Today marks the start of the new ranked season. This is the last season using the current perk system before The Labyrinth gets released in September. This season also sees the return of the Lumberyard to ranked! So don your chainsaws and plaid shirts, and jump into the ranked queue to earn some juicy ranked rewards this season.
Combat Improvements
We’ve made various adjustments to night time combat based on feedback from last season. Enraged terrors are now faster than non-enraged terrors. We’ve made some adjustments to the terror swipe, and added some new animations. We’ve also adjusted staggering and the light items to make them more intuitive. See the patch notes for more details.
Tutorial
The Game Master has put his Henchman to work and spruced up the in-game tutorial. The flow has been tightened up, voice-over has been added, as well as a general polish pass.
Legacy
From later today a legacy version of Deceit (2020) will be available to play. This is intended to help some of our legacy players to see more clearly how many improvements we have made, as a way to make feedback more constructive. It is not a fully supported version of the game. If this is something that interests you, join our Discord server for access.
Patch Notes
'Enraged' Terrors (able to execute an Innocent) now move 5% faster.
Terrors that aren't 'Enraged' will now down an Innocent in 1 swipe instead of 2, but also move 2.5% slower.
Swiping an Innocent at night will now ragdoll them instead of playing the usual down animation.
Innocents hit by a Terror's swipe at night will now respawn after 2s instead of 5s.
The 'Endling' movement speed buff awarded from being the only Infected alive has been removed.
The amount of blood awarded if your Infected partner dies has been changed from 2/4/6 based on floor to 4 regardless of floor. This means that you start the game with 1 execution if playing a Custom Game with just 1 Infected player.
The initial period of staggering a Terror, where they're unable to attack or use abilities, has been reduced from 1s -> 0.75s.
Staggering a Terror no longer applies a slow, instead each individual light item applies their own slow. The Camera & Trap both apply a 80% slow upon hit and the Torch applies a 15 -> 60% slow (ramping up over 1.75s of the Torch being on). The slow applied to the Terror will start decaying at a rate of 1% every 0.01s once they've started recovering their vision from being staggered. As an example case, if a full health Terror walks over a Trap they will be slowed by 80% for 1.75s and will then recover back to full speed over an extra 0.8s.
The Torch now ticks 5 times a second instead of 4, deals up to 75 damage per second (down from 120) but has 3s more battery life.
Players now receive 2 Traps when they complete an Objective awarding Traps.
Traps now deal 300 damage instead of 400. This means a Trap will no longer almost always down a Terror (360 base health).
The Camera can now be fired every 0.75s (down from 1.5s).
Terror sense has been reworked to permanently outline players, with decreasing clarity as you go through the floors, instead of reducing the frequency of revealing them. As such, Terror sense is now clearer on the first floor, slightly harder to see but permanent on the middle floor & fully disabled on the final floor.
Terrors now play a death animation when they're killed during the night.
The Experiment's clone now plays the correct run animations, mimics the Experiment's death audio & plays the new death animation when killed.
The Yeti is no longer slowed by 5% whilst its shield is active.
The perk ‘Strong Scent’ has been reworked to make terror sense clearer, rather than lasting longer.
Casual & Ranked queues now have different timeouts applied for 'dodging' a game. The timings remain the same for Ranked, but are more lenient for Casual to account for issues outside of the player's control.
The visual for anonymous players at night has been updated to be less 'ghost' like & to remove any identifying information about the player.
The Pistol is now always auto-equipped after using up another item.
The audio cue for players using Tamper Boxes & destroying Fuse Boxes has been made quieter.
Escape points are now shown on the minimap once they're available for use.
When a Generator is outlined to you at night, the player interacting with it (if they exist) will also be outlined.
The in-game translations have been updated thanks to our Community Translators.
[FIXED] Terrors can occasionally swipe players down even though they have an execution available.
[FIXED] The Escape Door interaction animations on the Asylum don't always line up correctly.
[FIXED] Your hand doesn't always correctly line up when restarting Generators at night.
[FIXED] Execution animations don't play correctly when killed from behind.
[FIXED] The Human & the Terror can occasionally be separated during the Execution animation.
Behind the scenes is an article series in which one of the Deceit developers takes us through some of the content that’s recently been in the works for the game.
Hi there! I’m John Handy, Senior Environment Artist on Deceit.
Over the course of this year we’ve been reworking the lighting and optimisation of our existing maps to improve their quality and level immersion. As of this week, four of our five maps have received our attention. We’ve been working to make best use of the assets we already have, before we shift our focus to brand new content next year. Let’s take a quick look at some of the progress we’ve made so far:
The Forest
The main issue I found with the forest was that we weren't making effective use of the lighting systems inside CryEngine. With the update I added a global moonlight as a way to subtly help with orientation. I updated lighting levels to leverage eye adaptation meaning when you go from bright areas into dark areas your eyes will adjust. Finally I enabled SVOGI for some tasty bounced lighting.
The Lumberyard
The Lumberyard had a few layout issues that had a big impact on the feeling whilst playing. The main thing I did was to address the time it takes to traverse from one area to another, as it took far too long to cross the map. Then like the forest, updated the lighting.
The Manor
The Manor had some serious performance problems that had been neglected and some art issues that meant it never looked how it should. I fixed a lot of the rendering and performance issues which means light now interacts more correctly with the environment. Then I added some more dramatic lighting throughout, helping the overall atmosphere.
The Asylum has been our main testing ground, with numerous visual updates throughout the year. This leaves just the Arctic, which we’ll be revisiting soon. Aside from that, we’re now looking at building some new content to level up our maps, including:
Cracks for humans to squeeze through, along with destructible walls. This will come together with new terror abilities.
New map-specific interactable elements to give each map a more unique identity.
More props to help bring more realism and variety to parts of our maps.
A new map as part of our next expansion!
When did you first join the Deceit team, and how have you found the experience overall?
I was one of the original developers at Automaton working on Deceit. After working elsewhere in the games industry, I have come back to continue work on Deceit.
Making a new game has its challenges, and there have been plenty of them during the development of Deceit. However the experience has been great, lots of ups and downs but at the end of the day I have had the chance to meet some great friends and make something we are proud of, and want to improve further.
Out of everything you’ve contributed to Deceit, what sticks out as your favourite thing to have worked on?
My main focus as an Environment Artist is to create the maps, which includes work on layout design, visual realism through materials and props, and lighting. I think my answer to this question changes over time.
Recently I have really enjoyed working on upgrading the lighting across the maps. There is a lot of great art which we have put time into over the years, and in my opinion the lighting wasn't representing it that well. The new manor is a good example of this. A bonus of upgrading the lighting system is how we have improved the atmospheric feeling through volumetric fog effects.
Do you have any sneak peaks you can share as to anything we’re expecting to see in the near future?
We have been discussing how we can make the maps foster better chase sequences during the night period. One idea we are playing with is having set destructible walls that the terrors could burst through, and balancing that with small passageways only the innocent can fit through.
This will be a really cool combination of Art and Design and I think will help to keep things fresh and add a lot of sandbox moments in the game.
Who is your favourite character to play in Deceit, and what outfit do you rock?
Honestly I like to mix it up, but I am a big fan of the Nina+Cap combo with the Oversized hoodie!
If people would like to follow you on your journey, where can they find you online?
A few years ago I actually dropped off all social media! However feel free to catch up with me in the Discord, or on my ArtStation
Clips Competition - The Results
Hello Test Subjects!
At the beginning of this month we launched our first community competition for Deceit. Entrants were required to submit their best short clips of their Deceit gameplay: showcasing their deceptive skills, prowess in shooting, and hilarious moments.
We’d like to thank everyone who took the time to enter, and we’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching all of the clips and judging the submissions.
So without further ado, the results are as follows:
1st place - vazza - £100 Steam Giftcard & Pre-release t-shirt 2nd place - ColesStew - Pre-release t-shirt 3rd place - tutuletz - 125 Loot booth tokens
We’d also like to award a runners up award of 25 loot booth tokens to 3 entrants - Weeb, HedShred, and FedericoRaya.
Once again, thank you to all of our entrants, and we’re looking forward to running more community competitions in the near future.
It’s back! We took the decision to temporarily disable the Lumberyard with our July 1st update whilst we levelled it up a bit. This was a decision we made based on both the analytics from the live servers, and as a result from our internal playtesting.
Whilst still having the same vibe and feel, The Lumberyard has gone through a significant amount of structural rework bringing it more in-line with the other maps from an aesthetic, balancing, and fun perspective.
We’re looking forward to seeing what you think of these changes, and will be reading all feedback to make any further refinements where needed.
NB: to help protect competitive integrity, The Lumberyard will not be available in ranked games until next season.
Improved Server Region Matching
Your game server will now be selected based on proximity (of the players in your game) to our nearest datacenter rather than based on which language you queue on. The goal of this is to reduce latency (ping times) overall, which can reduce instances of lag-related bugs and players teleporting around.
Prior to this update, game servers would be selected based on the language you were queued in, for example, this would lead to players in the UK playing on the English queue playing on US servers; these players will now instead play on European servers.
Patch Notes
The Pistol now sways as you aim & move your character around.
Taking Generators is now 20% faster (3s -> 2.4s).
If there are some Generators to be auto-completed they will now complete once every 2.5s instead of all at once.
Akin to the middle floor, the first night period now only requires 8 Generators to be completed if there are 2 Infected alive. If there’s only 1 Infected alive this period still requires 10 Generators.
If there’s only one Innocent alive on the middle floor all bar one Generator will be automatically completed.
The initial part of a Terror’s stagger, where they’re unable to attack, has been reduced from 1.25s to 1s. The overall duration of the stagger is still the same.
Terrors that are staggered will now find it a bit harder to see where their attacker ran off to.
The restriction on rotating your Terror when staggered by light has been heavily reduced.
Terrors can no longer attack or use their abilities after recently (1s) having their attack deflected by a Human wearing armour.
Infected players now only get a flat 1 blood for swiping down an Innocent at night instead of 1/2/3 based on floor.
Several changes were made in an attempt to stop Terrors playing audio after transforming out.
Our in-game translations have been updated thanks to our Community Translators.
[FIXED] Players can accidentally fall out of the map when running to the middle floor of the Asylum.
[FIXED] Occasionally players don’t get outlines to the nearest Generator to complete.
[FIXED] The Werewolf is unintentionally 10% slower than the other Terrors.
[FIXED] Players are able to remain in Terror form in a section of the second area of the Manor.
[FIXED] Alt+Tabbing out of the game whilst in Fullscreen can stop you from being able to type.
It’s time to get your sunscreen and swimming gear ready! The summer event is just around the corner, coming to Deceit mid-August.
‘Dev Blog’ is a new series that tells the on-going story of our current development focus, giving you an early first-look at game features we’re currently working on, and what you can expect in Deceit in the near future. We’re excited to see your response and feedback to the articles in this series through our various socials, which gives us useful insight into how we can tweak these systems pre-release.
Progression systems come in many different forms in video games - their purpose being to give us the motivation to return to the game for a steady stream of new content and rewards. Back when Deceit was first released in 2017, ours - levelling, prestige, reputation, and perks - were an afterthought. This year we are overhauling these systems completely, and we want to tell you a bit about that today.
Introducing the Labyrinth
The Labyrinth is a repeatable puzzle minigame that is the cornerstone of our progression systems. It ties together Levelling (and Prestige), Challenges, Perks, the Loot Booth and more. You’ll be controlling a rabbit companion to work your way through a circular maze towards an escape. Along the way you’ll be breaking open routes and collecting rewards. When you reach the end you’ll level up and discover the next puzzle. As you level up the puzzles get more tricky but also more rewarding.
How do you play the Labyrinth?
You’ll be able to access the Labyrinth from the main menu where it will have a physical 3D presence, like the Loot Booth. Experience Points (XP) will now be used to unlock routes through the Labyrinth which gives you access to collecting rewards and to escape. Some rewards are required to open the escape, others are optional.
It’s quite hard to describe the puzzle so below is a mock-up of how the Labyrinth works. The gold circles are required rewards, blue circles are optional rewards, and the green slice is a route that you’re hovering over to potentially unlock.
NB: This is a mock-up drawing to demonstrate the Labyrinth, not an accurate in-game depiction.
What else is changing?
Firstly, Loot Booth Tokens are going to be given out in Shards from the Labyrinth. Collect enough Shards and you’ll be able to combine them into a Loot Booth Token. Instead of spending 3 loot booth tokens per turn, you will now spend 1 token, and get 3 rewards per turn.
Secondly, Perks will no longer be linked to seasons and instead be permanently unlocked when found. From the ones you have unlocked you will be able to choose 3 Normal Perks as well as 1 Ultimate Perk. There will also no longer be Infected perks, instead Terrors will receive their own levelling system separately, called Terror Mutations, which we’ll talk more about soon.
Thirdly, Challenges are being simplified to being just one task each and grouped into Series. There will be no concept of activating challenges. There are now three categories of challenge:
Normal - Core challenges that are automatically unlocked and progressable
Daily - given to you each day you log in
Story - found in the Labyrinth to discover more about the world of Deceit
There will be lots of series of challenges within these categories, and each challenge must be completed before you’re given the next. For example, for the base challenge series specifically about the camera, you’ll need to complete camera challenge 1 before getting camera challenge 2.
Fourthly, Prestiging will now be optional when you reach the maximum depth of the Labyrinth. This resets you back to level 1, but there will be an upgraded look and feel of your Labyrinth, and you’ll be able to show off your new level of mastery. This comes with a trade-off of losing progress in some of the systems mentioned which you can earn back as you start to level up again.
Lastly, we’re reworking the End of Game Experience. This will now be done in-game before returning to the menu so players can talk to each other before they go their separate ways. You’ll be able to see a more advanced breakdown of how you did in the game and review your progress in-line with these new system changes.
What are the rewards from the Labyrinth?
The Labyrinth is the home of rewards, as such there will be a whole array of loot for you to get your hands on, including:
Loot Booth Tokens - unlock cosmetics for your characters
Story Challenges - learn more about the world of Deceit
Perks - improve your likelihood of winning games
XP - for you to progress further into the Labyrinth
There are also three more systems that we’ll be releasing later on in the year that will also be given out from the Labyrinth, which are:
Boons - activatable effects in the Labyrinth to manipulate the puzzle
Upgrades - consumable attachments to items
Cards - ways to modify and spice up each game of Deceit
When is the Labyrinth being released?
Due to the connectedness to our other progressions systems this will be released in a multi-phased approach, starting in September. This means we will release with an initial group of perks and challenges, with more to come throughout the rest of the year!
Upon release your existing level and prestige will be respected and transferred directly into the new system. To avoid higher levels from being thrown in at the deep end we will offer information on how to play the Labyrinth.
What can we expect from future progression system updates?
We have so many plans around progression and meta systems in general. We’ll be sharing them with you as we start working and as they get nearer to release. We have plans to appeal to social party players, completionists and the competitive crowd, and anyone in between.
Next in our ‘Dev Blog’ article series we’ll be discussing our plans to bring further depth and responsiveness to combat in Deceit, through additional Terror Abilities, animations and other improvements.
v2021.5.0 - The War Against Cheaters
Hello Test Subjects!
Today’s update brings the next iteration of our Anti-cheat system, along with several bug-fixes, polish, and balancing tweaks.
The current state of Anti-cheat
Cheating in Deceit is a significant issue that has been plaguing the community for some time. Last year we made an initial, first iteration of anti-cheat, that primarily targeted cheats that we could easily detect on the game servers. Since it was released, this iteration of the anti-cheat has enabled us to detect and punish over 60,000 instances of bad actors, and to this day this number continues to climb.
Today’s update: EasyAntiCheat
In today’s anti-cheat update we’ve integrated with EasyAntiCheat - which helps target the client-side injected cheats that we’re currently unable to prevent or detect on the game server side. With this we anticipate that the number of cheaters you see in-game will be greatly reduced, however we’ll keep our eye on the situation and will remain vigilant. For more information on EasyAntiCheat you can visit their website: https://www.easy.ac/.
Please note, we are intentionally leaving out some details and numbers around our anti-cheat effort in order to avoid giving any information that cheat program developers may use to their advantage.
If you happen to run into any issues with this update, please reach out to us on our official Discord.
What are the next steps?
Anti-cheat is a long lasting arms race between game developers and cheaters. Moving forward, we are looking into more ways to detect players from cheating, and aiming to ensure a high quality of games for all players. This includes detecting players who choose to circumvent the fair rules of the game, including boosting and teaming.
Reporting players
If you suspect someone of cheating, please use the in-game reporting function, and detail what sort of cheat you suspect them of using in the description box. These reports are critically important for us to verify how well our detection system is working.
Patch Notes
The Fuse Box time reduction in the first 2 areas has been increased from 25s to 30s.
Several in-game analytics events have been added to enhance how we track, and subsequently improve, the different types of games that players experience.
The in-game translations have been updated thanks to our Community Translators.
The middle night period now only requires 8 Generators to be completed if there are still 2 Infected alive. If there’s only 1 Infected alive this period still requires 10 Generators.
When the final Infected is eliminated from the game the Generators will instead behave as if an Innocent was eliminated, maintaining the uncertainty of whether or not your vote was legitimate.
[FIXED] Reducing the number of extra Generators available from 2 to 1 when there’s only 1 Infected alive caused 1 Generator to be auto-completed, instead of disabled. This made it unintentionally easier for the Innocent to complete all the Generators at night vs 1 Infected.
[FIXED] Players can’t damage other players with melee attacks (terror swiping & knifing) through water.
[FIXED] The hologram for Reward Crates holding either the Lethal Injection or the Shotgun doesn’t get fully removed once the crate is no longer usable.
[FIXED] Light can shine through the doors to the final area of the Manor.
[FIXED] You’re able to jump out of the map in the first area of the Forest.
[FIXED] You’re able to climb up onto the Asylum’s Swimming Pool scaffolding.
[FIXED] You’re unable to easily interact with a Reward Crate in the second area of the Forest.
[FIXED] The Terminal Objective briefly flickers as you start to use it.
We’re excited to announce our first ever community competition for Deceit! We’re on the lookout for the best Deceit video clips that are worthy of winning some amazing prizes. Impress us with your next level deception skills, or make us fall off of our chairs laughing. We’re hyped to see the best moments from your games.
Prizes
First place - £100 digital steam gift card (currency can be auto-converted by Steam) and a pre-release official Deceit t-shirt from our upcoming merch store (unisex sizes XS-4XL). Second place - A pre-release official Deceit t-shirt from our upcoming merch store (unisex sizes XS-4XL). Third place - 125 Loot booth tokens in-game.
How to enter
Submit your entry by tweet with your 60 second or less video attached, including the hashtag #DeceitClipsCompetition and tagging our official Twitter @PlayDeceit.
Timeline
Entries can be submitted between now and 11:59 PM BST on Sunday 25th July.
Entries will be judged by the Deceit development team.
Winners will be announced in a follow-up news post on Friday 30th July.
Winners will be contacted by Twitter direct message to redeem their prizes, therefore entrants must either be following the @PlayDeceit account, or have their DMs open.
Eligibility
The clip submitted must be authored by you.
Clips must be from patch 2021.4.0 or later (July 1st).
There must be no use of other brand’s copyrighted material (e.g. copyrightable music).
There is no limit as to how many clips each person can enter.
Clips can be at most 60 seconds long.
Entrants must be at least 16 years of age.
Entrants must not be banned in Deceit.
No purchase necessary to enter or to win.
Violation of any of the conditions or rule breaking will result in disqualification.
We’re looking forward to seeing your entries!
See you in-game,
The Baseline Team
Patch Notes - v2021.4.2
Patch Notes
Several changes have been made to the Terror respawning system in order to help fix players getting stuck with a black screen.
Traps will now only trigger once a Terror is fully out of a vent and is damagable.
Terrors will now be able to see the time until an executed player bleeds out above their body.
The melee system (knifing & terror swiping) system has been adjusted to better enable players to hit those hiding in designated hiding spots.
The visuals for the items obtainable from Objectives have been improved.
Voice lines at night are now enabled/disabled based on if a player is in ghost form, rather than if the lights are off. This fixes voice lines incorrectly playing for players in the gas and also enables these voice lines for those in Terror form, or playing with night anonymity off.
[FIXED] Players are sometimes unable to move after exiting a vent.
[FIXED] Ghost players incorrectly have a yellow outline on them that helps reveal their location.
[FIXED] Changing the elevation in the minimap / vent map when in the gas will cause the wrong floor to load.
[FIXED] Lights that remain on when the power is out (candles etc) flicker as the day period ends.
[FIXED] The in-game keybinds for item slots 3-5 show the keybind for item slot 2.
[FIXED] The large tower lights in the final area of the Manor have no collision on them.
[FIXED] A consumable spawn in the first area of the Manor is stuck under a generator.
[FIXED] The Challenge task for collecting armour doesn't work.
Improved performance on the Manor map. We'll be working on further performance & lighting improvements for this map in the future.
Players can no longer be downed or executed when they are already transitioning to the next area.
[FIXED] The Chinese, Korean & Japanese languages don't display properly in-game.
[FIXED] The interaction text for picking up the Lethal Injection is missing.
[FIXED] Players can occasionally get stuck in an infinite respawn loop.
We've also been tracking and working on several other fixes for issues highlighted in our #bug-report channel on Discord, including Terrors occasionally being stuck unable to select a vent. We aim to release another patch next week with some further fixes.
