to the class and add the action, you can just use the search function and now create a copy of another action instead.
Warning: Currently this copy is not displayed however until you exit one depth of the current context. So if you create something from copy, save it, then save the current context, then go back in and add it. This is not optimal but still a huge improvement over the other workflow.
In the showparticles result we added our new modular particle base. This uses custom vertex streams to create a wide range of new effects from a single material, by changing the sprites and noises from a sheet of technology based styles and colors.
There are 4 Types:
Each of these can pick between 16 Technology Colors (or custom) and 16 Technology Distortion styles, to create new effects.
You can also have control over different settings such as emission over time, emission over distance, gravity, turbulence and sizes. While this is not the same as making particle effects in Unity editor, it does allow to create a wide range of things for general usages. The icons can also show on auras or world space indicators above heads or feet as example.
There is still content coming in form of the Engineer and a large new Environment.
We are planning small and short updates with polish and fixes as we go towards launch.
U15 will also be followed up with hotfixes as needed.
We are very sorry that Update 15 took this long to complete.
In Synthetik 1 we rarely refactored game systems and as such at the end of the project the game became unmaintainable in combination with the very unstable engine. In Synthetik 2 we did a lot of things right but also had a lot to learn and started varied things on the wrong foot.
We now took the chance and massively refactored and upgraded many elements of the game and set-up our pipelines to be extremely efficient and easy to maintain so this won't happen again.
Before we knew it, we dissassembled the car into 1000 parts with everyone working on different pieces.
We added many new systems for U15 in addition to reworking old things such as quests, outgame rewards, lobby features, chat channels and much much more. Since many things were so tied together and we spend a lot of time on core gameplay, the base and networking simultaneously, it was not really possible to split the update in multiple parts.
It is definitely our fault that we did not plan this well enough and communicated it poorly, we will learn from this and handle things better in the future for sure, we hope you understand.
