Big Changes

Changes to Normal Difficulty/Addition of Intense Mode

We’ve updated the default difficulty mode (aka Normal mode) to be significantly less punishing. We’ve slightly reduced the maximum intensity level that the Director will produce, reduced the liklihood of seeing duplicates of any specials, and made it less likely that the Director will spawn Goopers and Grabbers at the same time. In our playtests, the overall effect is that the game still feels intense and challenging, while dramatically decreasing the chance of a pair of specials wiping the team.

We’ve also added an Intense option for players who have a full team of players. Once you have four people in your party, the party leader can flip the Intense Mode toggle on to play with the same Director tuning that we had from launch through Update 2.2.

We’re going to continue working on difficulty for the foreseeable future, so we’d love your feedback on this update in particular, either on the Discord or through our Bug Report form.

Communication Wheel - First Pass

Sometimes marking an object in the world just doesn’t let your teammates know how urgently you need their attention. Press and hold your ping button to open the communication wheel and select a message to better communicate with your fellow survivors using both an in-game marker and your character’s voice.

We’ve selected 8 default options that players will give you the ability to call for help, get other players to follow you or wait, or simply apologize for a mistake. Additionally, there are another 13 voice lines you can swap out in the Settings menu to suit your unique communication style.

And if you like using our default context-sensitive ping option, fear not, it’s still there. You can still spam that Ammo Charger to your heart’s content. After all, sometimes the best way to help your team is to let them know that there’s a “Charger her… Ammo Charger… Charger Here. Got a Charger here!” when you’re just that excited about refilling your weapons.

Game Instructor Revamp Kickoff

We’ve significantly overhauled the Game Instructor system, which is designed to help players better understand the ins and outs of The Anacrusis. The first pass addresses Things Players Can Do In The Airlock, but we’ll add more in subsequent patches. This also is a work-in-progress, so please let us know what you like and don’t like, as well as the bits of the game that you feel we could explain better.

Friendly Fire

Friendly fire is now disabled for all players. You will still be able to kill bots though, in case they get stuck in navigating the level or you just get tired of Lance’s nonsense. (We actually turned this off yesterday, if you happened to notice.)

Controller Bindings/Stick Sensitivity

We’ve done a significant rework of the controller sensitivity settings and button configuration based on feedback from the community and several weeks of internal testing. Please let us know how movement and aiming on the controller feels. We’ve also reset the default button configuration to one that we feel works better for the game. Unfortunately, the nature of the changes required that we reset your bindings and sensitivity settings. Sorry for the hassle, but we’re pretty confident that the new settings will feel good for the vast majority of people. As always, feedback is wanted so let us know if you make changes!

Episode 1 Outro Cinematic

When you complete Episode 1, you’ll notice that we’ve created a new outro cinematic, showing our heroes escaping the Bridge and teleporting back to The Anacrusis. Your characters should show up on the outro screen wearing the costumes you chose for them in your loadout screen, which we think is pretty freaking cool.

Smaller Changes

• Microsoft Store / Game Pass for PC version defaults to DirectX 11, which improves perf and reliability for that version of the game.
• You can now leave AFK mode by pressing the Fire key.
• When a player enters AFK mode automatically, they are notified with an on-screen message.
• In safe zones, such as an airlock, or when the game is idling before an event, players will take much longer to be automatically set to AFK.
• [Maybe sell this in a less direct way] Reduced corpse count on console for better performance.
• Added an animation that better telegraphs the gooper attack. Additionally, we’ve made the Gooper’s mouth parts animate in a more believable fashion.
• New (temporary) fire and reload animations for the Plasma Rifle
• Tuned the alien death animations to be have more weight and be more responsive to gunfire.
• Added new visual effects for all forms of healing.
• The Gooper has gotten a new attack animation to both sell the attack better and give players more time to react to its attack.
• Infinity Pass Quests should now consistently show the next quest, even when there are communications hiccups from the back end.
• People who use mice set to very low or very high DPI settings will find that the extremes of the mouse sensitivity setting to work better for them.
• Renamed "White" skins to "Amber" to better reflect their actual appearance as well as the color of their energy.

Bugs Fixed

• Matter compiler re-rolls should work again for all affected parties. Apologies for the temporary loss of agency.
• [Was this in the last update?] Fixed cases where a player couldn’t pick up items that had moved around.
• Fixed holes in the world in multiple episodes and maps.
• Fixed a variety of player bot navigation errors.
• Fixed several holes in Episode 1: Terminal that could yeet players into space.
• Fixed a variety of enemy AI mantling and navigation errors.
• Fixed an audio bug that clipped audio at the end of the level loading period.
• We’ve fixed some rare instances where loadout settings wouldn’t save between sessions.
• The Don’t Stop Now emote plays (and stops) properly when triggered.
• Push-to-talk now works properly when bound to a gamepad or mouse button, in addition to the keyboard buttons.
• Fixed several preview images in loadouts and the Season Pass page.
• We’ve added a prospective fix for the bug that prevents you from equipping cosmetics you unlocked in the previous game.

New Bugs Created

• Joining games in progress causes a brief moment of lag. We’re aware of the problem and are working to fix it either in Update 4 or an Update 3.1 Hotfix.
• The countdown voice line isn’t currently hooked up, so it won’t play at this time. We’ll fix this in the next update.