Road to 1.0

About one in five gaming PCs on Steam runs an RTX 30-series card, and older 20-series and GTX cards are still widely used. In May and June, our players on 20-series cards averaged 41–44 FPS, while those on GTX cards stayed below 30. For a shooter built around flying, sliding, and fast-paced combat across a dense city, that simply wasn’t good enough.

Before bringing even more content to the game, we focused on building a stronger foundation for 1.0: higher average frame rates, smoother gameplay, and significantly fewer FPS drops when the action gets intense.

A gun’s rarity used to decide how many attachments it could carry, so you filled every slot, and every build of the same gun looked alike. Now each rarity gets a points budget, and every attachment has a price. Pile on cheap parts or blow it all on one or two premium ones. The slot count no longer decides your build; your playstyle does. And a budget only works if you can see what you are buying, so we rebuilt the weapon stats from the ground up. Vague bars gave way to a clear list of the numbers that matter, in real units, down to ADS time in seconds, and every part shows what it changes, before and after: recoil pattern, accuracy spread, damage falloff over range.

In any squad shooter, a team that works together is one of the main reasons people keep coming back: shared plans, covered flanks, teammates who know each other’s moves. But plenty of our players drop in without a premade squad, so we wanted to make it easy to find people you click with. Now keeping a good squad together takes one click, wherever you are when the match ends.

Players loved OTG’s movement, but it came wrapped in rules that made little sense: jetpack heat that stayed high while you drifted in the air or rode a zipline, and a dash we kept nerfing with one artificial cooldown after another. Instead of tuning numbers back and forth, we rebuilt movement around one heat system for the dash and the jetpack, removed the artificial limits, and smoothed the transitions between jump, slide, wall jump and dash so they flow into each other. Movement finally follows rules that make sense, and because it all draws on one heat pool, it can run out.

Time-to-kill changed with it. Keeping your sights on someone is the hardest thing a shooter asks of you, and with our movement it felt like chasing a hummingbird. You could do everything right, take the angle and open fire first, and still watch your target dance out of the crosshair, catch their breath and come back to finish you. We cut time-to-kill so a tactical edge actually pays off, and made accuracy depend on how you move.

Too many deaths came out of nowhere: players went down without knowing where the shots came from or how bad the hit was. We rebuilt the combat HUD so you can read a threat at a glance: which direction is dangerous, how hard you were hit, and what your teammates have left to get back into the fight.

We also rebuilt how a fight sounds: hits, headshots and kills now each have their own distinct cue, so you can tell how a fight is going without looking at a single number.

We used to have two separate shooting ranges, one for weapons and one for cyberlimbs, both confined to small indoor spaces. You could practice your recoil patterns, but not your jetpack bursts, grapple swings, or vaults over ledges. And in OTG, movement is just as important as shooting.

So we built a whole map with the range at its heart: racks of guns and limbs and firing lanes indoors, with open island all around to take any build into the air.

And it won’t stay a practice ground for long. Next, it opens up to custom matches, and after that, who knows, it may find its way into the main game.

A new way to fight deserved a new uniform. The August update came with a full military kit drop: the armored Bulwark set for those who hold the line, and three Vanguard hunters waiting in the Battle Pass.

In OTG, the gear you earn lives on-chain, and thanks to GUNZ it carries real-world value. A cheater doesn’t just ruin a match; they walk away with value honest players fought for, and chip away at the economy everyone plays in.

Cheat makers are riding the AI wave too. Over the summer, blatant aimbots gave way to scripts that play almost like a human and hop between throwaway accounts. The commercial anti-cheat we relied on couldn’t always keep up, and a smarter opponent called for a smarter answer. So we built our own.

After more than six months of work by some of our best engineers, Kestrel went live: an AI anti-cheat that runs entirely on our servers and learns how real people play. Before it ever judged a stranger, it went to school with the best players in our community. Their matches set its bar for real talent, so it can tell a great player from a great script. There is nothing to install, and it spent its first days watching before it acted.

And it won’t stay ours alone. We’ve already started offering Kestrel to other studios, turning an investment in our own game into technology the wider industry can use.

Every live game collects a list of small annoyances, and the anniversary felt like the right moment to clear ours.

Scope glint. Once players stayed visible at any range, a sniper on a rooftop could see the whole city while nobody could see them. A glint on long-range scopes gives the other side a fair chance to spot the threat.

Bulk HEX decode. Our core players finish every session with a pile of HEXes, and opening them one by one turned into a chore that ate the time they came to play. Now the whole pile cracks open in one go, and it’s straight back to the fight.

Extraction beam. Extracting a HEX is the loudest moment of a match, yet from a few blocks away it was easy to miss. Now the antenna throws a beam into the sky for as long as the extraction runs, and the pulse racing up it works as a progress bar anyone can read: the squad holding the antenna sees how long it still has to hold out, and everyone nearby sees where the prize is leaving the city and how much time is left to take it.

New players. The new tutorial was only the start. We kept polishing the first hours after it, so the road from the first flight to the first win feels smoother at every step.

Turrets. They used to cut players down without warning. A laser sight and a warning sound now tell you that you’re in their line of fire before they open up.