Hey guys,

As you know if you’ve been paying attention, we’ve got another update coming soon that will continue the improvements we’ve been making to our game since launch.

While I think we all agree that Sunrise City is in a much better place now than when we launched (and certainly our population growth says we’re in a much better place!), there’s still room to improve. These changes are essential to continue fixing and improving the game and setting it up for future growth and expansion. I think you’ll all appreciate the new weapons, abilities, customization options and changes to the current abilities.

Today I’m going to highlight some of the major changes we’re making to CrimeCraft in the next update.

New Weapons, Clothes and Appearance Options

We are adding 14 new guns to the game through the loot table and the Black Market. These include assault rifles, LMGs, sniper rifles and SMGs. New clothes also are being added to the Black Market as well as appearance options including new faces, skin tones, hair styles, beards and makeup.

Ability Additions and Changes

We’ve added three new abilities and reworked many of the existing abilities, so we will be rolling back everyone’s Skill Points at the update launch so you can try out the new additions.

The new abilities include:

• Electric Shield – An ability that stuns enemies after melee attacks
• Corrosion Grenade – An ability that gives the character a grenade that creates a cloud that reduces damage resistance and absorption to all enemies in the radius
• Collector – Characters get a chance to spawn a +25 hit point MedKit out of each enemy they kill

Ability changes include:

• Desensitization – Increased positive effect
• Enhanced Metabolism – Increased positive effect
• Enhanced Endurance – Decreased stamina reduction and increased sprint speed
• Enhanced Recovery – Increased positive effect
• PSP Rounds – Character’s resistances increase as soon as a player uses the ability, starting animation is two times faster and ability can be stopped at will by pressing any move button
• Incendiary Rounds – Ammo loading animation removed, so the ability is now instant
• Charge Compression – Added possibility to throw two grenades without cooldown
• Fragmentation Grenade – Throw speed increased, lighting changed
• Molotov [filtered]tail – Throw speed increased, enemies who pass through flame take damage
• C4 – Now thrown like a grenade and sticks on collision
• NBR Grenade – Throw speed increased, activates when it hits the ground, heals enemies and allies, increased healing effect, duration reduced
• Liquid Armor – Added visual effect to character torso, character speed decreased
• Blast Helmet – Added visual effect to character head, character speed decreased
• Camouflage Sensor Array – Effective radius increased
• Explosion Dampening Field – Now thrown like a grenade
• Heartbeat Detector – Duration increased

Abilities removed include Flash Grenade, Sensitization, SatCom.

Ability Level Gating

Along with the changes to the abilities themselves, we also are adding level gates. At low levels, users will have access to a small number of abilities; at mid levels, about half of the abilities; and high level users have access to all abilities.

This change adds depth to the RPG side of the game as players progress through the levels and unlock additional play options and streamlines game play for new players. Note that to balance the gameplay we have adjusted the PvP handicapping to account for the difference in abilities.

Itemization

We are expanding the Black Market and adding a number of new items to the Gold Bar store, including the new customization options and weapons I mentioned earlier. That’s not all that’s coming to the Black Market, however. We’re adding several new game features including Profiles. Profiles are additional paper dolls for a character that can be outfitted with different clothes, boosts, abilities and weapons for different combat situations. Each time they die in a match, a player with multiple profiles can choose which one to spawn. For example, if your enemies are using extensive resists to heavy damage, you may choose to respawn with your grenade launcher build.

Chemist Profession Improvement

We have made many major changes to the Chemist profession to make it a more viable crafting tree. If you are a Chemist, when you log in after the update you will find that all of your recipes have been removed and that the money you spent learning those recipes has been refunded to your account. The Chemist trainers will be selling the new recipes at launch so Chemists can learn and use the new recipes right away.

PVE Instance Creation

To encourage cooperative game play in PvE we are making the following change: In this next update, instances can’t be created if there are open matches with open slots. We are making this change because of our population growth. There is an upper limit to the number of instances that can be run per server, and having 12 PVE instances with one user is not efficient for our server usage and performance.

Durability Adjustment

You’re going to notice that your weapons and clothes will lose durability faster after this next update goes live. The goal is to increase the turn-over on gun use in order to further spark growth in the economy and encourage players to explore more options in firepower and crafting.

These aren’t all the changes coming in the next update but they are the major changes. We’re tuning combat performance for game play balance, removing the ability to reload while sprinting or rolling and we’re also adding a Stamina Meter to the combat UI. Finally, we’ve added some explosive new death animations that we think everyone will enjoy!

--KevinB

Last Edited on: Mar 19 2012 10:51 PM UTC (64 Days ago)