Update 20 - Iron Fortress

Hey everyone!

We've got a long awaited update for you today with Update 20;

🔶 New: Iron Fortress

It's finally here! A new alternative environment for the Arctic Base.

Iron Fortress, codename "D-Day" starts with a beach landing area, transistions to heavily fortified trenches and culminates in a heavily fortified fortress.

From the rocky beach, to the heavy trenches, missile launch zones and concrete reinforcements, the Fortress offers a very brutalist and very Synthetik style, with heavy cover, large open areas and a lot of action. Some assets you might remember from the first game :)

As the Iron Fortress is new, we need your feedback about issues, balancing and everything else!

🔶 UX

We did some improvements in the main menu and on the cursor.

• Cursor visibilty improved when out of range

• Cursor now has better anti-aliasing

• Cursor now shows more clear reload indication

• Varied minor cursor polish effects

• Active reload fail now hides the active reload bar

• Added mini-map icons for summons

• Main menu - varied menus renamed for simplicity

• Main menu - improved Armory Token user experience

🔶 Gameplay

Quality of Life

• Removed fallback self targeting on Ion Cannon

• Removed friendly targeting on dynamic reflector

• Sticky bomb now can explode while stunned

• Fixed Golden Boy removing itself still

Environments

• Fixed around 20 suboptimal enemy navigation areas in environments

• Normalized 3 maps which were far longer than others in terms of enemies

Other

• ZB-26 Rex damage 1.2 > 1.3

• Scavenger variant safety added & visual

• Handful of minor action fixes

🔶 Networking

Second reliability layer

We added a second reliability layer for important gameplay events like spawning entities, weapon actions, and other critical interactions.

Previously, these events relied only on Steam P2P’s built-in reliability. In rare cases with very poor connections, that could still lead to issues like enemies or other entities not spawning correctly. To reduce this, the game now also resends critical events at the application level.

This should greatly reduce worst-case problems caused by packet loss or unstable internet connections.

Smoother movement on bad connections

We also improved movement smoothing for high-latency and packet-loss scenarios.

In poor network conditions, enemy movement could sometimes look choppy for clients. To improve this, bots now send pathing information as well, which helps the client interpolate their movement more accurately. In our tests, bot movement looks much more stable even at high ping, including around 200 ms.

🔶 Oil Splats

Recently we noticed that oil impacts on the ground had a sort of smooth fade-in. After noticing we couldn't unsee it anymore. Tuning this made weapon impacts noticeably more direct and punchy.

• Oil splats are now more direct, leading to better impact feedback and feeling

• Oil splats are now slightly more consistently visible

🔶 Performance

Boss performance was in some arenas quite lacking due to some oversights, this has now been resolved and the affected fights have significantly better performance.

• Significantly improved Raptor Jet Boss performance

• Significantly improved X57 Spider Boss performance

• Significantly improved Hovercraft Boss performance

• Significantly improved Last Defender Boss performance

• Slightly improved Sawblade Boss performance

• Slightly improved Arena Masters performance

• Reduced pixel fill rate costs of most newer VFX

• Reduced pixel fill rate costs of varied distortion effects

• Reduced overdraw on Mortar Markers

• Reduced overdraw on basic Mortar Explosions

Synthetik 2 is now getting close to 1.0

With over 100 weapons, thousands of actions (items, perks, buffs..), 10 classes, and around 4 times the maps of the first game, we are at a state where we are slowly preparing for launch.

Getting the game to this point was a hard battle, with many big plans, some wrong turns, innovations, learnings, experiments and refactors. We are very proud about our progress from the initial start to the current state and how we have advanced as a team.

To bring a little perspective to the amount of work going into these games and the general complexity of such a project, here are the windows folders of both projects.

Of course there is always more to do. 1.0 is by far not the end either but we are very glad that we finally reached this point.

We can't disclose too many details about console ports but generally speaking, the game works well on console and we are dealing with certifications and launch preparation there as well.

That's it for Update 20!

Up next: More polish, fixes, UX, class improvements, balancing and quality of life.

We are also investigating mods in co-op and seeing about per-class tokens amongst other things! Updates will continue, stay tuned for the 1.0 annoucement!

Stay tuned! - Team FFG