Hey everyone!
Update 18 is now live just in time for the holiday season! We hope you had a great 2025 and a we're wishing you a wonderful start to 2026 : )
🔶Highlights:
New Engineer Class
Steam Achievements
Class Prestige
Attachment Refinements
Low End Performance & Loading speed
Quality of life changes
🔶 Weapon Balance
R2000H damage 7 > 8.2x
PPQ perk shield cost 250 > 150, damage 50>75%
Retuned Fusion pistol to have more burst damage upfront
KS23 now has a new Perk
Rayon new perk, Laser Calibration
Optimized mag for AM Tech now increases reload speed and ejection speed
🔶 Attachment Balance
Attachments v3 seemed to be a really good change in the right direction and there is a much clearer separation of the game elements now as a cause. However some categories of attachments were maybe struggling a bit with variation, and some attachments needed some tweaks. Overall the new changes should bring things in a really good state.
New Divine Attachment: Golden Boy Package - fills all attachment slots with random attachments
Blessed mag: 75% magsize -30% reload > +15 Magsize, +30% Class experience
Offload Cycler ultra now a legendary attachment in multiple categories
Ammo TP is now in multiple categories
ATP5 Ammo Teleporter is now in Mixed major category
Chromatic alloy is now a legendary attachment in multiple categories
Titanium Tripod reworked, is now a legendary attachment in multiple categories
Kill shot now has safety for 1 ammo, 15%>30% threshold, 100>50% damage
X-Shot receiver now increases extra shot count for other sources of extra shot
Tri-Bolt carrier removed -25% firerate
Fixed wildfire barrel not working
Turbo Chip now has 1x scaling
Testing: Zero pulse grip now adds 100% dmg to stunned
Kill counter now stacks the reload negative correctly
Other Gameplay:
Machine Hunter now rolls into cover (Turtle Shield) making it more fluid to use
Riotguard Judge bikes +1000 HP (*scaling), despawn 30>60s
Heavy Gunner custom-extended now only works on chest drops
Shield link cooldown adjusted
Metal Storm cooldown adjusted
New Item: Microwave Emitter
🔶 Class Prestige (Beta)
You can now prestige a class after reaching level 25.
This resets all class progression and grants a special prestige icon in the Lobby and Character menus to indicate your dedication. There are 5 different stages of icons.
Prestige is a purely intrinsic reward and might be expanded in the future. In comparison with S1 we did not want to link a perk to prestige to not make people feel forced to reset their class to get the full benefit but let us know what you think.
For the next iteration we will change that it does not reset class data unlocks and add improved info UI. Careful! Clicking the button will instantly prestige the class right now.
The new Engineer is finally here!
The Engineer is a advanced support class which relies heavily on summoned constructs, can repair and boost friendly units with his over-clocker likes to play in the backline.
For the class we wanted to do a real evolution of the S1 classic, with a wider loadout, more build choices and more depth.
⮩ Surge Mechanic
Engineer has a new Mechanic, ⚡️Surge, which is obtained from kills. You can have up to 3 Surge.
Surge offers special effects for basically all Engineer abilities if the ability is used at a certain Surge level.
Some Examples:
Mortar Turret - Now fires a flare and gains incendiary ammunition
Sentry Turret - Produces claymore mines and gains plating
Spider Module - Spawns a special Damage Absorbing Spider, which can soak a lot of damage and explodes in a huge radius based on soaked damage.
⮩ Loadout
The Loadout of Engineer is much more diverse now. Firstly the Engineer can pick from 3 different types of Turrets, a classic LMG all-rounder, a close range high burst Assault Turret, and a long-range, long-duration Mortar Turret.
The Overclocker returns as a mobility option but we also added the classic dash+item combo.
The Specialization Ability is where the Loadout really shines, with many highly different options:
🔶 Spider Module - Explosive Spider or ⚡️⚡️⚡️Damage Absorbing Suicide Spiders
🔶 Missile Drone - A long range damage dealer. Spam based on ⚡️Surge.
🔶 Area Jammer - Slowing Device / ⚡️⚡️⚡️Wall Piercing Stunning Emitter
🔶 Assault Mode - Offensive Boost and creates laser drones based on ⚡️Surge.
🔶 Sseth-Up Sentry - Pocket Turret. ⚡️⚡️⚡️Dangerous Beholder Unit which can change teams.
Additionally we have 3 utility options:
🔶 Unidentified Potion - Causes one random effect, including healing and stat upgrades
🔶 Overdrive Station - Heals in an area and grants ⚡️Surge on kills within proximity
🔶 Supply Box - The already known ammo box
⮩ Class Kits
The Engineer also offers 3 distinct Kits:
🔶 Repair Kit - The most classic kit. Strong repairs, and a Stasis Gun which offers unique utility
🔶 Technomancer Kit - Summons can have elite ranks and has a mind-control weapon.
🔶 Gambler Kit - Gains extra randomized benefits from recycling and taking risks!
⮩ Try it yourself!
Engineer is now live, so just give it a try! Keep in mind that this is the first version, and while we already got very positive feedback from the private testing, there will surely be more improvements and tweaks coming, so let us know what you think!
🔶Quality of Life
Many effects which could attack the player have been changed
(Lacerator, Bloodbane, Smart Ricochet, Shock Conductor..)
Fixed missing Tooltips in Armory & Escalation Settings
Improved clarity of Escalation buttons
Purchased Permanent Upgrades now show an indicator on the next open that its active
Added Quit Game popup
You can now quickly recycle items on the ground by pressing the button
🔶Performance
⮩ Binary Serialization
We did a rework of JSON configuration serialization to a binary serialization which is a speed up in initial loading times, especially on low-end.
⮩ Contact Shadows (Experimental)
For the "Minimal" Graphics settings we are testing screen-space contact shadows, which don't have to trace all the geometry in the game and are much cheaper than normal shadows, however they can have some noticeable graphical artefacts. If people don't like it we might revert this to classic shadow maps or even no shadows for the low end setting.
Screen-Space Contact shadows have performance similar to no shadows, but still offer shadowing of the scene. Keep in mind that the performance display in the screenshot is not fully accurate. Contact shadows have a also a GPU cost but they do not require to re-render all the geometry in the scene like classic shadows. They trace based on screen depth, so they also cannot have shadowing from objects off-screen, and they have significant artifacts & accuracy issues.
This is mostly for the super low-end. Let us know if this is adding any improvements to your framerate or if it just makes things look worse. If you are already CPU bound or bound by other factors, this might actually not be an improvement and just a visual downgrade, as such we need feedback based on your hardware.
🔶Achievements
We finally added steam achievements, in the first pass 34 in total. Let us know if anything is unobtainable or feels too hard to achieve.
🔶Tons of Fixes
As usual we made many small fixes based on things you reported. As we are doing exponentially less breaking changes, the game will become more and more pristine with every report and fix, so keep it coming!
🔶Work in Progress
We also worked on our unique graphic design tool pipeline, which allows us to make much faster graphical content on higher quality, including videos, gifs and more. This is a significant time saver in the long run and you can see some pictures in this post already being created with it.
We are also working on more controller improvements and console certifications which are quite challenging but doing great progress.
Up next: A brand new late-game Environment, item mirroring and more!
That's it! Have fun!
Team FFG
