There’s a huge pile of balance changes on the way too with ”over 10,000 words” articulating the avalanche of tweaks coming covering vehicles, weapons and ‘other’.
To get in the festive spirit there are also some Holiday specific additions with PU02, like snowmen all over Esamir’s frozen wastes giving XP - there’s even a Golden Snowman.
”Significant changes have been made to infantry and vehicle balance. These changes are listed in the last sections of the patch notes and are over 10,000 words,” warns SOE.
Performance:
▪ Esamir Object Optimization. We optimized the number of unique objects, overall object count, and polygons per object on Esamir. This will give players the same environment based performance increases they see on Indar.
▪ Physics Optimization – We have changed the way we simulate various aspects of the server and client to more efficiently process players and vehicles in the game.
▪ Client Memory Optimization – Animations have gotten some serious work to reduce their overall cost without reducing quality. Many per-player animation costs are reduced for players at a distance.
▪ Additional client crashes fixed.
▪ UI – Optimized dynamic image loading and processing to reduce GUI advance spikes ( eliminates over 50% of the intermittent 4+ms spikes we were seeing )
▪ UI - Optimized data processing on the loadout pages
Holidays:
▪ Over the next few weeks you may come across some snowmen scattered across the frozen wasteland of Esamir. These jolly and harmless fellows can be blown up for a nice chunk of XP, and, if you can light up enough of them you may earn a special reward. Also, keep your eye out for a rare blinged out Golden Snowman who gives a very exclusive reward. If you see one, make sure you get it before your squadmates do!
▪ Nanite Systems has been hard at work on a new pistol. Get a silver medal with it and you will unlock a special title.
▪ In addition to new holiday camos and decals, from the 18th of December through the 1st of January we will be having some huge sales in game.
▪ Each day during those two weeks a new category in the marketplace (such as “shotguns” or “helmets”) will be on sale for 50% off. In addition all Items of the Day items will be 99SC regardless of their original cost, and Members Only Item of the Day items will be 1SC, so make sure you log in every day and don’t miss out on anything good!
▪ Make sure to give your enemies the gift of C4 this holiday season!
The full PU02 changelog is available on the official Sony Online forums.