Greetings contestants! As we close in on a week of The Culling being free-to-play, we have our first post-Origins patch inbound. Rather than making sweeping changes this new patch is intended instead to get melee combat feeling even closer to Day 1, as well as to address some big quality of life issues and bugs. We’ll have more to announce about our longer-term roadmap, including when you can expect Origins on Xbox One, soon. [b][i]Servers will be down Friday, September 20th at 8AM Eastern for up to 4 hours.[/b][/i] [b]Changes[/b] - Melee Combat

• Melee attack animation playback speed is no longer affected by weapon speed (to match Day 1 combat timings)
• Fix for hit reactions when Shoved not looking correct from some directions
• Fix for melee input queuing bug resulting in the ability to charge attacks while shoving
• Reduced melee input queuing window to reduce unwanted queued actions
• Shove animation duration now 0.8s to match Day 1
• Shove range reduced from 2.0m to 1.75m to match attack range
• Striking a Shoving player now consistently applies a Stagger (this required special timing in Day 1) [i]Dev comments: Please see our recent dev diaries, which explain these items in detail. All of these changes are intended to either get combat closer to Day 1 or address inconsistencies from Day 1 that muddied the experience. We will continue to follow community feedback regarding the melee combat systems.[/i]

- Reduced spawn rate of firearms in Blue Crates and Red Crates

Dev comments: We like seeing guns turn up in crates occasionally, but the drop rate was high enough that you usually saw several guns in many matches. The drop rate has been reduced by roughly two thirds.[/i]

- Removed Dynamite, Impact Grenades from Green Crates

comments: You can still get explosive mines and remote explosives from green crates. This was something we talked about in a previous dev diary but didn’t implement.

- Fix for aiming down the sights with a ranged weapon not providing an accuracy bonus

Dev comments: This bug was introduced when we made some bow accuracy changes for Origins. We’ll be keeping an eye out for Bow accuracy feedback now that this issue is resolved.[/i]

- We now hide crosshairs when aiming down the sights with ranged weapons

Dev comments: This is not intended to affect ranged weapon balance, we felt that the crosshairs were a distraction when aiming down the sights.[/i]

- Voice communication now uses push-to-talk (mapped to Left Alt by default) - Fixed several keyboard keys that could not be mapped - Added menu option to invert mouse Y axis - Fixed bug that allowed players to apply a second satchel to unlock 5th inventory slot - Fix for exploit based on recycling the Detonator for a Remote Explosive - Don’t show player count on main menu (the count was not accurate and didn’t account for players who were in matches) - Fix for bug where Sabre applied cripple wound even when Disabler perk was not equipped - Fix for US West not being selected as an automatic region - Golden Arm perk description now accurately reflects that Golden Arm’s bonus damage scales based on distance from target (reaches 100% bonus damage at 20 meters) - Trapper now provides a single Steel Caltrops - Fix for bug with Explosive Runs description that stated the stim grants 25% boost for 30 seconds (it provides 15% boost for 2 minutes) - Fixed UI typo for Headphones How do you feel about our patch? Share your thoughts in this survey Until Next Time, We’ll see you on the Island.