NEON NIGHTS UPDATE
Agents, it’s finally time to lift the curtain on what’s coming for season 2. We’ve been hard at work to get you this [U]Major[/U] content drop featuring (but not limited to):

• A new spy
  
• A new catalog
  
• A long list of tweaks, updates and reworks gathered from player feedback
  
  We are extremely excited to see you dive into this new content and are eternally grateful for your continued support as we work on expanding Deceive Inc.
  
  Now let’s get to it, shall we?
  

Major Additions
New Agent: Sasori the Venomous Assassin


Once Hans’ loyal henchman and renowned international assassin, Sasori, had a crisis of conscience leading him to retire from his villainous ways to open a quaint little restaurant in Osaka. After a long period of soul searching he is finally back on the field with a new perspective on life and a renewed sense of purpose.

Sasori is an all-new tracker agent that excels at hit and run attacks to single out and finish targets with flair. He brings our first first hybrid range/melee weapon in the form of thrown projectiles and a blade, allowing him to harass targets from afar and close in for a swift elimination.


New Status Effect: Poisoned


A master of poisons, Sasori crafted a new non-lethal recipe that prevents his rivals from healing and spending intel for the duration. This means that even picking up a spy cache while poisoned will not heal you at all! In conjunction with his passives giving him different advantages against poisoned foes, he is a true menace for anyone careless enough to end up on the wrong side of his blades.

We are thrilled to welcome Sasori into Deceive Inc.’s roster and we hope you enjoy discovering his intoxicating toolkit.



Catalog 2: Neon Nights
This season, we jump into a future of corporate espionage, back-handed deals and treacherous board meetings. Neon Nights is here with [U]50 levels of cyberpunk inspired unlockables to obtain[/U]. We adjusted reward content a bit this time around to have more high value items overall. We hope you like the new styles you’ll be able to rock on the field!

Purchasing the premium catalog will give you instant access to our newest agent and exclusive rewards. [U]As a reminder, players can still buy the new agent with Credits earned by simply playing[/U].




Reactive Ink
Neon Nights introduces our first reactive ink with the Random Access Memories reward in the catalog. This reactive ink will change entirely when in or out of cover to fit the current situation.



About Misery Empire
For users that did not purchase Misery Empire, Neon Night will now become the current season to spend catalog tokens on. Do not worry though: [U]Misery Empire will always stay in the season menu. You can go back and purchase it at any time if you decide you need some noir in your life down the lin[/U]e. Like we discussed at launch, purchased catalogs NEVER expire.

General Changes

Heat Changes
Heat is evolving once again from feedback we’ve been gathering around the release of High Alert. While the overall sentiment seems to be trending much closer to a good place for heat, the majority of feedback is still showing you want a bit more consequences. With this update, we are bringing some spicy changes to how you generate heat!

• Downing a civilian, staff, or technician will now give a full heat level
  
• Downing the VIP will now give 3 Heat levels
  
• Guards will remain the same at about half a heat level per guard
  
• The idea with these changes is pretty simple: We want to give value to go back to lower level cover and not encourage staying as a guard the entire match. Wrongly guessing will now carry bigger immediate consequences that will encourage players to better analyze situations.
  

For the VIP, we want to give more meaning to coming across them and give them a place as a disguise option. With this change, shooting any VIP on sight will carry huge potential ramifications that could lead to your immediate defeat. Think wisely.

In addition to these changes, we are adding a buffer of time to prevent situations where you could hit multiple NPCs at the same time with a single shot leading to a huge amount of heat generated. This should help keep things clearer from a player perspective.

We’ll monitor how this affects the game in the days following the release of the update to bring adjustments as needed.

As always, your feedback is very important. We’d love to hear what you think about these newest changes. You can provide your feedback directly at: https://forums.tripwireinteractive.com/index.php?forums/deceive-inc.2333651/

Or

discord.gg/deceiveinc


Spawn Economy Rebalance
For this season, we’ve spent some time rebalancing ressources spawning in a few key ways with a single unified goal in mind: Slowing down overall pace of matches and giving some reasons to look around the vault before going to the objective.

These changes touch two major components:

Keycard Spawns Changes

• Purple keycards will no longer spawn outside of purple rooms. This will prevent early game loots that would dramatically speed up a match.
  
• A small amount of keycards can now spawn inside the vault. This will give some chance for players that did not have much luck in the first phase to scrape back an advantage during the infiltration phase.
  
• The Golden Keycard will now spawn inside the vault. This will prevent players from having a full keycard deck before the vault is opened.
  

Ammo Spawn Changes

• Reduced overall pool of ammo spawn in all maps.
  
• Reduced chance for ammo to spawn in public areas.
  

The reduction in ammo pools is not massive, but we feel it is currently too easy to stay full of ammo without any specific efforts in looting. This should give ammo dispensers a more interesting role in how you spend your intel. We hope making the ammo economy tighter will result in a more interesting play experience overall.

A final new addition on this topic is the addition of more “fixed” food locations on maps. You will find more snacks around kitchens, restaurants and places where you would expect to be able to eat. This should help players running nutritional supplements to have more surefire ways to get a snack.


Purple Chest Tweaks
In season 1, we introduced the purple chest spawns in rooms without a vault terminal. While the effect this had on the game was overall very beneficial, a side effect of it was that now the purple powerup was actually rarer than the gold during the opening phase of a game. We are now spawning two purple chests in non-vault terminal rooms to compensate for this.

This also means that arriving second in one of those rooms in a solo match will still carry a reward instead of leaving you empty handed. We hope this change will allow a more interesting use of field upgrade builds overall.

Account Max Level Increase
Max Account level is getting raised up to level 400 with the release of season 2. An all-new progression ink has been added for players that will reach this new milestone: The Malachite ink!

Updated XP Values
We’ve upped the values of XP sources all around for a smoother progression with more rewards from the different lootables and interaction with in-game objectives. We’ll keep watching the progression rate and player feedback to make this aspect of the game more pleasant for all types of players.

Game Performance Optimizations
Work continues to improve performance and with it comes a long list of optimizations. [U]We expect these new tweaks to have the biggest impact on medium and high graphic settings[/U]. It’s our hope that they will allow more people to play at medium instead of low for example to get a similar result.

We will keep monitoring how performance evolves on the wide variety of hardware that the community is using to continue making further improvements.

New graphical options and automatic hardware detection

We’ve added new functionality to better choose starting settings for players getting into the game and exposed more granular graphics settings for you to tweak at your leisure.








We will continue our commitment to give you more control over the look and performance of the game in future patches.

Agent Select Menu Rework
One recurring piece of community feedback we’ve received ever since the alpha days was the desire to get more precise information about the nitty gritty details of all elements of a build. This update is another major step in that direction.

We’ve reworked the weapon tooltips in the agent select menu to showcase every single stat they have in a completely transparent way. This showcase is directly fetched from weapon stats, that means that live updates to balancing will be directly shown in this menu without a client update.







We want to give this transparency treatment to more elements of the game as we continue updating it, so stay tuned for more developments on that front.


Inks Menu Rework
In the continuous theme of making menus better, we’ve reworked the ink menu both from a UI standpoint to better showcase the weapon and from a lighting standpoint to give a more accurate representation of how inks look in game.









Additional Field Upgrade Decks
We’ve doubled the amount of field upgrade decks you can customize to give you better control on the finer details of your builds.









Enhanced Controller Settings
Adding controller settings has been a major talking point for our console players (and those who play with a controller on PC) and with this update, we are increasing the amount of tweaks you’ll be able to do to better tailor your experience.

You will find new settings for disabling controller vibrations, aim-assist and tweaking the finer details of the “quick-turn” mechanic that triggers when holding your joystick completely to speed up turns when holding your joystick in a direction.








Please keep the feedback coming on what you would like to see in terms of future controller features and we will be continuing our work to expand the options over time.

Melee Shot Delay
We’ve received quite a bit of feedback on some deadly combinations of high damage weapons with a charged melee. For example, a charged melee with a king shot from an ace could be devastating on the receiving party without much chance to counterplay.

In this update, we now have a stat that allows us to tweak the delay before firing after a melee on a per-weapon basis. We have not yet set different values per weapon in this update as it’s a balancing change that requires a lot of consideration across the board, but you can expect notes on this melee shot delay to appear in balancing patches this season.


Reduced Cover Breadcrumbs Duration
We want players to feel confident they can change cover more often to take full advantage of the heat changes in public areas. One part of the risk of changing cover is the duration for which the breadcrumbs left behind when changing cover stay. We have reduced this duration to keep the danger of swapping cover when spies are in the vicinity, but making it less of a long term clue that a spy was here.

Fragrant Shore Tweaks
We’ve updated Fragrant Shore to prevent some free room skips in green rooms around the level. This made the bounce mat a bit too good of a pick. Coupled with keycard changes, this should slow down matches significantly.

Having these green room skips also led to the side-effect of having spots in the map with extremely high concentration of combat because multiple players would head to the same skip location. This was particularly true with the green room at the ground floor of the hotel.

New credits cosmetics
In addition to all the skins and intro poses that a new agent brings to the table, we are adding more inks to the credits offering players can buy or gain in a loot briefcase. We hope you enjoy them!

Elite Guards Presence
The amount of Elite Guards present before the vault has been reduced from 6 to 5 to make them slightly rare to encounter and make disguising as them all the time a bit riskier.

It’s not a massive change, but we think it will affect balancing in a favorable way.

Intel XeSS Update
Updated Intel XeSS to the latest version.

A note on the Vault terminal Alarm
The season 2 preview mentioned removing the vault terminal alarm that was added in season 1 to increase the uncertainty players will feel when in a purple room with elite guards or the VIP.

While we still believe that adding uncertainty to these rooms is a desirable goal, we don’t think the risks of removing the vault terminal alarm and enabling stronger camping is worth it. We will continue to revisit this goal to find a solution that gives the result we want, without the amount of risk this change brought.

We’ll keep you updated on our next move on this subject in future patches.

Agents Balance
In season 2, we are focusing our efforts around two main goals: Raising agents lagging behind in terms of power and lowering the power level of top performing outliers. In this case, the top performing agent is Larcin.

As such, some agents might get extremely minimal or no tweaks at all while others get an extensive list of changes. This is simply because agents close to the top or right in the middle are left lightly touched as we adjust the rest of the cast around them. We feel this is the best way to reach a more balanced playing field and make better targeted adjustments as the season goes on.

As always, we will monitor how these changes affect the meta and the standing of the cast as we plan our next adjustments during the season.

General Agent Balance:

Melee

Slight adjustment to the time it takes to charge a full powered melee to make it a bit more of a commitment.

• Fully charged mele time: 0.65 Second => 0.8 Second
  

Ace
With the introduction of our newest tracker, Sasori, we feel Ace needed a buff to her own tracking ability. We are giving her base expertise a fully fledged trace status effect, UI indicator and distance included, to really help her hone in on her target. We hope this makes it a more appealing pick, especially in teams where it’s shared with your entire crew.

Weapons

Base: Queen of Diamond

• Fire rate .7 => .8 Bullets per Second
  

Mod 2: King of Diamond

• Animation adjustment to better fit reload speed.
  

Expertise
Base: Queen’s Gaze

• The tracking effect is now a full-fledged Trace with a precise indicator on the target.
  

Cavalière

While we are making a single change to Cavalière, it would be wise not to underestimate its potency. We are lowering the time it takes for Cavalière to fully charge her special melee attack. Coupled with the fact that the entire cast has had their charged melee time raised slightly, this makes Cavalière uniquely positioned to capitalize on her passive’s strength more often.

Passive
All Passives:

• Charge time for Cav full charged melee: 1 Second => .8 Second
  

Chavez
After the nerfs we gave Chavez in the last few patches, he seems to have settled in a healthier spot as a strong pick, but not an outlier. In this update we are mostly focused on giving a more distinct use case to the Sentinel VS the Vigilante by making the Vigilante a full fast-firing weapon archetype and balancing the sentinel around its medium fire power.

We are also making a tweak to the “Tough as Nails” passive to make it a more viable choice in a very competitive passive ability landscape.
Weapons
Base: Sentinel

• Reload Time 2.4s => 2.5s
  
• Crit Damage Multiplier 2 X =>1.75X
  

Mod 1: Vigilante

• Reload Time 1.8s => 1.65s
  
• Fire rate 1.8 => 2.3 Bullets per Second
  
• Damage 20 => 18
  
• Crit Damage Multiplier 1.75 X =>1.5X
  
• Limb Damage Modifier .75X =>.9X
  

Passive
Mod 1: Tough as Nails

• Overheal decay speed is now half as fast as before to give more opportunities to leverage it.
  
• Health numbers won’t aggressively tick anymore like you are taking damage when overheal decays.
  

Hans
Hans is getting some significant adjustments this update. Spray patterns for his hipfire have been revisited to make them more efficient in close quarter fighting. More importantly, both of his “wave” based passive are getting the added benefit of a slow to cause some friction that will keep enemies in Hans’ preferred range if he can get the drop on them. We hope these buffs will keep Hans on his upward trajectory!

Weapons
All Weapons:

• Tweaks to spray patterns on all weapons to make close range shots more reliable.
  

Base: Hook

• Fire rate 1.25 => 1.4 Shots Per Second
  

Passive
Base: Dreadful Presence

• Spies caught inside the wave originating from Hans will be slowed for 2 seconds.
  

Mod 1: Fear Projection

• Spies caught inside the wave originating from a rival spy will be slowed for 4.5 seconds.
  

*Known issue*
These changes are currently not described in Hans’s agent select screen since they came in late. The written details will be added in game in a future patch.

Larcin
Larcin has been the top performing agent and the highest pick rate for a little while now. While we don’t want to lose what makes him unique and interesting, it’s clear that his options are too potent currently compared to the rest of the cast.

Our goal with this update is to tone Larcin’s oppressiveness down, give a better use case to his second expertise (outside of the exploit he had with it) and make sure he has to play better to fully make use of his very powerful expertise options.

Weapons
Base: Silence

• Fire rate 6 => 5.5 Bullet Per Second
  
• Reload time 1s => 1.15s
  

Mod 1: Cadence

• Magazine size reduced 18 => 14 bullets
  
• Ammo per box and overall pool adjusted with new mag size
  
• Fire rate 10 => 9 Bullet Per Second
  
• Reload time 1.1 => 1.25 Second
  

Mod 2: Violence

• Reload time 1.2s => 1.25s
  

Expertise
Base: Au Revoir

• Duration reduced 7s => 6s
  
• Cooldown extended 60s => 75s
  
• Decreased expertise refund value when canceled
  
• Delay before immaterial kicks after use .2s => .25s
  

Mod 1: Grande Finale
We’ve made some changes to Grand Finale to enable more interesting team play with it, but also address the cheesy strategy of peeking and shooting instantly without any reaction time on the receiving end. We think this new iteration will be more fair, but also more interesting for Larcin and his team.

• Larcin and his allies can now shoot at any time inside.
  
• Shooting immediately breaks the immaterial effect
  
• A delay of 1.5 seconds without shooting is necessary to go immaterial again.
  
• Height has been raised to prevent jumping from the top, even in stairs.
  
• Cooldown extended 60s => 75s
  
• Delay before zone drops in after press .4s => .25s
  

Mod 2: Tour du Chapeau

• Duration reduced 8s => 6s
  
• Cooldown extended 60s => 75s
  
• Decreased expertise refund value when canceled
  
• Delay before immaterial kicks after use .2s => .25s
  

Passive
Mod 2: Pickpocket

• Adjusted heat per wrong guesses to be higher to fit the new heat (still not a full heat level in one go)
  
• VIP gives more heat when pickpocketed to make them a bigger consideration.
  

Madame Xiu
We are making some adjustments to Madame Xiu’s weapon this update to try and make a better case as to why you should use each of her weapons options. The Longshen has been the dominant weapon in her arsenal recently so we are making a few tweaks to it’s damage output and overall feel while giving a overhaul to the Xuanwu to give more of a “light machine gun” feel with a more present rev up time.

Weapons

Mod 1: Longshen

• Damage 12 => 10 per bolt (3 per burst)
  
• Refire delay after burst .55s => .45s
  

Mod 2: Xuanwu

• Starting fire rate 4 => 3 bolts per second.
  
• Rev up time 1s => 2s
  
• Fully Rev up fire rate 8 => 8.1 bolts per second.
  

Red
Lovebite has been the least performant tool in Red’s arsenal and with this update we are giving it a bit of…love. While it breaks our heart to remove the heart-shaped spray pattern, it did limit us quite a bit on the balancing side. We believe that these tweaks will make Red’s shotgun a far more enticing option for close quarter enjoyers.

Weapons
Mod 2: Lovebite

• Spray tweaks on both hipfire and ADS for a more reliable experience.
  
• Fire rate .95 => .1.15 Shots per second
  

Squire
After a pretty extensive list of changes in the high alert update we are leaving Squire mostly untouched for this one. The reason is quite simple: While he’s now closer to the rest of the cast in terms of analytics, he’s still a very strong pick with a big presence. We will continue monitoring Squire’s trajectory with all the changes to the rest of the cast, but for now, our boy gets a rest.

Passive
Mod 1: Sixth Sense

• Now applies a real trace, with distance indicator and expected behavior.
  

Yu-Mi
We are bringing more adjustments to Yu-Mi in a continuous effort to make her more competitive. We revisited charge times after launch and after further considerations and overall performance analysis, we feel these should be brought back down to make charge shots more accessible. We are also bringing a highly requested change to the medi field and giving back a bit more gadget cooldown reduction on her base passive to lean more into the “gadgeteer” aspect of her playstyle.

Weapons
Base: Tactical Slingshot

• Charge time: 1.2s => 1s
  
• Boosted Charged projectile speed to facilitate landing far shots.
  

Mod 1: Experimental SplitShot

• Charge time: 1.2s => 1s
  

Mod 2: Heavy Longshot

• Charge time: 1.5s => 1.3s
  
• Boosted Charged projectile speed to facilitate landing far shots.
  

Expertise
Mod 1: Medi Field

• The bubble now only heals Yu-mi and her allies. No more stealing heals!
  
• Reduction to the time healing stops when receiving damage.
  

Passive
Base: Quick Fix

• Gadget Cooldown Reduction 50% => 65%
  

Gadgets Balance

We have some new functions and mechanical changes for some of the gadget roster in this update.

Recon Drone
The drone will now be able to open doors you have previously unlocked or have a keycard for. This added functionality makes it a far more potent recon tool to look around the map for rivals or vault terminals.

• The drone can now open unlocked doors or doors you have keycards for.
  

Hacktrap
The hacktrap is now much more reliably useful by triggering on security doors even if the victim uses a keycard to enter. This added reliability means we have to lower the time the trace lasts a bit to make it more of a temporary alarm rather than a long form trace that makes escape very difficult. We hope these changes make the hacktrap a more popular choice for tracking loadouts and keeping tabs on other spies.

• Hacktrap users now gain 3 intel everytime someone triggers a trap.
  
• Hacktrap now triggers when a keycard is used to open a trapped door.
  
• Lowered Trace time 20s => 12s
  

Holo-Mimic
The mimic has played a big role in the body camping meta in teams. With this update, we are fixing the possibility of pushing bodies around with it.

• Can no longer push downed spies' bodies around.
  

Shield-Brella

We’ve been talking for a while about the frustrating nature of the deployed shield-brella. There are multiple factors that we believe are core to the problem.

The crux of the issue is that the deployed version of the shield is always the best option for a shield user, even in close range, because it enables them to juke around the shield to land shots. With this update, the deployed version of the shield now has a very visible weak point at its base. Any shot, no matter the damage, to the weak point will break the deployed shield instantly. The goal with this is to have a quick response in close quarters to negate the shield easily, while keeping it a good option in longer range fights where the weak point is hard to hit.

The second part is giving a better use case to the in-hand version of the shield. To do this, we are giving the portable version a bit more HP to make it a good option to disengage while moving away or take a few hits as you reposition.

We’ll watch how effectively the weak point helps the player to deal with the shield and will be able to tweak its different aspects further as needed.

• Deployed form now has a visible weak point, leading to instant destruction when shot.
  
• In-hand version now has 75 health instead of 50.
  

Field Upgrades Balance

Field Agent Kit:
We are making some adjustments to the field agent kit. With these changes, we are keeping the gold version to be quite playstyle defining, but nerfing slightly other versions that had a bit too much of an impact, especially on high cooldown characters.

• Gray 20 => 15
  
• Green 25 => 20
  
• Blue 30 => 25
  
• Purple 40 => 35
  

Nutritional Supplement:
In addition to more “fixed” food location in maps overall, we are buffing food items a bit to give nutritional supplement a bit more use cases. We also buffed slightly the base amount that food gives and scaled the bonuses accordingly.

• Base food healing amount 8 => 10
  
• Gray 12 => 15
  
• Green 14 => 18
  
• Blue 16 => 20
  
• Purple 20 => 25
  
• Gold 28 => 30
  

Bug Fixes

General

• Fixed an issue where friends list would appear empty.
  
• Fixed an issue where zooming into loot from a lootcase makes the player stuck on this screen with no way out.
  
• Fixed an issue where status effects visual feedback could be improperly spawned based on distance from world origin.
  
• Fixed an issue where controller settings were not being saved after making changes.
  
• Fixed an issue where heat effects would stay stuck if using a mimic.
  
• Fixed an issue where the mission report would not show up if clicked while spectating.
  
• Fixed an issue where some custom weapon skins would not appear in the lobby line-up.
  
• Fixed an issue where bringing up navmode while meleeing can cause the player to not take out their weapon, rendering them unable to fire.
  
• Adjusted reload timing/animations for some weapons where timing was off rendering players unable to fire.
  
• Fixed an issue where shooting a tracking dart at a target while the drone is flying will do nothing.
  
• Fixed an issue where “call for help” was present in solo matches.
  

PlayStation 5

• Fixed an issue where there was no vibration on the PS5 controller.
  

Maps

All

• Fixed multiple FPS / Performance issues
  

Hard Sell

• Fixed LOD issues in some hardsell rooms that led to assets disappearing at short distance.
  

Silver Reef

• Fixed an issue where four vault terminals were present in very rare conditions.
  

Fragrant Shore

• Fixed an issue where keycards would spawn in areas that cannot be picked up.
  
• Fixed an issue where players were able to get on top of the Capitol.
  
• Fixed an issue where super guards would get stuck in certain areas.
  

Diamond Spire

• Fixed an issue where keycards that spawned in the helipad area would be invisible.
  

Agents

Chavez

• Fixed an issue where unshakable Fortress effect stacks when placed on stairs and hugging the wall.
  
• Fixed an issue where his gray health wasn’t always visible.
  

Madame Xiu

• Fixed an issue where waiting until the last moment of the second cast of Python's Ruse will cause the player to be unable to use any weapons or gadgets until they use the ability again.
  

Cavalière

• Fixed an issue where sometimes her zone can be seen (and heard) by her rivals.
  
• Fixed an issue with Tournament Arc - where eyes do not fade out with rest of body when going near her.
  

Larcin

• Fixed an issue where going invisible while recovering heat will cause the heat to visually persist on-screen.
  
• Fixed an issue where his thrown/reloaded weapon can be heard from far away.
  

Yu-Mi

• Fixed an issue where the medi-field bubble would have much faster healing than intended when entering and leaving it at a fast pace.