Downloaded and got to play a few hours on this shiny new beta branch, and so far it is AWESOME. This isn’t a tear-down of the patch notes, just the things that I noticed while playing.
Performance! Wayyyy better. Ran smoothly with nearly double FPS for me. Loading times also dropped considerably.
Voice lines: so good! I heard a ton of new ones already. Some situational ones for Skittergate are particularly awesome. Also noticed some better synergy with ult voice lines no longer cutting off other character dialogue, instead they overlapped.
Stealth visuals: When Shade/HM/Ranger use stealth, their character model now fades out so you can barely see them. Really adds to the effect especially when Shade is sneaking through a mob.
Spawns: Seemed much, much better, in 3 hours of playtime did not have any total RNG apocalypse scenarios. No face spawns or bugged patrols yet, but that bug can be intermittent so time will tell.
The Melee Headshot Sound is insanely satisfying. For me it is one of those things, I did not think was necessary but now you would have to pry it from the cold hands of my dead, ravaged body.
Optimizations are really the focus of this patch. The game runs so smooth…I love it.
Also some love for controller users as the menus got many shortcuts now.
Specials, including disablers, spawn in duos but I feel like the amount of hordes has increased insanely. But that could have been only coincidence or my subjective perception.
that is one of the things i am looking forward to the most. getting headshot pings from ranged weapons was satisfying enough, when sound cues are added to melee, it would be doubly satisfying!
I have noticed this a few times… I think, anyway. There have been a few times where there was a suspicious amount of SVs just standing around or mixed in with other ambients. A whole patrol worth but they weren’t even lined up or marching, just sorta hanging out.