Misc. Fixes, Changes, and Additions

• Critical Chain will no longer stack indefinitely.
• MAX units now correctly produce footstep audio.
• Javelin NEST launcher has new firing audio.
• Biolabs have thawed out, and are climate controlled once again.
• Cloaked infantry/vehicles can no longer capture control points.
• Bullet impact particles should now play when shooting grass.
• Smoke trail on the Falcon projectile should no longer glow bright white at night.
• Muzzleflash smoke on infantry weapons has been toned down.
• Toned down smoke on various vehicle related effects.
• Bullet shell casings have been scaled down.
• Muzzleflashes on MAX weapons should appear on the muzzle of the gun on High and Ultra settings.
• Blowing dust particles on Indar will now only play on high settings and have reduced scale and opacity.
• Lights should no longer stay on for several seconds after bullet impacts and explosions expire.
• Personal shield bullet impact particles should no longer obstruct your view in first person.
• Burning DoT effect has been optimized.
• Facility capture FX have been optimized.
• Jetpack particles should no longer trigger in first person view.
• Smoke particles on the Medic Shield Recharging Field have had their brightness reduced.
• Added hover-over tooltips for all currency types on the loadout screen, showing how to gain them, and their maximum values.
• Optimized the HUD health elements to reduce framerate spikes.
• The Flail now uses the correct icon.
• Fixed blue squares incorrectly appearing on the map and minimap for multiple Amp Stations across all continents.
• The Tutorial has been disabled.
• Fixed a physics crash that was the most frequent crash on Live.
• Loosened up on continent faction balance restrictions a bit, as they were originally tuned for smaller player counts.

Looking Forward

Heyyyyy there, folks. It's been a long road to this point, and it feels like it's all been a bit of a blur at the same time. We're finally ready to introduce the Escalation update to you, which is the culmination of an absurd amount of time and effort committed by the new team. The hype drummed up for this update is well beyond what we expected, and the community's help supporting and promoting the title and the team has been more than we could have asked for. Escalation is important, not only for the state of the game, but also to set some new expectations for what you can see from us moving forward. You've noticed us interacting with the community more often than we have in the past, staying more transparent about what we're working on currently, and about what problems have been popping up here and there, and we've been taking more advantage of the public test server and private test groups as well. The team here wants to do great things with PlanetSide 2, and over the coming year, we intend to prove that out in the form of a better content cadence, revisiting bugs and unfinished systems, and dropping larger updates like this one every so often to keep players looking back our direction, regardless of what they're playing at the time. We'll get a chance to talk about future plans in later streams, so until then, thanks for playing, and enjoy Escalation.

-Wrel, Lead Designer

Official release notes