There are some big improvements coming to Six Days this Autumn, and I’d like to share a few of them with you.

We’ve got some exciting changes coming that will deepen the tactical experience.

• We’re introducing new mechanics designed to give you smart, situational advantages—whether you’re containing enemies, tracking their movements, taking down buildings, resupplying your team, or more. Used tactically, these will open up new ways to outthink and outmaneuver your opponents. Your tactics will matter more than ever!
• Please note, these additions won’t reduce the intensity or realism of building and street clearing. Instead, they’ll create new layers of decision-making—from which structures to target, to how best to clear a room. And every change is grounded in real-world tactics and equipment.

We’ll also begin rolling out NEW WEAPONS, NEW ATTACHMENTS, and NEW ABILITIES—all inspired by real-world counterparts.

• You’ll earn these through battlefield success. The Autumn update will offer a first taste, with more arriving in future updates. Expect to see some familiar weapon types that offer their own unique combat efficiencies on the battlefield.
• Please note, we’re paying very close attention to ground these additions in reality. We want to thank the community for sharing feedback in this area.

Missions are evolving, too.

• Two missions are getting major adjustments, and the new tactical mechanics will also change these missions and the way all of the other missions play. Expect fresh challenges in familiar scenarios.

Finally, we want to reassure you: Procedural Architecture remains at the heart of the game.

• While we may make starting points more consistent in Campaign mode, procedural generation remains a big part of the game -- including customizing this procedural generation in the Co-op Lobby, just like you can today.

Besides the new features, we also have a host of big quality improvements coming, as well. Three of these include:[olist]

Fireteam AI: A lot of our remaining AI bugs are rooted within the game’s navigation system. So, beginning a few months ago, we began a wholesale replacement of this navigation system, and the results so far are outstanding! Of course, these changes sit right at the foundation of all our AI code, so this is not a quick fix. We still have a few weeks of work left to uncover all the ways this new code is incompatible with the old code, and then we’ll have to rebalance all our friendly and enemy AI based on these new capabilities. Since we know many of you are curious to get a look under the hood, we’re going to take you inside this overhaul in our next major community update around the end of this month.

Stability: Most remaining issues related to stability are due to the ray-traced lighting we introduced in November and improved in April. We’re finding some graphics cards still struggle with ray tracing, and the combination of Procedural Architecture and ray tracing can make VRAM usage fluctuate wildly, causing some cards to crash. Fortunately, our team has already found lots of ways to reduce VRAM usage, and we’re also introducing some methods to create more consistency in all memory usage, even with Procedural Architecture. Additionally, we’re also addressing a few other non-graphics crashes.

Performance: You’ll also notice some substantial performance improvements in our Autumn update. Over the past few months, our team has been decoupling systems to let each system run faster, optimizing components, and more aggressively multi-threading tasks. We’re already seeing some nice improvements, and more consistency, in performance due to this work, with lots more coming.[/olist]As you can see, our Autumn update is very much focused on the game’s core experience, quality, and performance. Once we get through this, we will then add more new missions in future updates – we’ve only released roughly half of the game’s planned content so far.

This is just a short list of some of the big changes coming this Autumn. There’s lots more, including some highly requested community improvements.

I’d also like to thank those of you who’ve been providing specific and constructive feedback about what we’ve already released. This feedback is reviewed by many on our team each week, including me. Just to call out a couple examples from the last week – we really appreciate the specificity within Mudroc’s and drpepper’s comments. Our designers and AI team have been consuming and discussing these already.

Our next community update will do a deep dive into the game’s extremely unique AI and the improvements that are coming to our AI navigation.

Thank you for your continuing support for Six Days!

-Peter