We've upgraded our engine version to Unity 2021 to take advantage of the features included to increase the performance of the game for our players! Additionally, to celebrate this we've put the game on sale and have introduced a new battle pass for players to unlock new skins we're introducing during this event! There are also a few other improvements to the game included.

Assassin Battle Pass:

• Free, limited-time battle pass to accompany the update and game sale!
  
• Upon completion of the first match, you automatically are awarded with a matching shirt and pants set.
  
• Smaller than the seasonal updates, with less time commitment required to finish the pass.
  
• New UI for encouraging players to activate new battlepasses, also includes a description and end date.
  
• Battle pass now extends a few days beyond the sale to allow players who buy towards the end of the sale to still be able to complete it.
  

Unity 2021 Engine Upgrade:

• Upgrade to the latest of the Unity engine, taking advantage of myriad features in order to increase game performance.
  
• Overall expect a 10-20% performance increase across the board.
  
• Frame drops, and lowest frame rates overall improved to bring a better, more stable frame rate.
  
• Tileset specific changes to address specific areas where framerates would be much lower than others.
  
• We are still working on bringing some of our post-processing effects back up to where they were before the engine upgrade, some things like fog, lighting and smoke may not be exactly as you remember them.
  

From Creative Director Baard:

This performance update has been the primary effort of our engineering team since the release of character customization/progression in October. Upgrading to a new Unity version is a substantial effort. Consider that Escape From Tarkov, another Unity game, has only just now upgraded to Unity 2019. As of today, we're on Unity 2021, and what that has brought is a substantial improvement to the lowest framerate seen on player's machines.

It is for the above reason that for far too long updates to the game featured only new cosmetics. The last thing we want to do with this Early Access game is reduce it to a hat-o-thon. We'll do a better job of pacing out our updates to ensure meaningful changes to the game are made in a timely manner.

While we're still a long way from a rock-solid 140+ framerate we'll one day achieve, raising the lowest framerate has a profound effect on the feel of the game. Our intention was to couple this performance update with a meta-changing design iteration of the game, but simply put: we didn't want to hold out on you. You guys deserve to have this framerate improvement as soon as possible. For that reason changes to weapon handling were held back until Cadet feedback on the feature could be wholeheartedly addressed.

We'll have more to share on the meta-changing update we have planned subsequent to this one soon.

As a final note: there will be bugs--particularly when it comes to visuals. Unity upgrades always yield unexpected surprises. Please help us find these issues so we can expediently address them in the #bug-reports channel on discord. (Find the discord link in game on the home screen!)

Improvements:

• (WIP) Crouch animation state now dramatically lower to match 1st person expectation and to make crouching behind objects less likely to leave your head sticking up
  
• Kill alert popups now can show multiple successive kills in a row
  
• Bank vents now have a less subtle appearance, showing light coming through the vent to help guide attackers
  
• The client and the backend now have a working re-connection flow that should take place for most cases where clients would disconnect when on the main menu. We are working on improving this further to make it more seamless, but for most cases it should at least automatically reconnect without requiring a game restart.
  
• User config now saves into two separate files, and no longer syncs machine specific data to the cloud (Resolution/volume/microphone) to make cloud saving more useful. This imports your old config before saving a new version in %appdata%/Giant Enemy Crab/Due Process
  
• Clarified names and descriptions of settings for "Press key to aim brace" and "Inverse Aim Brace" in the options menu
  
• Added ding (???)
  

Bug Fixes:

• Shotgun rack bug fix
  
• Fire bells will no longer bug out and play the entire round if you detonate a second charge after the fire bell stops
  
• Fixed issue where clients would just show "STEAM ERROR" instead of the correct error message when disconnected from the backend
  
• Fix error preventing client from entering the disconnection screen when they actually disconnect from the backend
  
• Fixed issue where clients would sometimes be allowed to re-join games they were already removed from (6v5 bug)
  
• Fixed issue where the object changing state or highlighting multiple objects in succession would cause extraneous conflicting actions to show up
  
• Fixed issue on open lockable doors where both the open text (as [LOCKED]) and the CLOSE text will be in the list if the door is open
  
• Changed behavior for unavailable interactions to show failure reason instead of success text.
  
• Changed text on a lot of doors. Some doors have attacker specific descriptions.
  
• Fixed bug with customization UI showing objects from other tabs
  
• Various customization UX improvements, "pass completed" is no longer shown every game after achieving it
  
• Fixed various backend errors