Sneak peek: Changes to diving suits and big monsters

Hello everyone!

It’s time for another sneak peek of the upcoming spring update. In keeping with our theme of making Europa more dangerous (but not unreasonably so), we’ve made some changes to diving suits as well as added an exciting new behavior for the biggest monsters in the game. We’re also introducing new, triggerable animations, which modders may find particularly interesting. Let’s take a look!

Suit off, pressure on

Did you know that one of the first inspirations for Barotrauma was a game concept called Pressure? Water pressure is also where we get our name from.

Diving suits were originally intended as a means of counteracting dangerous pressure; a special tool to be used when needed. However, as there are very few downsides to wearing a suit all the time, a lot of people do just that. It’s only smart, and it makes you effectively immune to pressure.

While we’re not on a mission to make things unpleasant for anyone, we wanted to put the pressure back on, so to speak. Making suits less good at withstanding pressure was not an option, because there needs to be a way to survive a hull breach, and that’s what diving suits are for. So we went about this the other route: making changes to incentivize taking your suit off when you’re out of water.

We didn’t want this to be a cut-and-dry nerf, though, so for starters, we reduced flooding speed slightly, which means pressure will build up more slowly after a hull breach and won’t kill you as quickly even when suitless. But we’ve also given diving suits some new penalties – hopefully just enough to make it less appealing to walk around in one all the time, but not so much that the suit wouldn’t protect you adequately when you really need one.

Here are the changing suit stats:

• Increased the penalty to movement speed when walking (swimming speed stays same).
• Obstructed vision slightly more.
• Reduced the armor effects of diving suits, particularly the Regular Diving Suit to make it less of an all-round protective second skin.
• Reduced the crush depth resistance of Combat Diving Suit and Abyss Diving Suit. This might seem mean at a glance, but it’s not: The toughest suits used to withstand more pressure than a fully upgraded submarine hull, and we’ve ironed that out and capped the Abyss Diving Suit at the same depth as the maximum hull upgrade. This way, if your sub is lost to pressure, so are you.
• All-round small adjustments to the different diving suits as well as to level generation to create clearer use cases for different suits in different environments.
  • Made the Exosuit tankier and stun resistant.
  • The Abyss Diving Suit is very tanky, very clunky, and only really needed in the abyss; all the above-abyss environments can be handled by one of the other suit types.

New animation variations

This topic is partially related to diving suits: We didn’t just make walking in a suit slower, we also improved the walking and running animations of characters wearing suits.

Perhaps more excitingly, we’ve added a handful of entirely new animations which are triggered by talents and afflictions. These should be particularly interesting for modders, and you can find out more about this new feature in our modding documentation (Status Effects > TriggerAnimation).

Here are the new status effect animations we’ve added:

• DrunkenWalk (caused by drunkenness and concussions)
• VigorousWalk (caused by haste and strengthen)
• JollyWalk (caused by psychoclown, soothingsounds, inspiringtunes, skillfulmelodies, clownpower and melodicrespite)
• Vomit (caused by the vomiting effect of nausea and drunkenness)

Bring the trauma back into Barotrauma

Last but not least in this post, we’ve been working on ways to make the very largest monsters in the game pose a bigger threat to your crew. Previously, they’ve been quite apt at destroying your sub, but once your sub had sunk and you were safely in your diving suit, you were just that: safe.

No more! The big monsters can now pinpoint the location of crewmates inside the sub much better, and they will aim for you specifically rather than pummel away at the hull indiscriminately. Some of them will cause damage to you by attacking the wall you’re standing next to… and others may even reach inside the sub to get at you.

We’ve tried to make this new feature dangerous but not overwhelmingly destructive. Let us know what you think once you’ve encountered the business end of a Charybdis up close for the first time!

Stay tuned

That’s all this time! We’ll write again in a couple of weeks about other upcoming changes, and in the meantime, don’t forget to keep an eye on the Unstable version to give the new update a test drive.