Update #78: New Merc-Driven Storyline: Specter from the Past

Knights, we are excited to drop even more content into the merc-driven storylines we have been building up over the last few months - now with a story that can resurface an old name, someone you thought was dead. And it turns out - they badly need your hel ! This update pairs with the recent "Depths of Loyalty" and "Deltaware Re-Activation" updates to further expand on merc-driven story content.

In translations land - we have recently announced the upcoming Simplified Chinese translation 《赛博骑士：闪点行动 Cyber Knight: Flashpoint》and are looking for community members to help in the review process (see below). Thank you to all who have provided feedback on the other newly released translations! We've provided UI improvements where needed and accepted many suggestions.

If you are enjoying the updates and constant improvements, please take a moment to leave a review!

Our Save Game Policy and Updates

Since you'll always be seeing a lot of updates around here, we want to reiterate our saved game policy so everyone understands our commitment to your games. No saved game will ever be invalidated by an update. All new content and features will be added immediately to all saved games (with the reasonable exception of New Game options). You never have to restart if you don't want to. This is a studio commitment that we have made and kept for many years and games. We stand by it. So do not stress about the deluge of updates that is coming your way - heist on my good heisters.

Merc-Driven Storyline: Unexpected Specter

This is a storyline and a Casting Director ability that we've been talking about for a long time and we're excited to roll it out into game. The Casting Director has a wide range in its ability to match and pick appropriate characters and contacts to fill roles within stories, and it even has the power to reach into the grave and find someone there.

With Update #78, we've added the first "post-humous" stoyline, where a dead merc can reappear as an echo in the game. In this case, as you'll find, they weren't as dead as you had thought and are now in need of your help - if you can pull it off.

This storyline and the Unexpected Specter mission unlock after Power Level 5.

Fixed Death Tags

With this update, we resolved issues with character's death tagging to make sure it is clear and now lists the name of the heist on which you died. In the future, we hope to further upgrade this tag to include the Contacts and Factions that you were working for (if any) and working against.

Retirement Re-Sort: Loyalty First

As we prepare to add more Retirement slide options to the game, we've completed a review and some housecleaning of the Casting Director's Retirement matching rules and made some improvements.

While we fixed a few bugs and improved some of the matching rules for some retirement outcomes, the big change was to adjust how the retirement list is sorted. Previously, three sorts were used in priority - seniority on the team (top), Loyalty (fallback) and Level (super fallback). This gave an enormous amount of weight to seniority and the date you joined the merc company above all else. We have redone the sorting order to shift seniority to the super fallback position, preferring to sort by Loyalty, Level and Seniority only if Loyalty and Level were the same.

This has refreshed and updated some of the retirement results that you team may have previously received.