Hello SUPERVIVERs!

Today we’re covering upcoming iterations to the Breach map, a brief follow-up on our resident dunkers, and some thoughts on item balance. Onto it!

Continents

For our 1.0 launch, we made some big shifts to the Breach - spreading out landmasses, adding more abyss and wind tunnels, and creating Skysharks as a new form of long-distance traversal. Our goal with these changes was to give the map more variety - so fighting in different zones gives you unique combat situations to react to. Something we’ve been hearing more in the last few weeks is that several areas of the new map are still feeling pretty “samey”. We’re looking to make some adjustments to address this feedback.

To make sure we’re improving the right areas, we connected with some of our veteran players, folks who have put hundreds of hours into SUPERVIVE. Their notes helped us narrow in on specific spots on the map that could benefit the most from an additional level design pass.

One of the biggest points we heard was that the map feels too chopped up, with too many small islands breaking up the flow of play. This often caused endgames to collapse into the same few tight spots, with the abyss forcing everyone together. Another theme was that abyss fights themselves, though more plentiful, felt one-note. We’re tackling that by reintroducing more variety in abyss spaces, with a mix of tighter crossings and wider gaps to keep combat and movement interesting throughout the map.

A few example areas we’re updating next patch:

• Adding an additional mid-sized island in the large abyss between Ion Acres and Veingrove

  • There was a single island here previously, but was feeling more like an outpost for a single team to hold rather than a contestable space. We hope a second island may make this more skirmishable. 

• Adding a wind ring to help north/south access into Kobayashi’s

• Extending Endshrine landmass north to avoid large gap of abyss

• Connecting Northern and Eastern landmasses with bridges to give an alternate traversal path between these sections

• Adding dock elements below the train tracks south of Prisma Falls, including grind rails and spike pillars

  • This replaces the large empty space with a wider combat playground that isn’t just the train tracks themselves
    

There are quite a few changes in this style in 1.03. Take a look next week and let us know if there are any areas you feel like we’ve missed!

Item Balance

We’ve made some balance changes to Armory items over the last couple patches, and we have some more of these in 1.03. This patch we’re focused on a few wider goals.

1. Making healing/utility item options more appealing

While there’s nothing wrong with players gravitating their builds towards aggression, when we’re seeing Protectors and Controllers choosing offensive items en masse, it’s an indicator that we need to make sure the defensive options we have are hitting the mark. We’re going to do a pass on our more defensive Relics and Grips to make sure they’re compelling alternatives to going face every game.

2. Active Item Consistency

After looking at the data around active items, it’s clear that some are too strong, or that the active effect is available too frequently. We’ll be looking to bring these options more in line with the median, in some cases with cooldown increases, or changes to their outputs. This also means looking at the actives which are feeling neglected or unpopular, and seeing if it’s a matter of the cooldown being too long, or if the effect itself isn’t sticking to players. We’re not looking to make popular items unviable, more to reduce the gap between item tiers to let players express different playstyles without feeling like they’re forced into a single competitive build. 

Unrelated to balance specifically, but we’re also shipping some VFX updates to Paladin’s Primer and Wildfire Drive to make their effects and ranges more clear. Wanted to share them because they look cool :3

Dunking Hunters

Last patch we shipped a new set of combat changes around dunking abilities. We’ve been keeping an eye on Hunters affected by these adjustments to make sure we’re not seeing any major impacts to their strength or play patterns. At the moment, we’re planning on giving Kingpin some QoL buffs, and are looking into adjusting Emergency Platform more towards creating holdable terrain in the abyss rather than just existing as “anti-dunking” tech.

And though we probably won’t be able to ship the fixes until a later patch, we’re also cataloguing the most frequently player-reported bugs and looking to do another focused sprint to burn that list down. Appreciate everyone who documents these incidents in discord, on our player support website, or social media. Especially those of you who provide video. You’re the real heroes. 

See you for 1.03 next week!

~ the ViV team