Update 14 - Chips Revamp - Part 1

Dear Sweet Surrender Community,

We’re back with another massive update. The central focus of this update is a revamp of our core Chips Upgrade system, but we’ve also made numerous Quality of Life improvements across the whole game.

23 New and Improved Chips

Our efforts to revamp the chip system started last year as we sought ways to better balance the game. To that end we have made several major changes:

We introduced Nano Stims - a new way to boost your health. Keep your eyes open for them.

We created a new category of Economy chips that heavily involves gears with 7 new chips

We revamped the Projectile category - chips affecting bullet damage - with 9 new chips and 3 improved ones.

We also revamped the Quickfire category - chips affecting firing rate, magazine size and recoil - with 2 new chips and 2 improved ones.

We removed some of the less interesting chips.

Here’s a full list of all the new and revamped chips in this update

Click on "Show Spoilers" - Gray lines indicate improved existing chips

Whenever we could, we tried to combine at least two systems to encourage more interesting builds to evolve. It’s been fun watching our community during Beta testing come up with new and different ways combinations and builds.

Later this year we plan two further updates refreshing the rest of the chips, as well as bringing further improvements to these systems.

Explosions Rebalancing

We wanted to make grenades more interesting and useful in the game. To that end, we did a pass on their strength and radius to make them more impactful.

We then did a pass on ALL explosions in the game to change their radius, fall-off curves and corresponding visuals. Explosion radius should now more closely align with their visuals.

Improved Holosights

We have massively improved the visuals for the holo sights (laser-sighted handgun, focus handgun, assault rifle and both sniper rifles). We also added a dot to the laser pointer on the lasersighted handgun for more precise aiming.

Improvements for First Time Player

We’ve taken the time to once again thoroughly test the experience for first time players. It’s quite easy to take this for granted ~4 years after launch, but it’s also one of the hardest areas to get feedback on from players.

Despite that, we’re still doing what we can to improve our first-time experience, as well as making our more hidden mechanics easier to notice for returning players:

• We added a “Tips” screen in the homebase, scrolling through our most frequently requested tips

• We added a clearer explanation (and reminder) of the existence of our map. Also added an indicator on your wrist.

• We added a Settings Screen directly in your homebase, to more directly surface our extensive options for the player. And also as a QoL feature, so you can finally directly see your changes live when adjusting your graphics settings or holster positions.

• Gears are now more easy to spot, with added particle effects (color-coded to indicate value)

• Better on-boarding of comfort options and leaderboard

Weapon-Environmental Collisions

Last year we introduced a fundamental rework of our collision system, allowing players to prevent collisions between their weapons and the environments. This was a commonly-reported source of frustration for first-time players.

We’ve now disabled weapon-environment collisions by default for all players. For existing players, you can re-enable collisions if you like in the Weapons settings menu.

New Settings

We’ve added several player-requested settings in the last few updates that we would like to highlight:

• Over the shoulder slot height adjustment

• Optional speed run timer

• Extra player height offset

• Quest 3 now has a custom graphics settings screen

Various Other Chip Improvements

We’ve made several visual improvements to how we present chip information. Better layout, better use of color. We have further improvements still planned, including an improved system for conveying the chip active status.

Improved In-Game Patch Notes

We’ve reworked our in-game patch notes system to communicate a summary of our last 5 major updates. This new system also allows us to update the patch notes without an update to the game. We plan to use this in the future to communicate upcoming changes and other developer news.

Save & Quit

We’ve revamped the Save & Quit to make it a bit more robust against leaderboard abuse and class-based progression issues. After some internal discussions, we’ve also decided to remove the “Save & Quit” station once you move past the first room in the level. We’ve improved our Class Stats tracking, including across Save & Quits.

Melee Improvements

We’ve made several improvements to our melee weapons so that they behave more reliably. There’s still further improvements to make in this area but it’s going to take a deeper undertaking to get right.

Improved Bug Reporter

We’ve improved our bug reporter interface (better keyboard, avoiding duplicate logs) and the underlying tech (we can now see errors you ran into in a previous run, not just the current run). This helps us investigate some of the rarer issues players run in.

Conclusion & Next Steps

We’ve made a bunch more smaller touches here and there, please see the full list of improvements and fixes below.

A big thank you to our Discord community, especially our Beta Testers. We released 4 major betas for this update over the last few months, and our testers helped us track down quite a few bugs, new and old.

This is again, a big Quality of Life (and FREE) update. It’s our big thank you to all those who keep playing and enjoying our games. We appreciate all your kind words and feedback.

Stay tuned later this year for Part 2 of our Chips Revamp\!

Release Notes

Improvements

• RemovedGameplayAdded Nano Stims that give you a health boost (performance chip has been correspondingly removed)
• RemovedChipsReworked overpowered chips Mobile Malware (scale based on damage \+ probability) and Health Regen (removed)
• AddedChipsNew Gear/Economy category with 7 new chips
• AdjustedChipsRevamped the Projectile and Quickfire chip categories with 11 new chips and 5 improved chips
• AdjustedChipsRevamped and improved chip tiers and chip distribution

• Gameplay: Rebalanced level distribution to better work with Economy chips.

• Gameplay: Player grenades are stronger, with a bigger range

• RemovedGameplaySave & Quit station is removed once you leave the start room of a level.

• Gameplay: Enemies are less accurate after you teleport

• Gameplay: Buffed auto-reloading (faster) on Heavy Submachine Gun, Burst Shotgun and Heavy Grenade Launcher

• AdjustedGameplayImproved teleporter pad behavior so it’s easier to approach them from behind

• Gameplay: Healing pods no longer heal each other

• Gameplay: Healing pod “heal” visuals match correctly to affected radius

• Gameplay: Improvements to the final boss scenes including reducing overall performance impact

• UX: Tips screen in homebase

• UX: Settings screen in homebase

• AdjustedUXImproved in-game Patch Notes
• AdjustedUXImproved comfort options descriptions for first-time players

• UX: Weapon-Environmental Collisions are off by default now

• AddedUXShow “no leaderboard available” until player has completed first run

• UX: Vending Machine UI improvements: more clearly communicate level progress and gear usage

• AddedUXNew map visual indicator on wrist

• Visuals: All enemies now have muzzle flash and recoil when they shoot

• Visuals: Leaderboard layouts and highlighting active leaderboard

• AddedSettingsnew option for adjusting over the shoulder slot height

• Settings: Optional speed run timer

• Settings: Extra player height offset

• Settings: Replaced 3rd graphic mode on Quest 3 with customizable settings

• Visuals: Gears are more visually apparent

• Visuals: Chip UI improvements

• Visuals: “Snappier” animations for sniper scope

• AdjustedVisualsImproved feedback on elevator button and vending machine buttons

• Visuals: Tunnel Robot now has an idle animation

Bug Fixes

• FixedKatana EMPfixed triggering completely refilling the energy (now should gradually refill)

• Melee weapon collisions with environments

• Fix BlastAcidGrenade null collision issues

• Fixed duplicate bullet reload sounds

• FixedSewersfixed bridge that didn’t lower visually but collision lowers

• Class specific leaderboard stats track correctly across saves

• Fixed class progression on grenadier class so that all grenades count

• Fixed incessant beeping on turret spiders

• Fixed duplicate holo sight element on rifles

• Fixed room generation issues with overlapping containers

• A number of bugs reported by the community during beta (including infinite ammo, broken crit chips, infinite gear issues and a lot of balancing issues).

• Added a 1k cap on max amount of gears