Deep Dive: Combat Overhaul
Welcome back agents, this week we are digging into the work that has been ongoing to make the combat and weapon ‘feel’ of DI more satisfying and approachable. Keep in mind that this is a very large topic so not everything will be covered in this small brief and everything we will showcase is subject to change. You can look forward to more changes when the update releases.

Visual Updates
To give a better weapon feel to the game’s arsenal, we are going back to revisit some weapon mods that did not have their own firing and reload animations to give them a more unique feel. Beyond the visual differentiation, this allows us to make bespoke animations that fit their fire rate and reload speed much better, removing the sluggish “slowed down” feeling of some weapons. Here’s Chavez Duke which was a pretty egregious example of an artificially slowed down animation to fit its stats.

Duke Animations Before



Updated Duke Animations


Some unique flourishes have been added like chavez cocking the hammer in between each shot to better fit the weapon’s fire rate.

Recoil Changes and Damage Falloff
On the more directly gameplay affecting side, a big emphasis has been put on reducing the incidence of recoil on gameplay. This has been a major area of continued feedback that we hope to address in a big way with this update.

First of all, recoil has been smoothed out across the entire cast to be much less of a detriment to the gameplay. This means tracking your shots is less of a challenge than before. To compensate this from a balancing standpoint, we are making damage falloff a bigger part of the game with weapons losing potency over distance, making fast death at a longer range much less likely.

These two elements combined together should help make the gunplay more accessible and easier to use with falloff keeping situations from feeling out of hand when getting attacked and tracked from far away.

Here’s an example on Red’s base weapon

Before

After



Collision between out of cover spies
A frustrating part of close quarter fights in DI comes from the fact that two spies can phase through each other, making melee hits hard to land and the fight hard to understand. This is why with this update we introduce the concept of collision between two out of cover spies!

This means that while in cover, everything will behave like it currently does, but when two out of cover spies collide, they will body block each other allowing for much more precise melee attacks. Here’s an example of it in action:

View the GIF here

Directional Hit Indicators
Another big piece of the combat puzzle is better feedback to understand what is happening in the middle of a fight. One of our focuses on that front is remaking the directional hit indicator to be more precise and add more information packed into it.

You will now have a direct idea of the amount of damage you took in a given direction with the thickness of the indicator.

Before


After (Small Damage)


After (Bigger Damage)


Controller Aim-Assist Rework
To close things out, we also wanted to give an update on the work done to make the controller experience more pleasant. We are updating the way aim-assist works in multiple ways.

The first and biggest is in how aim-assist is set up: Controller Aim-Assist has been reworked moving away from limited fix-points targeting on characters to using the character’s collision as the aim-assist target. This means that aim assist wil now pick-up the character as a whole making it possible to snap to any limb and help stick and move the reticle along the whole body rather than switching between individual points along the character’s body.

The second aspect of the change is the prioritization of hostile targets over passive-ones , meaning that civilians will now be ignored by aim assist when engaging hostile guards or spies.

Finally, training dummies and some deployed gadgets like the remote turret will now be picked-up by aim assist and treated as valid targets, making shooting them down in a pinch far easier to pull off.