Update 22 Progress Report

This newsletter is taking more dev time than the update, Newyears was almost a month ago

Welcome to the new year, Raiders!
We've been working hard ever since Update 21 to make the next update, we're still getting the hang of scoping updates out so this one ended up being waaaay too much work for us to push in a reasonable time- BUT we wanted to keep everyone updated on what we've got so far since we've been very silent for some time and we have a few new players who may be unaware that development is still actually going on RAID.

So no more waiting, we have a wall of text for you to enjoy!


The new skills are really fun to play with we've found, but they're difficult to balance and a lot of work to implement and bug test, so the initial release of update 22 will not have a ton, but here's some of new skills and warcry options that might interest you all!

Recon: "Silver Bullet"

• When activated enemies will be highlighted through walls
  
• All your weapons will have extreme wall penetration
  
• When the warcry is active firing will decrease the length of the timer, making precision shooting the focus of the warcry.

Assault: "Sentry"

• When aiming you become almost completely static and gain perfect accuracy.
  
• Magazine size is increased when activated without needing to reload
  
• Standing still or mounting a turret will drain the warcry half as fast
  
• Your damage resistance is greatly increased during the warcry

Insurgent: "Hold The Line"

• On activation a flag is planted where you stand which boosts the players inside its radius.

Insurgent: "Pain Train"

• On activation you charge forwards knocking down and hurting all enemies in your way.
  
• Hitting an obstacle that stops your charge will deactivate the warcry leaving you with some remaining charge left.
  
• Higher level Pain Train includes an AOE stun on activation.

Why is there nothing for Demolitions?
We have plans for his future warcry abilities but they will need more work on the systems in place to make work how we want it to work and don't want to delay the update any further.

• Player movement is overall less floaty.
  
• Mantling system now lets you climb over waist high walls that you normally would not be able to jump over while carrying heavy items.
  
• FPS animations now blend better and have some subtle camera effects along with interactions. (Camera bobbing effects can be decreased in the settings.)
  
• Detection should now be a lot more gradual when entering viewcones, Along with some enemy voice indicators for when you're being seen.

All weapons and enemies have had their stats adjusted to give us a strong base on where we want to balance things, The amount of damage needed to kill enemies should be decreased.

• Weapon falloff is now less harsh overall, but falls roughly in the 10-30m range.
  
• Weapon spread has been changed to have a smaller impact when spraying.
  
• Flamer health was changed so headshots can kill easier but is still better to go for the gas tanks.
  
• Melee weapons should now be far more capable of killing on all difficulties.
  
• Total ammo counts has been decreased across all weapons, this was to account for ammo skills and the lower enemy health and shouldnt have too large of an impact.

Final note on stat changes, if you are finding you're running low on ammo constantly and feel like you have a fairly complete build make a feedback post on the forums, Large changes like these will likely not account for some play styles.


Shotguns in menus will look like their damage was extremely lowered but this is now per-pellet damage, shotguns will deal damage for every pellet that hits the enemy rather than dealing full damage if only a single pellet hits.
Damage falloff has been made less harsh on all shotguns to adjust for pellet spread being harder to hit.

What about upgrades that increase the spread?
Those are still present and may change in the future if its needed, but along with the changes to pellets, aiming down sights will now have a choke-effect on spread if you need to target someone far away.


These rewards have been re-balanced along the development of update 22 and will have better rewards on operations, where you normally might get 5 gold for doing a massive operation now the rewards can be all the way up to 200 gold bars!


Normally to earn gold in raids you have to pick up trinkets around the levels, we've made that less of the focus on raids that have gold bars on them. Trainwreck and Goldrush for instance will have piles of gold you can take as a bonus, all bonus gold you steal pays you similarly to the loose valuables you find only with a greater reward.


Changes are being made to the crates and shelves around levels that includes;

• Pickups will have increased returns, more ammo and health.
  
• Shelves having less supplies on higher difficulties.
  
• Crates will contain one item, this was changed for ease of use.
  
• Crates will have a higher chance of containing better supplies (larger health kits or ammo)
  
• Grenade stacks can now range from 1-5 with higher chances in locked crates.
  
• Break effects when opening green crates.
  
• New effects for dropped items and dogtags. (Image below)

The new carry system has been in the works for a while now, being able to carry two or three bags from a skill didnt seem right as not all loot is the same so we opted for a weight system, you can see how it works in our last U22 roadmap in the Update 21 annoucement


Some new and improved elements to the hud are coming too like loot, objective and warcry ready indicators. The rest of the hud and even menus will slowly receive similar improvements and overhauls in future updates.
Here's some examples for now:





Changes to the design for shotguns, logical color coding and contrast improvements.
Tracking mode and Off are still present as options and are supported with these changes.
Color Coding;

• White markers are non-lethal hits.
  
• Red markers are hits that were a kill.
  
• Gold markers are critical hits, If the critical hit was a kill it will show red.

Icon Coding;

• Cross formation was a hit.
  
• Cross formation with a dot in the middle was a headshot.
  
• Shotguns will always use a simple dot.

We haven't had the time (or budget) to call in voice actors but we do have audio sources and unused dialogue that we have been making functional again.
Raider dialogue should now include a bunch more lines while cruising in vehicles, running from barrages, reviving teammates or using turrets just to name a few. Voice lines also shouldn't cut over each other as much, and the frequency of some of the objective reminders have been reduced.

• General stability fixes overall, a lot of unnecessary leftover code from prior games have been cleaned out, and many microtask threading related crashes patched up.
  
• Last Orders: Added more cover to the surrounding road, along with more triggers for hiding bodies in bushes.
  
• Trainwreck: Large objective crates have been replaced with proper gold piles to support the new loot system.
  
• Goldrush: Gold piles have been increased to support the new loot system.
  
• All maps that have dynamite crates should now be able to spawn ammo and health instead of being empty if no dynamite is set.
  
• Team AI raiders will now use cosmetics you have equipped on your other save slots.
  
• Lighting improvements across all maps.

Click thumbnails to see complete image
Team Ai raiders wearing the players other save slot cosmetics;

Higher difficulty Commander variation finally used;

Updated flare design;

New lighting across all maps;



We've also been working on the odd challenge card idea, Here are some that are functional;

• Challenge: Dooms Day: +Increased movement speed, -You cannot aim down sights.
  
• Challenge: Holiday Rush: +Carry penalties become bonuses, -You take increased damage.
  
• Boost: Raise The Bar: +Spawn into the mission with a crowbar.

Note, we don't have a designer for new card art so if we release new cards it may have to use existing art or have blank card icons for the meantime.


We're still a very small group working from an incomplete resource and tool-set, Some of the tools we have are for licensed software which we don't all have easy access to. We also don't have a complete source of the game, project files are extremely large and to be quite frank we don't know where everything is located.
We fix what we can when we can, so if there's something that hasn't been fixed chances are we just can't at the moment.

A note on new levels;
We are working on new levels, we teased that Sea Forts level seen in Ilija's livestreams will be the next raid to release but we cannot say when that will release and we don't want to delay the entire update to work on Sea Forts.


With the year of development for update 21 and the amount of work being put into update 22 the update formats will change to focused updates, this gives our small team the ability of pushing out more fixes and content more frequently.


Happy Late New Year from Lion Game Lion and the M.U.G team here!