Update 0.2.0: The Great Performance Patch is Out Now

G'day everyone.

It's been far too quiet here since The Nest Update in December, and you deserved better than silence. Earlier this year we had to step back from Macabre and take on outside work to cover our bills. Since July we've been back on it properly, and today we can finally show you what we've been working on.

What you've told us

While we were away from Steam, we went through everything you've sent us: your reviews, your Discord posts and your bug reports. Three things came up more than anything else:

• Performance. Frame drops, stutter and crashes get in the way of everything else.
• The Crawler. You want a monster that's a consistent, readable threat every run, and so do we.
• Learning the ropes. Your first few runs should teach you the game, not leave you guessing.

We're taking them on one at a time, starting with performance. If the game doesn't run well, nothing else gets a fair go, and that includes the Crawler.

The Great Performance Patch

The first of those is here. The Great Performance Patch is our biggest update yet, and it's out now for everyone. Thanks to our Kickstarter backers and Insiders for playing it first and telling us what they found.

It's not only performance, either. Here's what's in it.

Smoother, steadier performance

• Macabre moves to Unreal Engine 5.8, with DirectX 12 as the default.
• Far less shader stutter. In our testing on a GTX 1080, a repeat run through the same route now compiles 0 or 1 shaders mid-game, down from 89 to 127.
• A lighter load on your CPU and graphics card, and the Low preset now switches off MegaLights and ray tracing to give lower-end machines more headroom.
• The Textures setting now really scales, from Low to Cinematic, so you can match it to your graphics card's memory.
• Fixed a short freeze at respawn and extraction.
• NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR upscaling, plus frame generation on supported graphics cards.

A new Performance Benchmark

Head to the Video settings and hit Performance Benchmark. It plays a short scripted match, then shows you what's holding your frame rate back, whether that's your graphics card or your processor, and recommends settings for your PC. One click applies them.

A more reliable Crawler

This patch makes the Crawler you know more reliable:

• Getting caught now always plays a kill animation.
• A big navigation overhaul. In our 30-minute stress test, the Crawler got stuck or teleported 17 times instead of 44, and despawned once instead of seven times.
• Its paths are now built before you drop in, so it's ready to hunt from the first second. Loading takes a little longer as a result.
• Smoother movement. It turns in arcs and steps through big turns instead of spinning on the spot, and it looks much smoother to the rest of your squad.
• Cleaner kills. The real Crawler's sounds no longer play over your own kill animation, and when a death ends the match, the screen fades out before the results instead of cutting in mid-kill.

We've put a lot of time into improving the Crawler's movement. We built a test course just for its animation, filmed it from the side and from above, and measured how far its feet slid, run after run. Then we kept iterating until it stopped skating across the floor and started stepping like something with real weight.

Making the Crawler smarter, more reactive and more alive is the next step, and that's what our next playtest is all about.

Steam Deck

The Great Performance Patch runs on Steam Deck, with settings tuned for the Deck on first launch, a bigger interface that's easier to read, and controller prompts from the very first screen. If you change things around, the Recommended button in the Video settings puts the Deck settings back. We've still got a few things to finish before Valve's Steam Deck Verified tick, and your feedback helps us get there.

And plenty more

A new interactive map you can pan, zoom and ping from, squad votes for your next Rift, a full audio overhaul with proximity chat that carries the room you're in, smarter pings, and controller navigation through the menus.

Helping shape the Crawler

The Great Performance Patch also adds gameplay data sharing, so we can see how runs actually play out: where squads get caught, how far people get and what the Crawler does. It shows us how the game runs on different hardware too, so we can spot driver problems and unstable setups quickly, and the game can warn you when your graphics driver is out of date or known to cause trouble.

Every match you play shows us where the Crawler finds you, how the chase plays out and whether you get away, and that feeds straight into its next round of AI work. The more you play, the faster it gets better. If you share gameplay data, you'll also get a short feedback card after each match, so you can tell us about it in your own words.

In some regions you'll be asked on your first launch. Everywhere else it's on by default, and the game lets you know. Either way, you can turn it off or delete your data at any time in Settings, under Controls.

Played the playtest?

If you joined the playtest branch, set Beta Participation back to None (right-click Macabre, then Properties and Betas) to get the same update as everyone else.

Everyone else, Steam updates the game for you.

What's next

• A smarter Crawler, more reactive and more alive. That's our next playtest.
• Learning the ropes. A better first run for new players is high on our list.

We'll keep posting here as each one gets closer.

Thanks for sticking with us, and for every review, bug report and Discord post. We read all of it. If the update makes a difference for you, an updated review on Steam means a lot to a small team like ours. Bugs and feedback go in our Discord.

See you in the Rift.

The Weforge Team