Beyond the introduction of the first wave of Syndicate robots, patch 3.8 will also include a few significant changes, so I felt like it deserves its own blog post.

EP reward changes

Based on a forum suggestion, we’re incorporating EP boosters into the EP reward system. The result is that if you have an active EP booster, any EP rewards that you receive from your ingame activities will be doubled.”’ (This comes after the handicap bonus multiplier.)

This change alone would result in a way too high EP reward multiplier for starting Agents if they are using a booster, so we decided to cut the handicap multiplier in half, which will start from 50x instead of 100x. (Basically if you are using a booster after this change, you will receive roughly the same EP rewards like now.)

Another change that’s coming with the patch is the reduction of EP rewards for mining and harvesting from 1 EP per minute to 1 EP per 2 minutes on average (without bonuses). Based on our statistics, the amount of EP that players gained from mining and harvesting was too high, considering the effort and risk involved compared to other activities.

Pretty lights

For a long while already, I wanted to have another go at the lighting, environment, and post-processing setup of the game. The last one happened in 2012, so it was high time for a revisit and see if we can still make things look better. Here are some before-after screenshots, so decide for yourself, or check it out live tomorrow.

Patch 3.8 will be deployed tomorrow, August 4th, starting from 14:00 servertime/CEST (12:00 UTC).