This week’s update focuses on balancing and pacing in Deceit 2: we want to create a faster and smoother pace of gameplay. Read on for a flavour of what we’ve added to this game this week.
Enraged and empowered
We’ve made tweaks to the ‘Enrage’ period that Terrors enter when the Escape Key is collected by Innocents: One common complaint we heard was that all Innocents regularly end up without the sanity needed to escape the map. To counter this Rift Eyes will no longer activate during the Enrage period. Ghost form magically disappears during this period too, so you can see what humans are around you. It’s nice to know who your friends are.
Mutant Ninja Terrors
We’ve reconfigured the Mutations Spell wheel: Mutations now only spawn once per game, and we have made the Spell wheel clearer and easier to use. The Mutation ‘Soul Swap’ has a new effect that blinds Terrors to counter them delivering a poor Innocent to their teammate. Risk-reward, as they say. Our newest Mutation also enters the game: ‘Silence’ replaces ‘Paranormal’ - muting all players for 30 seconds or until the end of that In-Between phase. The ‘Earthquake’ Mutation has had a big buff too: it now destroys cameras and tannoys in the same range as wall cracks.
Keep on movin’
To move the game along and keep the momentum up as you go through the game, we’re making some significant QOL changes across the board. We’ve removed some aspects of Second Sight from the game: available souls have a visual effect and will whisper from the task they’re trapped in to bring you to them, and Infected will always see the position of Innocents (with the exception of the Final Showdown: when it’s just you and one pesky Innocent remaining, or you’re the last Terror standing against two Innocents).
We’ve improved the smoothness of entering and leaving tasks, and there are new default items as the Clipboard and Inspection pin have been removed. It will take 60 seconds for the Inspection Machine to boot up at the beginning of the game and you now unlock the Inspection Machine with the pin that is handily left on the table beside it! Those Asylum employees had no sense of password protection.
This is just an overview of the key features added with today’s update; for all the ins & outs - like how we’ve moved the skin variants to their own page as we continue to work on the game’s UI - check out the patch notes below.
Stick with us as we move ever closer towards making the game free to play: we’ve been collecting the questions you’ve been asking and we’ll be sharing more information with you at the end of this month.
Patch Notes
Art
- Hovering players in your party will now highlight them with a beam in the Main Menu.
Audio
- Updated the Enrage phase music so that it ramps up the closer the Escape Key holder gets to the Escape Door. Once the door starts being unlocked there is also a global audio cue played.
- You can now talk with everyone that you just played with in the post game summary screen. This is a room based voice chat system, so if your party member leaves the summary screen you won’t be able to talk to them until you do the same.
Gameplay
- The duration of the Reality phases have been adjusted. They will no longer scale based on the number of players alive, and the impact of activating Weak Points has been reduced. On average this will mean the earlier Reality phases are shorter, and the later ones are slightly longer.
- A custom setting has been added for adjusting how Reality phases scale based on the number of alive players.
- As we prepare for releasing our second Terror, the Werewolf, we’ve moved the Rift Eyes to be an Experiment specific passive. As part of this and some other balancing changes: [list]
- The Rift Eyes will no longer activate on their own, instead they will activate based on when the Experiment Terror(s) uses their Scream ability. Each Scream usage will activate half of the Rift Eyes in half of the rooms. The room selection is completely random, meaning 2 Experiments could activate Rift Eyes in either every room or half of them, and everywhere in-between. The number of Eyes allowed to be activated per room is capped to half.
- The Rift Eyes will no longer automatically turn on when in the Enrage phase.
- Rift Eyes are now independent of each other, rather than being heavily linked to a cluster within a room. This means hitting a Rift Eye with light will only disable that one Eye. Despite this change, there’s no change to how fast you lose Sanity based on how many Eyes are looking at you. 5 Eyes draining your Sanity will still be the same rate as 1 Eye.
- Rift Eyes will now only lock on to one player at a time, and will remain on the player until they break line of sight (or blind them!).
- Rift Eyes now have a clearer ‘waking up’ state and can be blinded during this to stop them from revealing you and draining your Sanity.
UI
- The Sanity loss hit markers have been reduced in size.
- Variants of cosmetics are now nested within the parent cosmetic in the Collection tab.
Translations & Localisation
- Several translations have been updated.
