Deceive Inc. State of the game 2023
Welcome or welcome back agents! With the year coming to an end, we thought this would be a good time to look at what we delivered so far and where we are looking next for Deceive Inc. We are incredibly thankful for our community and their passion for the game. We’ve been driven by the feedback we receive from you all to push the game further and make it a better experience for everyone.

Let’s start things off by having a look at all the major drops we’ve made this year since launch:

What we have done this year
Major Updates:

• Launching the game!
• Season 1: Misery Empire
• High alert Update
• Season 2: Neon Nights
• Upper Echelon Update
• Season 3: Of Kings and Queens
• Holiday Rumble Update

New Content:

• 3 New agents
• A new map
• 3 Catalogs, each with 50 unlocks
• The addition of private lobbies
• Duo Queue
• The heat System
• The Echelon System
• Multiple new gameplay elements from team revives to lost and found boxes
• Our first map rework with the silver reef vault area
• Our first live event with Holiday Rumble

What Lies Ahead
Now of course we all know the REAL reason you are reading this post is to have a glimpse at what’s ahead for Deceive Inc.. In the spirit of transparency with our community, we wanted to provide a peek behind the curtain of our intentions in the coming year.

We want to make the game better in its fundamentals and to do so, we need to take the time we need to iterate and make bigger swings than we have done in the past. To this effect, we’ve put into place a program with testers composed of involved members of the community to evaluate changes to the game and their impact on the experience. We are working on 4 core aspects that touch a lot of pieces of the game. Our key areas of focus in no particular order are:

Improving the combat experience
Deceive Inc at its core is a first person shooter. The stealth aspects make it unique and give flavor to every encounter, but if the fundamentals of combat are not strong, the experience cannot thrive.

To this effect, we are looking at considerably overhauling this part of the gameplay, from animation adjustment, sound overhaul to handling tweaks, everything is on the table to elevate this part of gameplay to a higher standard.

What you can expect is an overall tighter feel to combat, more unique look and animation to different weapon mods and a more diversified gameplay experience when playing different weapon types.

Readability and usability
There can be a lot going on in Deceive Inc and not at all of it is easy to understand and parse. With this focus, we are looking at ways to make the action easier to understand, abilities easier to use and keeping a special attention on the gamepad side of the experience to make it better.

This focus is of crucial importance to make the experience more accessible to new players.

Improved level flow
We have learned quite a bit about our own game in the past months, and we are coming back to our maps with a new eye on what makes a map, well, good. This focus means we will revisit levels to make area flow better, add more cover to make encounters more exciting and overall make sure that every map is at its best.

We will focus on different maps one after the other so expect these improvements to drop one after another in multiple patches, starting with the Silver Reef vault overhaul for the holiday rumble update.

Match to match satisfaction
While all previous items should help with the satisfaction a player gets from playing a match, something the overall satisfaction is a focus in itself.

This focus is all about better celebrating what players do well in a match and rewarding those actions. It also means revisiting match elements that are big frustrations and contribute to long term dissatisfaction for our players. A good example of an item that touches this are guards. They are often frustrating in how they interact with players and fight and making sure they are more easily understandable and that players have clear tools to mitigate their annoyance is a big factor in reducing frustration.

All these focuses have active development going on right now with some of it being tested by our external testing program as we speak. Not all of these items will land at the same time, some will ship in the shorter term, some will take more time to materialize. We will have some exciting new elements to share with you in the future as we make progress on all of this.

Now, with all these major reworks on the way, what does that mean for a new Agent?

We also have work ongoing on a new addition to the roster, but our new commitment on making the fundamentals of the game stronger means that they will not drop as soon as you might have expected in the past.

We think this new agent will be a VERY exciting addition to the game, both from a gameplay and lore enthusiast perspective, so please bear with us as we make Deceive Inc. a better game in the new year.

For now, we wish you all a great holiday period. We’ll see you all on the other side!

A reminder of all the ways you can keep up to date with all on-going Deceive Inc. news and also a great way to communicate with other Deceive Inc fans!

Official Twitter - https://twitter.com/PlayDeceiveinc
Official Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/PlayDeceiveinc
Official Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/playdeceiveinc
Official Discord - https://discord.gg/deceiveinc
Official Forums - https://tinyurl.com/DI-Forums
Community Reddit - https://old.reddit.com/r/DeceiveInc

*Please note, all content mentioned is subject to change based on on-going development testing. We will of course continue to update the community on any and all changes.