Knights, a new update is filtering down from the top of the dome to the streets, to the shadows, seeping through the pavement. Surely it will reach your underground safehouse soon. With Update #163, we've added new options to the New Game Knight screen including weapons packages and your pick of starting cybernetic, further improved and tweaked the meta-visuals update, smoothed out the Safehouse timeline animation and provided a 3rd Fastest speed, and fixed a lot of bugs from your F10s! We are hitting so many different angles of polish and improvement for the game and we're super excited for what is next. It goes something like (1) more mission maps (2) Gunslinger class and (3) more story! Check out the Gunslinger Preview thread that is ripping along on Steam right now with great ideas about how to make that class extra fun and cool. We're 3 reviews short of 500 steamhappy! If you're enjoying the game or how we are running our Early Access (always improving!) please take a minute to leave a review.

Weapon and Cybernetic Packages for New Knight

With Update #163, we've added 2 new sets of options to the New Game Knight screen. These allow your Knight to pick from a set of 4 starting weapon packages to better customize their starting load out. You can pick from a stealth pack (Sword and Silenced Pistol), a mid-range loud pack (Shotgun and Silenced SMG), a versatile pack (AR and Silenced Pistol) and the long range pack (Sniper Rifle and Silenced SMG). On top of the new weapon choices, all Knights used to start with Dermal Plating installed. This was limiting and while it made you a tank it also reduced Move Speed. With all the new choices in the New Game V2 screen, and especially those that let you lean your Knight toward a Hacker, we needed to give you the freedom to pick your our starting implant. So, with Update #163, you can also pick one of 4 cybernetics - among Dermal Plating, Matrix Link, Display Link and Neural Accelerator.
One of the key cybernetic options available to your character is that of the Matrix Link which lets you start with your Cyber Knight multi-classed into the Hacker class. This goes along with some of the Hacking-focused Trait options you can pick above and gives a cool new angle to what your Cyber Knight brings to the team from the get go. Along with this update, we've tweaked, tuned and improved a lot of starting cyberware progressions for the better. For example, Synth Muscle has been buffed with more Attribute bonuses and the first level no longer has a Wound Res penalty and we've removed the Stress Res penalty from Matrix Link. We've added more HP and Wound Res to the Dermal Armor progression while reducing its Move Speed debuff to 6% to 12% max and added more Accuracy bonus to Display Links.

Smoother Timeline + New Options

We've done a really nice polishing pass on the animation for the Safehouse Timeline. It is smoother than ever before and we've cut out all the possible "jump back" that could happen where an event would scroll forward and then suddenly leap backwards. We still have work to do to improve the experience when new events appear on the timeline (it's a big jumpy and you might want to pause) but this is a really nice improvement on the smoothness of the main clock of the game.
We've also added a 3rd speed - Fastest - to the options for Timeline Speed. Accelerated is comfortable and plays rapidly, Standard is comfy and on the slower side and well, Fastest is just fast. It rips along and does very little attempt at making animation so much as moving turns forward.

Improving Meta-Visuals

For the meta-visuals, we've made some nice upgrades to follow up on the big update and improve in some situations where things were not working as expected First up, if an enemy was standing near a drop that was 4m or above, their sight lines were not displayed below. This is now resolved with the sight lines painting onto the lower geometry up to 6.2m below. The situation with enemies facing upwards elevation (such as stairs) is no better than it was in the old system and there is no visual aid except relying on movement alerts to know if you will be seen by an enemy in this position or not.
We've also adjusted and increased the opacity on the sight cones which is important to make them functional in areas with varied light - especially red and orange lighting conditions.
In addition, the new visualization for Talent ranges are very helpful for placing map area of effects like Lookahead or Tox-Cloud except that the range calculations on these areas was not updated to ignore height and effectively use a column instead of a sphere. This lead to the meta-visual range finder showing situations in which an enemy would be targeted - near the edge, as shown above - and yet they could still be missed. We've now updated the math to ensure that the visuals are unerring.

Bug Fixes!

Thanks for all the F10s. We had another round of high Power Level Cyberdecks escape the lab (how!? again!?!) and we've stuffed them back in the box. Unless you bought them lol. Also, when removing required programs from the deck, sometimes the names were wrong (you're removing Attack but it warns about Sleaze). We fixed a long standing issue with a trio of fuel barrels that refused to ever show the cover shield, now resolved. Some of the enemies in the new Blown Out Flat level could appear in inaccessible areas, trapped forever. In the Hacking mission level - the Weigh Station - the camera bounds were flipped, allowing you to leave the leave but never get back in.

v1.8.139 - #163: New Knight Packages - 10/22/2024

- New Game Knight - now select from 1 of 4 weapons sets for your starting Knight - New Game Knight - now select from 1 of 4 cybernetic implants for your starting Knight, including MatrixLink to multi-class Hacker from start - Improved smoothness of Safehouse timeline animation, expanded option for speed to be Standard, Accelerated or Fastest (less animation, more speed) - Fixed issue with new meta-visuals for sight cones where they disappeared if there was a 4m or more drop - Improve new meta-visuals for sight cone to be more visible in brighter / redder lighting environments - Improved map area of effect rules (for Talents like Lookahead and Tox-Cloud) that were not following the new rules (these also still need new meta-visuals) - Buffed Synth Muscle (more Strength/Speed, removed -Wound Res %) and Matrix Link (removed -Stress Res %), buffed Dermal Plating series (more HP, Wound Res, better Move Speed), added +1% Accuracy to Display Link - Fixed issue with triple fuel barrel stacks not showing cover shield correctly - Fixed issue with program names being swapped when uninstalling required programs - Removed Cyberdecks in Power Level 8 and 9 that had leaked into market - Fixed enemy starting in inaccessible area in Blown Out Flat level - Fixed camera bounds issue in Hacking Weigh station level - you could pass through and never return