Starship Troopers: Extermination has always had a bit of "we have Helldivers 2 at home" energy; ironic considering how much Helldivers 2 channels the tone and ideas of the Paul Verhoeven film Extermination is based upon. While I enjoyed Offworld's large-scale, team-based multiplayer in my Starship Troopers: Extermination review, it was a frequently uneven experience beset by technical issues and the wrong kind of bugs.
Nonetheless, I've kept one eye on it since it launched last October, and its latest update sounds pretty nifty. Described by Offworld as "one of our biggest updates yet" patch 1.6 brings some major technical and mechanical changes to Extermination's cooperative arachnid-blasting.
The Director is the most significant of these additions. Sadly, this does not mean Verhoeven himself has been brought in to oversee Extermination's post-launch life. Instead, it's a director of the Left 4 Dead variety, a high-level meta-AI system tasked with overseeing enemy spawning during matches.
Describing this as a "total overhaul" to how spawning works, Offworld says the Director was created because Extermination has too many in-game variables for the original system to work as intended. "As the game has grown with new modes, difficulty settings, and more enemy types, we realized that our original spawning system, while functional, was starting to show its limits," Offworld writes. "We needed something that could scale with the game, improve performance, and most importantly, create more engaging and consistent gameplay."
According to Offworld, the Director "constantly evaluates the battlefield's state and decides when and where enemies should spawn". Assuming the system works as claimed, players should notice more consistent spawns that "reduce unfair or unpredictable moments" as well as more crafted-feeling gameplay beats.
Moreover, Offworld says the Director scales across modes and difficulties, which should mean it can be easily implemented into any newly introduced game modes. "We've built the Director to work not just in existing game modes, but future scenarios as well," the studio explains.
Outside of the Director, update 1.6 also brings performance optimisations to projectiles, which is good because Extermination could chug like a marine having just finished boot camp when the lead started flying. Projectiles also have more visible tracers, while certain bullets can ricochet off surfaces or armoured bugs, just in case Extermination's battlefields weren't dangerous enough for you.
Other notable additions include a new Critical Strike mission where individual squads all start in separate locations, a "bug holes" system that allows arachnids to pour through a spawn point until players plug the hole with explosives, a new rocket launcher that fires guided tactical nukes—which sounds tasty—and the usual array of more specific balance tweaks and bug fixes.
Update 1.6 is available now. Some recent Steam reviews claim to have encountered an issue that prevented players from being able to play, related to how Extermination uses easy anticheat and requires an Epic account. But the developers report that this has now been resolved.
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