Agents,

It is time for you to start being read in on all the latest operational changes heading your way later this month. To start:

A new agent is joining your ranks!
You may have already seen some of their handy work in the field. While their full motives aren’t yet known, the company has arranged for this talented individual to put their talents to use for Deceive Inc. after contact was made.

We’ll be sharing more on this new agent in the days ahead, but we wanted to take this opportunity to brief you on some changes in the field:

Private Lobbies
Private Lobbies will be officially added for all players, allowing for agents to group up with their friends and drop into an operation together in solo, duos or trios. This is only the beginning and thanks to player feedback from last month's beta, the team is already looking at how we can add in some of the top requested features and tweaks.

Audio Occlusion Changes
We’ve made changes to how weapon sounds propagate in maps to make obstructions a bigger factor. In this update, walls and other obstructions will have a bigger effect on blocking sound while open areas will keep sounds propagating from far away. We hope this makes picking fights in closed off rooms safer and more of a strategic consideration.

Room Weighting Overhaul
A driving factor on how NPCs navigate a map is based on “weights” attributed to room. In this update, a major overhaul of restricted areas weight has been made across the entire game.

This now means that all guard rooms have a balanced weight to not skew certain rooms to have much higher guard traffic than others, making some rooms more desirable to sneak into without a costume early on. This is a subtle change on the surface that should result in a better balanced experience overall.

NPC Vision arc tweak
NPCs are getting a vision upgrade with this update. What that means is that the side of NPCs will be less of a deadzone for them to spot you at various angles. We were very careful to tweak this in a way that still allows players to sneak behind NPCs but standing right next to one on their side will result in them noticing you now.

NPC Scolding behavior overhaul
Previously, when a NPC spotted a player with the wrong disguise from far away, they would walk slowly to them to scold them. This meant that players could easily run through large restricted areas with very little risk of npc catching up to them. Now, aggro-ed NPCs that are far away will run toward the player to scold them.

We also think this behavior makes more sense for a player trying to emulate a NPC and spotting someone with the wrong disguise from afar which should help blur the line more.

Xiu’s Return To Greatness
The madame has been a figure of much discussion about her viability due to some ongoing issues. She wanted us to pass along the following: “Only a fool would count me out”. Xiu has been the focus of our first “Targeted Agent Sweep” where the team really dug into some of the legacy issues that have built up and worked on getting them fixed while addressing balance around the character as well.

Other agents will also see improvements with work having begun on Red that will be reflected in the upcoming update as well as increased reliability of Hans active.

Keep your eyes tuned as more briefs will be headed your way agents, covering more detail, new information, and additional balance updates and QoL improvements/fixes for agents!