News and Announcements

Player Count Experiment Agents, like we discussed last week with the patch notes, we ran an experiment on player count since last weekend to gauge your interest on the matter. We would like to invite you to give your opinions on how much you liked the tweaked player counts in the poll (located here) so we can have an accurate representation of community opinion on the subject. In the meantime, lobby sizes are back to normal effective immediately while we parse through feedback and poll results to determine our next move. Thank you for participating!

Community Brief Jatimania Agents, we hope you are living your best life as you chase the elusive heights of dreampreneurship. We are currently monitoring your feedback and emerging issues of the Jatimania update in the hope of releasing a hotfix in the next week. Here are some of the big topics we are looking at. Aim-Assist Settings We have discovered an issue with how the “aim-assist strength” setting works. To make a long story short: The setting currently not only reduces the aim-assist strength but also the input strength as a whole, making it feel more strong in a lot of cases. This is on the top of our list to get a fix on. Sound Occlusion Tweaks We had some sound occlusion fine tuning that did not make it in time for Jatimania...

JATIMANIA Patch notes Agents, can you feel it? It’s in the air, on the walls, even Deceive Inc HQ could not avoid it. Jatimania is here, a whole new live event with free rewards to earn featuring everyone's favorite (?!) VIP. But that’s not all! Jatimania also brings several requested improvements to the game as we continue our initiative to overhaul the title with a special focus on stealth, sound and npc behavior. Let’s dive in! Live Experiment Solo and Duo Player Count Back at the launch of catalog 3, we ran several player count experiments for solo lobby team sizes. While we got some valuable feedback from the experiment, the fact we were deep reworking core systems for operation overhaul and the wide array of player counts we...

April Update Patch notes Just before we get ready for a release, we wanted to give you a final look at the April update. A slew of changes are coming your way including sound occlusion, NPC behavior, aim-assist settings, map updates and more. To top it all, we have a special surprise included in this patch that we can't wait for you to discover very soon. In the meantime, let's dive into the patch notes! Live Experiment Solo and Duo Player Count Back at the launch of catalog 3, we ran several player count experiments for solo lobby team sizes. While we got some valuable feedback from the experiment, the fact we were deep reworking core systems for operation overhaul and the wide array of player counts we tried meant that it was...

Agents, While working with our partners to troubleshoot and fix an issue that is impacting players, we are planning to conduct backend maintenance to hopefully address this issue. This is expected to happen in the early hours of tomorrow morning for most of our agents: 8:00 AM UTC 4:00 AM EST The expected windows is approximately an hour where players will not be able to matchmake, but this may take longer (we expect a downtime maximum of no longer than 2 hours as of this point). Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Agents, we are moving forward with more refresh of existing operations to bring them to a higher standard. Our focus this update has been on Hardsell, Fragrant Shore and Diamond Spire with a slew of new additions, new flank routes and expanded visual cover for more exciting engagements. We are very eager to show you what we have been working on so let’s get to it! Hardsell: New rotation points added in staff rooms around the maps and an extended terrace network on the rooftops should help make the map feel more fluid than ever. Inside the vault, new visual cover and intel setups on the upper floors will make for more engaging combat and stealth. Fragrant Shore: A new staff room on the waterfront, a balcony to flank inside the...

April Update Preview Agents, before we head into the weekend and close out the month, we wanted to give you a little sneak peek into upcoming changes that will drop with our next update in April. We’ll dive into two subjects that are pretty massive in how they affect the game: Sound Occlusion and NPC Behavior. Sound Occlusion Rework A massive rework of how we handle audio is dropping with the april update, enabling occlusion on a wide array of gameplay affecting sounds. This affects everything from field upgrade chests being open to weapons being fired or gadgets being placed to differing degrees. For instance, you can expect to hear weapons better through walls than a chest being opened. From a developer perspective, we now have...

Operation Overhaul Live Balance Update Agents, we are dropping our first live balance update for Operation Overhaul effective immediately. This requires no download from your part and will automatically take effect in-game. Our current mindset with this update is to keep the most oppressive and unpleasant elements targeted by feedback in check while we continue parsing through feedback for larger overarching changes in the future. With all this said, let’s have a look: Damage Falloff Damage Falloff is one of the biggest changes to DI’s sandbox this update and as such, we are monitoring feedback, analyzing numbers and taking a deeper look at where it should go next. While we are having a larger look at the mechanic, we still wanted to...

Agents, a double XP weekend is starting NOW! This will last until Monday, March 11th at 11:00 AM EST (-5 GMT)

Operation Overhaul Hotfix 1 Agents, as discussed in our messaging last week, we are pushing a hotpatch for a myriad of issues we have spotted in the wild since the launch of Operation Overhaul Phase 1. Our focus with these tweaks is mostly to get the game in a better state before looking at more gameplay tweaks in the future. Let’s dive in! General Changes Vault Printers Audio Vault printers will now make use of audio occlusion for the printing sound, reducing instances where you can hear a print while being out of the UI indicator range. This should make printing more easily defendable from third parties that are out of sight. Tap Input Tweak We have extended the window of time of what is considered a “Tap input” to make it register...

Agents, One of our backend partners will be doing some maintenance during the following period: Mon, 11 Mar 2024 10:00:00 GMT and Mon, 11 Mar 2024 14:00:00 GMT We do not currently expect to experience any outages or downtime, however the possibility of issues arising may occur.

Operation Overhaul Short Term Focus Agents, we are delighted to see you all jump in Deceive Inc. for the free weekend and we are beyond thrilled to finally have the first phase of Operation Overhaul out in the wild. Things are still quite fresh with the update dropping yesterday, but we wanted to keep you in the loop on what we are looking at in the short term. Let’s have a look! Hotpatch and fixes Our first order of business is to deliver a hotpatch in the coming week to address a variety of issues as well as some quality tweaks to keep things tidy. This will include tweaks to occlusion for sound on vault printers, a fix for aim-assist sticking on dead bodies and toning down sound effects for victims of Yumi’s new EMP flocks amongst...

To mark the successful launch of ‘Operation Overhaul’, DECEIVE INC. is available to download and play for free on PC via Steam, including full compatibility with Valve’s Steam Deck, the PlayStation®5, and the Xbox Series X|S from Feb. 29 through March 4. Throughout the free weekend promotion the game will be available at a 60% discount, quite the steal for intrepid young agents. Please check each platform’s individual store pages for more details. The changes in ‘Operation Overhaul’ are so extensive that the team at Sweet Bandits and Tripwire joined forces to create a detailed walkthrough on all the quality of life updates. Agents can tune in to get the full mission specs or read through the written report in the patch notes...

Agents, As we previously discussed in our end of year state of the game post and more recently in our weekly posts, Operation Overhaul is coming. For those unaware, Operation Overhaul is a MASSIVE initiative for the team to take the time to rework core aspects of the game and expand its system to make it a more interesting, polished, and accessible experience. This update is our first major step in this initiative, packed to the brim with new gameplay elements, systemic reworks and map updates. We are very excited to finally show you what we’ve been working on. This is, by far, the biggest patch we’ve worked on yet so we should probably start diving into it right away. General Gameflow Change: Vault Printers Ever since the launch...

Agents, we are back with our final deep dive before phase 1 of Operation Overhaul hits the live servers and this week we are going in depth with major changes to the infiltration phase and the addition of AI spies. Gameflow Change: Vault Printers Ever since the launch of the game, a major piece of feedback that we have received was that the vault area was under-used in all maps since most matches blaze through the infiltration phase at great speed. To help remedy this, we are introducing a whole new part of the gameflow: Vault printers! From now on, the golden doors of the objective room can no longer be opened with 10 intel. You now need a golden keycard to gain access, which cannot be found anywhere in the map before the vault...

Deep Dive: Guards and Heat Agents, our topic this week is centered around guards, their behavior and their connection to the heat system. We’ve put a lot of effort into this update to reduce frustration from guard behavior during pvp fights and make their response more in-tune with player behavior to give you more tools to avoid a strong response from guards. Let’s have a look at how we are tackling all this in practice. Updated Guards Behavior Guards will now scale their response depending on the heat level of the spy. Here’s how heat penalties work now and how it affects guard behavior. No heat: Guards will aggro from less far away and will only try to take you down with melee attacks. This level is meant to interfere very little...

Agents, this week we’ll be showing you what kind of changes you can expect to see in maps when Operation Overhaul hits the live servers. We have learned a great deal about what makes for a good map in Deceive Inc. over the past year, and we aim to go back to our existing operations and make them better by improving the flow of combat, navigation and giving players more options. Our focus for this patch was very much on Diamond Spire, but we have new elements for every single operation to keep things interesting. Let’s dive into some of these updates. Please keep in mind, we are still working on these changes and some of these screenshots might not be entirely representative once these changes are in your hands. That being said, let’s...

Agents, We have become aware of an issue that is impacting Xbox users who are attempting to purchase bonds. We believe this issue started on February 3rd and is currently ongoing. We are working with our partners to fix this issue as fast as possible. If you are one of the users who has purchased bonds and did not receive them, please reach out to support.deceiveinc.com so we can make a note and verify. Once this issue is fixed, we believe all impacted players will be granted their purchase on the next log in. Please reach out to support again after we have noted this issue is addressed if that does not happen.

Deep Dive: Combat Overhaul Welcome back agents, this week we are digging into the work that has been ongoing to make the combat and weapon ‘feel’ of DI more satisfying and approachable. Keep in mind that this is a very large topic so not everything will be covered in this small brief and everything we will showcase is subject to change. You can look forward to more changes when the update releases. Visual Updates To give a better weapon feel to the game’s arsenal, we are going back to revisit some weapon mods that did not have their own firing and reload animations to give them a more unique feel. Beyond the visual differentiation, this allows us to make bespoke animations that fit their fire rate and reload speed much better, removing...