Hello Bloodhunt Community!
We are very excited to present the 0.6 release notes! We call this the Community update as it's focused on many of the things that we have been hearing about from our players. This update contains Duo mode quality of life improvements, optimizations, balance adjustments, and other fun improvements we saw our players asking for.
We want to thank everyone who has taken part in Bloodhunt’s Early Access (more on that below!), as it has really helped spotlight where more work is needed. We hope you will see this update as confirmation that we're listening to you and reacting as quickly we can. Which maybe isn’t always as fast as you’d hope, but we don’t want to jeopardize stability just to rush something in before we’re sure it’s safe to add.
The detailed list of improvements is quite extensive, so let’s jump right in.
A “token” of our appreciation!
As a Swedish studio, it is almost a national responsibility to have at least one bad pun in our patch notes, so why not lead with it?
With that out of the way, we want to show our gratitude to those of you who have supported Bloodhunt during Early Access and have been patient with us as we work on addressing your feedback by offering a bunch of FREE STUFF for a limited time!
- A free item will be offered in the store each day for a limited time! Be sure to log in every day to collect!
- Also for a limited time, you can earn tokens just by completing specific daily challenges. We look forward to seeing what you will spend it on and hope to see you share your ultimate Vampire creations with us.
You asked for it, Duo mode!
- We ran a survey recently asking if we should try to temporarily add a duo mode to see if it would be a fun experience, and we got an overwhelming response that we should add it. So, in the interest of keeping our matchmaker as snappy as possible we are adding Duos with this update, replacing Trios. But don’t worry, Trios will return in the near future.
Also worth mentioning is that Duos is a mode that supports 42 players, and besides this being the obvious answer to life it will also positively impact performance (and is divisable by 2 and 3 player groups), but the game maintains its high paced tempo, especially with the increased red gas changes that are also in this update (More info on that below).
Kill credit! Finally!
- As of this update, the player who downs an enemy gets credit for the kill regardless how or by whom the enemy is eliminated. Doesn’t matter if the enemy is finished off by another player, the red gas, Entity, fire, a shark, etc. Kill credit is only awarded if the enemy is eliminated before reviving.
- Eliminating a knocked down player now awards an assist.
- Assists are also awarded for dealing a certain amount of damage to an enemy that gets finished by someone or something else.
Pacing improvements - less wait, more action!
- Players can now requeue after a match without having to return to Elysium in solo or group modes but note that requeuing as a party is not yet supported. Also note that you will need to leave to the results screen to be able to requeue. This is an early implementation and therefore a bit rough around the edges, but we felt it was better to get this feature into the game as soon as possible than to delay it to make it perfect.
- Shorter pre- and post-match timers, archetype select, and deployment to get you into and out of a game faster.
- In group player, spectating players can now open and ping the map and press a key to highlight the nearest respawn point for surviving teammates, improving the odds of getting back into the action. This will also make it easier for new players to understand how the respawn system works.
- We’ve tuned the red gas to tighten up the pace of the game and make the initial phase of the game more varied.
For transparency, here are the new timings:
Initial wait time: 90s -> 30s
Round 1: 215s -> 185s
Round 2: 185s -> 160s
Round 3: 180s -> 155s
Round 4 & 5 are unchanged at 175s for round 4 and 170s for round 5.
Loot and item adjustments
- We’ve added two new high tier loot locations: Memorial Park and the Graveyard. The graveyard is a great place for close based ground combat with many smaller objects to hide behind. With the addition of the high-tier loot we think that we will see the fights in this area get even more exciting. The Memorial Park area is an excellent place to show your parkour skills due to its open layout with simple geometry enabling a lot of verticality. High tier loot will raise the stakes further and we can't wait to see the action-packed mayhem that our players will cause.
- The blue visual effects around loot piles are now removed once all items are picked up. This makes it clearer when there is nothing left to find.
- Consumable items are now automatically collected, just like ammo.
- Consumables now have fixed positions in the consumable wheel instead of being sorted by the order in which they’re picked up.
- Golden weapons are now a bit rarer.
- Improved visibility of Camarilla and Entity crates – We have brightened the base color of the Entity and Camarilla crates to make them stand out more, which will hopefully enable more players to find them. We also added particle effect around the lid to draw further attention to them.
Making the game more welcoming for new players
Bloodhunt is easy to play but hard to master, and the skill ceiling is very high, so we’ve added some improvements to help ease new players into the experience and turn them into worthy adversaries for existing players.
- New players will now get several onboarding sessions with a mix of other new players and bots, which are identified as Cultists. Look for a “Cultists present” indicator on the pre-match screen. The bots aren’t always... convincing, but they’re fun to kill and a good way to practice weapons and powers. This is an experimental feature and subject to further tuning and development, but from our testing, players seem to like having the chance to get familiar with the game at a slower pace. Let us know what you think!
- We’ve streamlined some steps of the tutorial that some players were struggling with. These are mostly related to confusing input prompts.
- By popular request, you can now skip the tutorial.
- Push-to-talk voice chat (VOIP) is now on by default. We think that this will encourage more players to use voice chat and increase cooperation and mentoring. If you are an experienced player, please share your expertise with your teammates!
- Because of this change, the audio settings have been reset.
- XP callouts have been added to notifications for events such as downing, eliminating, and diablerizing enemies.
- Earned rewards from the battle pass or quests are now highlighted upon returning to Elysium.
- We’ve clarified the token and XP boost rewards in the battle pass.
- Your health after reviving has been increased from 50 to 75 to give you a slightly better chance of getting away. To compensate, the window of invulnerability after reviving has been reduced from 1.5s to 1s. The invulnerability is intended to protect the player during the “getting back up” animation, but once you can start to move freely again you will be vulnerable to damage. We hope to find a more elegant solution in the future that allows us to get rid of the invulnerability completely.
Performance improvements
Optimizing performance remains a priority and will be an on-going effort. We have made a few improvements for this update:
- Fixed an issue with our shader compilation process in DX12 – We identified a bug where our game would not compile all of the required shaders when running the game in DX12 mode for the first time. This caused the game to generate the missing shaders when it encountered them during gameplay, which in turn caused sudden and very noticeable performance dips. This has now been significantly improved, but you may still encounter intermittent hitches until all shaders have been compiled.
- SSR, Volumetric Fog and SSS settings are now set correctly when changed in the graphical settings menu.
- Audio threads have been optimized to take fewer CPU cycles.
Changes to the config files
As the game is in Early Access and we are still optimizing, it makes sense that we allow players to edit the parameters that we expose in our config file. However, a few of them have proven to give too much of an advantage, which circumvents how we want the game to be played, so you will no longer be able to toggle the following through the config files:
r.Fog
r.VolumetricFog
We believe that this will make the game fairer.
More stuff to do!
- Six new quests have been added which are the following:
- Welcome to Elysium
- The Wrong Hands
- Track Record
- Missing Agent
- Ashes to Ashes
- A Spy in Prague
- We still have some work to do on making it clear when someone has a quest to offer. In the meantime, be sure to talk to the NPCs in Elysium whenever you’re there to see if they have a task for you!
- We added a bunch of extra daily challenges and have fine-tuned the existing ones based on player feedback and telemetry. Please let us know what you think!
- In this update, we are experimenting with mutators that can shake up the experience by altering key parameters of the game. Examples are: speeding up the red gas, turning all loot locations high tier, remove Entity (but not their loot containers!), etc.
Active mutators are displayed on cards on the pre-match screens and in-game during the countdown and on the map. - Additionally, there are several new Journal unlocks and you might also spot some new spooky pumpkins as we get into the holiday season.
Balance changes
Blood Resonance
- Increased the chance of a civilian having resonant blood from 60% to 80% to make it easier to find the resonances you want.
- Increased healing per second for the Sanguine resonance from 0.5/1.5/ 3 to 1/2/4 to make it more impactful.
Archetypes
Nosferatu - Prowler
- Scouting Famulus now has a max duration of 45s. This change shouldn’t affect Prowler players too much but reduces “bat clutter” later in a match.
Nosferatu - Saboteur
- Sewer Bomb now has a max duration of 5 minutes. As with the Scouting Famulus change, this shouldn’t affect Saboteur players too much and just cleans up the miscellaneous sewer bombs scattered around the tunnels and breezeways of Prague in the late stages of a session.
- Sewer Bomb initial damage has been increased from 10 to 20 to increase their effectiveness both as traps and offensive tools, such as tossing one and shooting it next to an enemy hiding in a bush.
Toreador
- The max range you can travel from your projection without having it disappear will now only take horizontal distance into account, which should make it much more intuitive how far you can travel from it.
Toreador - Siren
- Blinding Beauty slow effect has been reduced from 50% to 15%. Now that the blind effect is working more as intended, we felt the slowdown was a bit too punishing. This change makes it easier to react and evade when blinded.
Ranged Weapons
SMG
- Decreased damage from 12 to 11. The SMG is still one of the highest damage weapons, but this change brings it a bit more in line with the rest of the arsenal.
LMG
- Increased damage from 15 to 17. This change brings the weapon more in line with the Assault Rifle in terms of DPS but still with its unique pros and cons such as better sustained fire, larger magazine capacity, and worse initial accuracy.
Revolver
- Increased damage from 45 to 50. The Revolver is meant to reward good aim at varied ranges but was a bit behind in DPS. This change lets you finish the job with one less shot on average.
Dual Pistols
- Increased damage from 25 to 28 and decreased maximum fire rate from 7 to 6. A slight reduction in DPS but also a little less spammy, making it easier to place your shots accurately.
Toggler
- Increased damage of primary fire mode from 25 to 26. This slight improvement should bring the Toggler more in line with the Assault Rifle.
Burst Rifle
- Increased damage from 22 to 25 and also increased accuracy by reducing spread from previous shots. We understood why players weren’t really using this weapon much and hope these changes will make it more attractive.
Parts of this change unintentionally made it into the previous update, but this is now the fully intended adjustment.
Marksman Rifle
- Vastly increased accuracy.
- Reduced maximum fire rate from 6 to 5. We felt the rifle’s spread took too long to recover between shots, which worked against its intended role as a precision weapon. You should now be able to hit more consistently but with a slightly reduced rate of fire.
Crossbow
- Reduced movement speed multiplier when aiming down sights from 0.8 to 0.6. This is not a balance change but rather a bug fix. All rifles and heavier weapons are meant to have a slower movement rate in ADS than single handed or lightweight weapons.
Melee Weapons
The rare melee weapons have felt a bit too weak compared to the higher rarity weapons, so we’ve bumped up their damage a bit. They’re still inferior to the Scourge Blades and Katana due to those weapons' special abilities, but there was no good justification for giving them such low damage output.
- Spike bat damage increased from 50 to 55.
- Fire axe damage increased damage from 65 to 70.
