Time flies! Today is GunColony’s 6th birthday. As is tradition for the past five anniversaries, we have prepared a jumbo-sized update waiting for you.
In Update 1.0, we are starting fresh and completely rethinking how the game should be played. We have replaced the Loadout and Armor mechanics in PVP with brand new versions, greatly increasing your loadout options and making it faster to switch loadouts and react to changing circumstances. In addition, the weapon balance has been through an unprecedented overhaul through temporary weapon removals, new weapon-specific modifications, and aggressive balance changes. Entirely new weapon categories like grenade launchers, as well as a new money and shop system as our take on “killstreaks”, serve to greatly diversify the core gameplay of PVP.
PVE players can rejoice too: Mob-Arena has also received gameplay changes on an unprecedented scale. While ammo is now limited and needs to be refilled, Buy Stations are now scattered across all maps, which allow you to quickly resupply your ammo, and obtain extra explosives and air support. In addition, you can purchase permanent upgrades like additional weapon modifications, custom armor enchants, and even extra loadouts to carry up to 3 weapons of any type and maximize ammo efficiency. It is now more imperative than ever to stay alive over the course of a game, so that you can upgrade yourself and keep up with the ever-growing horde.
Finally, we’re committed to making our 6th anniversary the largest one yet, and for the first time ever, it will be split into more than one major update releasing back-to-back. We have two more updates planned over the next two weeks, which will give a fresh look to spawn and add new weapon-specific modifications, among many other new features. Be sure to stay tuned!
NEW WEAPON
We have added the G3A3, a battle rifle with a slower 500 RPM rate of fire. This gives it great contrast to the M14 EBR and is overall a more balanced option that doesn’t have the wild recoil of faster firing battle rifles.
TEMPORARY WEAPON REMOVALS
As announced in the last blogpost, roughly half of our weapons have been temporarily removed from all modes except Competitive. This is because we want to take the time and rebalance every weapon in GunColony in order to create a healthier and more diverse meta. The remaining weapons have received totally different stats, and new modifications will also be coming for them later this week. Again, we understand that for some players, their favorite weapon might have been among the ones removed, but please know that your progress will be kept when the weapons are added back. We hope that there won’t be a content drought with all of the other new content we have added as part of this update.
We will to use Discord polls later this week to decide which weapons will be added back first. Be sure to participate in these polls so you can get your favorite weapons back into the game as soon as possible.
LOADOUTS
The new Loadouts are the flagship feature of this update and affect both PVP and Mob-Arena. In both modes, the basic idea is the same: you can store 10 Custom Loadouts and customize them to your hearts content before each game begins. This is much like the system used in Call of Duty and other first-person shooters with complex class building systems.
In PVP, gone are the days of constantly fiddling around with weapons in your loadout while making sure they stay under the price limit. Now, you can simply choose your loadouts before the game and switch between them with ease. In addition, the loadouts now use “Supply” instead of money. You have a maximum of 25 supply and every weapon has an integer price, making loadout-building more intuitive. You can now also equip two of the same grenade, and there have been new armor and explosive types added (more on that later).
In Mob-Arena, the biggest change is the ability to bring up to 4 explosive weapons of your own choice, in addition to the ones provided by your kit. You will now enter the battle (and respawn) with a few more necessities to get yourself out of an early sticky situation. In addition, you can purchase additional loadouts over the course of a game, which will be explained in more detail below.
Finally, modifications on your weapons will no longer have a penalty, which is an experimental feature. You’re always better off having 5 mods on every weapon now (this change also affects Competitive). We will do polls in the future to decide whether the community is happy with this change or whether a small reward should be readded when using fewer than 5 modifications.
PVP SHOP SYSTEM
In PVP, you will now earn some money per enemy killed, and a high amount of bonus money for killstreaks.
The money can be used in a new shop to buy one-time use items including grenades, airstrikes, and a few fun special items. Items purchased from the shop will not drop on death, and will last for the course of a match or until you use them.
Additionally, the Zombie Siege mode has a special shop:
MOB-ARENA SHOP SYSTEM
The new Mob-Arena shop works a little differently than PVP. There is no Equipment Tablet in your hand, and instead, you must visit one of the Buy Stations on the map:
Right clicking the shop will get you into the GUI. Note that if you are holding a live weapon it will waste a few rounds into the shop, which currently cannot be fixed due to how our gun system works, so we recommend swapping weapons and opening the shop during the swap animation.
In Mob-Arena, you can purchase some special items too:
- Ammo Resupply ($2000): replenishes all ammo for your weapons.
- Weapon Upgrade ($3000 for primaries, $2000 for secondaries): adds a random attachment onto your weapon, letting you exceed the normal 5-attachment limit. You can only have one attachment in each slot, except there is no limit to the number of Weapon Perks. You have the option to either accept or give up each attachment, so with enough repetitions you can eventually get to a perfect build in Endless Mode. Once you accept an attachment, you can not undo adding it.
- Loadout (quite expensive, varies depending on loadout): allows you to buy another loadout, including the kit that comes with your Primary Weapon. In addition, you get to keep your previous loadout (you can still only carry three weapons in total though). There are a number of cool things you can do with this, and I’ll leave it to you to discover them all.
MOB-ARENA AMMO SYSTEM
In this update, Mob-Arena has received perhaps its biggest change ever: the addition of limited ammo.
Instead of being able to shoot to your heart’s content, there is now a limit to the amount of ammo you can carry. You may gain additional ammo by getting it as rare drops from mobs, or by resupplying at a Buy Station. Depending on your weapon and how efficiently you use ammo, you might either need to visit Buy Stations a lot, or not at all. Bosses also drop a large amount of ammo which should be plenty in solo matches, but with higher player counts it will not be enough to resupply everyone.
There is a maximum amount of backup ammo you can obtain from resupplying at a Buy Station. Picking up ammo from mobs will allow you to exceed this amount, but only slightly as you are only able to pick up ammo if your current backup ammo is below the maximum. Also, the amount of ammo picked up from mobs will round randomly to a full mag, except if the ammo amount is less than one mag, in which case it will not try to round the ammo amount to prevent it sometimes giving you zero ammo.
By purchasing additional loadouts or picking up the weapons of dead teammates, you can now have more than one primary weapon in Mob-Arena. In fact, you can have any type of weapon in all three of your weapon slots. This lets you get more out of each ammo refill. However, you might also want to keep your secondary weapon as they are typically more ammo-efficient than primary weapons due to dealing higher damage per shot.
Finally, the ultimate tip to save ammo is to go melee. Duh.
BALANCE CHANGES
Every remaining weapon in the game has been completely rebalanced. These changes are intentionally large and meant to be experimental. Since we now have a reduced weapon count, we can make quick changes in case something does not work out or to catch “missed” opportunities.
In general:
- Weapons now have greater accuracy overall, both in hipfire and when aiming down sights
We felt that increasing the accuracy of weapons increases the overall skill ceiling of the gameplay, and greater hipfire accuracy improves the ability of Assault Rifles and LMGs to compete at close quarters, as you are less disadvantaged by the longer ADS times of heavier weapons. SMGs did also receive a hipfire buff, but this is kept in check by the armor changes in the next section.
- Different weapons now have a different headshot multipliers
Higher DPS weapons now tend to have a lower headshot multiplier than lower DPS weapons. This is less realistic, but greatly helps with balance and weapon diversity, as low DPS weapons now have a fighting chance at medium ranges instead of only being useful at long range. In return, higher DPS weapons no longer have arbitrarily reduced damage range than lower DPS weapons, adding back some realism in that sense.
- Hipfire spread is now uniform, unless using a Laser modification
Although hipfire battles are inherently random, we felt that luck was still too much of a factor in the outcome of close-range gunfights. By making hipfire bullets no longer clustered together, we reduce the chance of getting multiple consecutive hits or misses out of pure randomness. There is minimal sacrifice in realism for players who want it, since when using a the 1mW Laser or 5mW Laser, you will still get a clustered hipfire spread at the cost of an increase in crosshair size.
- Entity Penetration Damage increased for all calibers
Entity Penetration is a stat that mainly affects the Mob-Arena mode. As ammo in Mob-Arena is now limited, allowing for greater entity penetration damage provides players with an additional way to increase their ammo efficiency than aiming for headshots or using melee weapons. You are better rewarded for lining up multiple mobs in a row and hitting them all, especially with a sniper rifle.
- Belt-fed Machine Guns are cheaper
Light machine guns already had proper trade-offs compared to an assault rifle in most situations. The high ammo capacity allows them to lock down a corner at close range, but the slow mobility meant that grenades and flashbangs could effectively counter this strategy. At long range, with better damage and velocity but higher idle sway than assault rifles, they were also well balanced. Therefore, in this update, we have reduced their price to be more in line with assault rifles as well, in order to increase their usage.
- Sniper and marksman rifles have less flinch (aimpunch when shot), except for .338 and higher calibers
Many of our lighter sniper rifles are intended to allow for high-skill quick-scoping playstyles at close to medium ranges, where the player must aim for headshots or upper body shots in order to be successful. However, up until now they have been more of a novelty than a serious contender at these ranges, because getting hit would result in a flinch that threw your shot above the enemy’s head. In comparison, higher caliber sniper rifles could one-shot-kill anywhere on the body, which meant that flinch affected them less and they became the undisputed meta for sniper rifles. Reducing the flinch on lightweight snipers should make them more viable and competitive with heavy sniper rifles like the AWM. This buff also affects semi-automatic marksman rifles since they were previously underpowered as well, even though weapons like the WA2000 had good damage properties.
- Pistols have increased recoil recovery speed (less increase on Desert Eagle and revolvers)
The pistols will now recover their recoil faster, meaning that you now have an opportunity to let recoil reset fully between each shot while still outputting a competitive amount of DPS. This rewards discretion and aim over spam-clicking on sight.
- Pistols can now penetrate one target and hit the enemy behind it; Desert Eagle and revolvers can now penetrate two targets instead of one
This change mainly makes pistols more useful in Mob-Arena, now that they are competing with a primary weapon for the same weapon slot as soon as you purchase an Additional Loadout. You are still better off going with another primary, of course, but adding entity penetration at least gives pistols one advantage over a SMG that is worth considering.
- Starter pistols no longer have reduced damage and instead have reduced rate of fire
Previously the starter pistols had less damage than other pistols of the same caliber, for no real reason other than being starter pistols. Taking a page from COD Warzone, making the starter pistols have less rate of fire instead achieves the same effect of limiting their power without making things quite as unrealistic. Additionally, starter pistols are now also free in PVP as a consequence of the new supply system, making things more consistent between PVP and Competitive.
In addition, there have been many individual changes to the weapons. Expect some of them to behave very differently than before.
ARMOR TYPES
Previously, armor in PVP was a very simple choice. You would equip armor if you had spare money in your loadout, and that’s it. We wanted to improve the armor system and add a slight trade-off to using armor by introducing new armor types to PVP.
There are now 3 types of body armor: Light, Medium, and Heavy.
- Light Armor: 3 Supply. Provides full protection against SMG and pistol calibers; and half protection against shotgun and PDW calibers, and explosives/melee.
- Medium Armor: 5 Supply. Provides full protection against SMG, pistol, and shotgun calibers; and half protection against PDW and assault rifle calibers, and explosive/melee. Reduces movement speed by 2.5%.
- Heavy Armor: 7 Supply. Provides full protection against all weapon types. Reduces movement speed by 5%.
Note that only Heavy Armor provides protection against battle rifles and sniper rifles. For disambiguation purposes, full protection means the same protection as the old Kevlar Vest; half protection means that the damage you take is midway between unarmored and fully armored; and PDW calibers as mentioned above include 5.7x28mm, 4.6x30mm, and subsonic rifle rounds like the 9x39mm.
Compared to body armor, helmets are much simpler. There are two types of helmets:
- Basic Helmet: 2 Supply. Provides half protection against all weapon types.
- Heavy Helmet: 3 Supply. Provides full protection against all weapon types. Reduces movement speed by 2.5%.
This change does not affect the Competitive Mode, as we still want to honor the CS-style economy system. In Competitive, you can still access the Kevlar Vest and Helmet, which provide full protection without movement drawbacks.
STARTER KITS
The first page of the loadout menu in both PVP and Mob-Arena will now consist of starter kits, meant for new players. You can use these starter kits like any other kit in the game. Also, the weapons in these kits have the XP Boost perk to help you get leveled up faster.
There are five kits available:
- Assault Kit (M16A4)
- Infiltrator Kit (MP5SD)
- Gunner Kit (M249)
- Demolition Kit (Nova + RPG-7)
- Sniper Kit (AWM)
If you have never edited any Custom Loadouts before, the starter kits will be the first page you see when you open any loadout GUI. Otherwise, you can access the starter kits by clicking the “Last Page” button in the loadout GUI.
In addition, if you are below level 3, the “Edit Loadouts” button will be unavailable to encourage you to stick with the starter kits until you’ve unlocked more weapons. However, you can still edit custom loadouts by going to the loadout customization NPCs at spawn.
AUDIO IMPROVEMENTS
- Added a sound effect to dropping weapons
- This sound can not be heard by anyone else
- When you are in spawn, you can now hear yourself swapping and reloading weapons, but still won’t hear other players
- When you are in spawn, fire mode and suppressor toggle sounds will no longer be heard by other players
SECONDARY WEAPON CHANGES
To counteract the indirect nerf from introducing Light Armor to counter pistol calibers in PVP, we have decided to raise the amount of modification slots available for secondary weapons from 4 to 5.
NEW EXPLOSIVE WEAPONS
We have added two new explosive weapons to the game. You can use them in both Mob-Arena and PVP. Please note that they are only available in the first explosive slot.
- RPG-7
- HK69A1 Grenade Launcher
To prevent explosive spam, the launchers will not have backup ammo in very small PVP maps like Shipment and Showers.
In addition, melee weapons and explosives will now show up in your inventory. This has little consequence apart from the fact that we will be able to release skins for them in the future.
- Melee weapons can be leveled up, and the level will be used by cosmetics in the future
- Leveling of explosives is work-in-progress; it doesn’t work yet for most explosives, and could be removed in the future (we are still deciding whether to remove it from all explosives or non-lethal explosives only)
Finally, we have improved the RPG-7 aesthetically:
- Modified the rocket particles to be less obstructive
- The rocket disappearing when firing now shows up while aiming down sights as well. (This also affects the Crossbow)
WEAPON DISPLAY CHANGES
- The item name of weapons no longer includes the level. The weapon level has been moved to the lore instead.
- This is mainly to prevent grenades in the new loadout system from displaying a level in their name
- Weapon tooltips should no longer unnecessarily show “Unbreakable”
OTHER CHANGES
- Improved the performance of calculating a player’s movement speed each tick
- The A-10 Airstrike now has reduced block penetration to detonate easier upon hitting a block, making it deal damage more consistently
- Removed “Equipped” tooltip on weapons in /gun
- This prevents, for example, the Knife from showing that it is equipped in 20 different loadouts
- Tac Laser has been adjusted to once again be only visible when aiming
- This is because the 1mW and 5mW lasers now completely change how hipfire works, but we wanted to keep the Tac Laser as having no effect on hipfire, allowing for a modification to block the Laser slot for Mob-Arena players who want to upgrade their weapon but don’t want the realistic hipfire mechanic. However, this means that we can’t display a laser while hipfiring due to the hipfire spread now being completely random by default.
BUG FIXES
- When a player leaves the arena it will now count as a death
- This fixes issues when an Alpha Zombie leaves in Zombie Siege, among other problems
- Fixed a bug where the Level Preview GUI incorrectly showed crate tiers above level 13 while viewing levels above 60
- Fixed a bug where a buggy crosshair was shown while using the HK69A1 grenade launcher in Fabulous Mode even though it should have no crosshair when hipfiring
- Fixed a bug where when using the last ammo of a rocket launcher in Mob-Arena, the weapon’s removal sometimes does not communicate properly to the gun system
- Fixed a long-time bug where the Discord link in the join message was expired
- Fixed a server timezone issue that caused the auto-restart to incorrectly occur at 11PM EST rather than 3AM EST
- Fixed a bug where the Maxim-9 incorrectly had tracers despite being a suppressed weapon
- Fixed a typo in the round start message of the WarOwl scenario
- Fixed a bug where the AA-12 dealt no headshot damage to mobs
