It’s been a while, so here’s another high level look at recent Dirty Bomb dev… developments here at SD.
MERCS
It’s critically important to us that Merc abilities are integral to moment to moment gameplay, so we’ve been adjusting the balance to amplify their effect. Things like much more potent deployables, deadlier Airstrikes, the lot. This has resulted in some rough edges, but we’d rather get it out to you in what we consider a less than polished state than hold it back to try to make everything perfect. We think that this has enhanced teamplay as well as made the Mercs more characterful, but we’ll of course need your feedback!
We’ll also be removing Mercs from the overall progression curve in the future, and moving towards a more rotation-based system. Players will have more choice about which Mercs they unlock and when. There will be an interim implementation for the near future while we work on the full system; we’ll let you all know what the plan is when it’s finalised.
Regarding LoadOut Cards, we’ll be implementing a system that will allow you to craft the card that just won’t drop. We’ll also be making sure to introduce additional LoadOut Cards with each release build.
COMBAT BALANCE
Similarly to the Merc abilities, we’re increasing the min and max differentials between different gameplay elements of the Mercs. This means things like heavier weapons slowing down Mercs more when they’re equipped, some re-balancing of weapon raise and lower times, un-linking speed and health as an exact ratio, and a host of other changes. You can of course expect a detailed changelog before the changes are going into the live build. I expect a good bit of discussion around this!
Similarly to the Merc abilities balance work, there will no doubt be some rough edges. Rather than make tiny changes, we’re trying to swing things a bit more drastically to find out what works best, so it’s entirely reasonable to expect a degree of correction based on how things go and how you all feel about the changes.
GAME MODES
Expect Objective and Stopwatch modes to have an increasing number of small elements that make them different from each other. We’ll be reintroducing longer spawn times to Stopwatch Mode, and adding more tweaks to Objective Mode to further strengthen it as our more casual game mode.
We’d really like to get Execution Mode back in public testing and also get cracking on prototyping new modes as I think we have some great ideas, but that has had to take a back seat for the moment due to our other priorities.
DOME
We’ll be getting an iterated version of Dome out to you soon, along with a blog post detailing what’s happened with the previous version of the map as it’s been live and explaining why we’ve gone the way we have for the updates.
Our focus continues to be on blockout maps, and we hope when you see how much has changed with Dome you’ll understand why.
:stroggtapir: