Greetings, Brokers!

With 1.9.4.1 we’ve focused on a few important new features for the game along with some quality of life improvements.

Endgame Damage: The Shardstorm has brought its fearsome energy to the end of a match, resulting in increasing damage as it nears. Starting in Round 25, your Agent will take periodic damage from the storm. Each subsequent round, this damage will double. The Shardstorm is designed to bring a quick and decisive end to the match, so if there’s a victory condition you’re pursuing, make sure you get it taken care of by the time the storm arrives!

Shardstorm 2

AI Improvements: We’re always looking to improve the predictability of the AI behavior of your Agent. Our goal, as always, is that your Agent will move in a predictable manner so you can plan out each round and understand why the Agent is making the choices that it is making. In 1.9.4.1 we’ve added some improvements to location selection which will make it so your Agent will navigate around larger impediments significantly better than before. We’ve also made some improvements to your Agent guarding a Shard that they’re attempting to harvest. As with any AI change, other behaviors may change slightly from what you’ve experienced in the past.

Agent navigating toward a Shard

Please let us know what you think of the new AI changes!

Visual Improvements: Upgrading your skills didn’t feel rewarding enough, so we’ve added some celebratory VFX for skill purchasing. You’ll see some VFX appear with your Agent’s portrait when you purchase a skill. We continue to want to improve the user experience of the game and adding in more visual feedback, sound effects and more are one of our goals over the next few releases.

Agent doing a real cool swirly attack

Bugs and other items:

• The correct Honor element should spawn when you harvest a shard or KO an agent • The end-match Victory screen will now correctly attribute your Survivalist rank through the end of the round in which you were victorious
• Fixed an issue where models would sometimes show as extremely large
• Fixed some performance issues around CPU usage
• Fixed a bug with the VFX for the Shardstorm zone
• Adjusted some spelling and capitalization throughout the game
• Adjusted the start of the zone shrinking and the speed of zone shrinking (updated from 7% per round starting in round 3 to 8% per round starting in round 5)
• Updated the reward for KOs from 1 Element to 3 Elements