Samson: Welcome To The Pit - Free Update is Live!

Hi everyone!

After weeks of hard work, we’re finally live with our biggest update yet: Welcome to The Pit! This free update brings a ton of exciting new content, along with improvements to quality, bug fixes, and overall performance.

We’re still incredibly excited to be working on this game and grateful to see so many of you continuing to enjoy it.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback, please share your thoughts with us on the Steam forums or in our community Discord: https://discord.com/invite/xPHpQgKUwG. We read everything and value your input.

Underneath, find details about what the new update contains:

New Area: Lowline Circuit Race Track

Access to the Pit, Tyndalston’s legendary Lowline Circuit with more Street Trials to beat! This newly opened up area also contains the usual mix of pickups, magazines, Sandwich Boards, Points of Interests, White Whisper stash locations, and opportunities to get ambushed by Debt Collectors. It also includes an endurance Street Trial Job, as well as two new free Street Trials that are always available.

Free Street Trials

With Lowline Circuit comes the introduction of a new type of Street Trial that is always on, always free (i.e. no AP cost) and as alway for Street Trials, 0 AP to Retry. There are two of these available for now:

• Lowline Circuit (free Street Trial, always available)Race on the legendary Lowline Circuit - beat the timer.

• Lowline Circuit - Reverse (free Street Trial, always available) Race on the legendary Lowline Circuit, but in the opposite direction - beat the timer.

Vehicle Customization

Modify Samson’s car, with performance upgrades and customization options at Floyd’s Garage.

Taxi Gig

If you’re short on cash and have no Action Points left, maybe consider stealing a cab and riding as a cab driver for an evening? The taxi gig starts automatically as you enter a cab, and allows you to take passengers around town for small fares. Fares have different preferences on how they want to get to their destinations, make sure to pay attention to their inclinations to maximize your cash reward. Perfect if you need to top up your daily earnings or if you just want to cruise around Tyndalston in a stress free environment.

New Jobs

With the new area comes a fresh batch of jobs appearing around the world, adding more opportunities to explore, make money, and see what the update has in store.

• Black Top Renegades You know the Blacktop Club. Street racers. Gearheads. A little wild, sure, but they usually mind their own business. Problem is, a few of their boys got ambitious and started running a gambling racket down at the Circuit without anybody's blessing. Blacktop leadership ain't behind it. Go down there and remind these cowboys to stay in their lane.

• You Move Me, Man Father O’Malley needs a man moved, fast. He’s been helping people off Whisper and the pushers want him gone. Pick him up at the church, stash him in the trunk. Harbor’s hot with crooked cops, so drive clean. Drop him at the containers, designated box. We take it from there. Nobody’s killing him on our watch.

• Van Diesel You know "Diesel" Donnie? Yeah, tweaker gearhead. He's cowtowing up to some Blacktop club dropouts who has him running errands. So, "Deisel" jacked a van full of pro-racing wheels. Genuine Rock Face and SupaStandard... forged magnesium, top of the line stuff. I want you to find that van and jack it back. Deliver it to the race track. Gonna be good money in your pocket.

• Bust Out Barry Stan Barry got pinched last night slingin’ coke. They’ve got him locked up the precinct for now, but they'll be moving him to jail. They're sending a cruiser for the transfer. Seek it out, tail it, wait for them to load Stan. Once they've left the precinct, run 'em off the road and bust Barry out. Don't kill him, he owes me a lot of money.

• The Meter’s Tickin’ We got too many eyes on us. Gotta slow our roll. We don't want to attract attention. I need to clean a lot of cash and it's gotta look legit. Simple stuff: drive a cab. Pick up fares and shit. My guys cook your books and my money comes out clean. This way, the pay is good and the risks are minimal. Find a cab and get to driving.

• Lowline Circuit Endurance Street Trial

Can you complete 10 laps on Lowline Circuit in 12 minutes?

Sandwich Boards

Once you’ve taken care of DeVries’ ugly sandwich boards, you might see new entrepreneurs stepping in to showcase their businesses. Smash those as well for a minor vehicle boost that will either do a small repair (red board) or top up a bit of Nitro for you (blue board.)

Enforcement

Both Police and Gang have become slightly easier to trick once you are Wanted or Escaping, since we have introduced a short “suspicious state” before you are detected by enforcement. This means that they now have to keep you in line of sight for some time before they actually get a visual on you. Localization

Added text localization support for Brazilian-Portuguese and Russian.

New Achievements

This update introduces a handful of new achievements tied to the content arriving in this release:

• Gig Economy - Complete your first cab fare in a Taxi Gig.

• Samson McCab - Complete 10 cab fares in one Day.

• Endurance Street Trial - Complete the Endurance Street Trial at Lowline Circuit.

• Chop Shop - Install your first car mod in Floyd’s garage.

• Open Sesame - Smash through the gate to Lowline Circuit.

Steam post image Combat Updates

• Improved animation fidelity for various combat moves.

• Increased animation coverage and reliability for parries from all directions.

• Improved parry timing to make them more consistent and responsive.

• Smoother motion when stepping up and down on objects.

• Reduced Posture damage slightly on Light and Heavy Attacks, and increased Health damage on them to not make it too easy to bring enemies to a takedown state with e.g. Light Attacks only.

• Increased Posture damage from some hazards to make them more relevant in bringing enemies to a takedown state.

• Fix for ragdoll being "frozen" when you push people over railings.

Mission Logic

• Fixed issues that could affect progression in Missions and Jobs.

Performance

• Optimization and better threading as well as budgeting of NPC characters.

• New asynchronous bulk tick system to reduce tick overhead.

• Performance improvement to various AI systems such as behaviour trees, targeting, mic and senses.

• Smoother frame pacing when VSync is disabled and not using frame generation.

• New custom throttling system to improve performance when running faster than 30 fps.

• Various general optimizations in Traffic System UI, WorldQuery, LodSync, StoryDeck and Audio.

• Wide performance improvements that help reduce hitches.

• Updated and added more systems to our custom timeshare system to reduce spikes in the game.