Greetings to all our legends of the skies!

I hope you’ve had a chance to read about Valkyrie’s first venture down from the stars to the snowy planet surface of Solitude. If not, you can find out all about the frozen base, our new twisted wormhole maps and a host of other highlights here.

But that’s not all that’s coming in Groundrush. In fact, it’s not even half of it! This release also includes updates across the board.

I’m returning to the warm inviting glow of the wormhole to put more of your twisted game modes into practice. So, until next time. See you in the vats.

CCP TerrorShark

NEW! Pilot Animations

New for this update is our avatar animation feature. Aside from making our virtual world a far more believable and realistic place, the animations will help pilots celebrate a victory or commiserate a defeat.

NEW! Game Subtitles (English)

Accessibility and usability have both been focal points during the development of Valkyrie, so we are pleased to announce that English subtitles will be available as part of this new game update.

Feature Improvement: Valkyrie League

As part of our ongoing iteration on the Valkyrie Leagues feature, we have tuned our calculations to further penalise players who are regularly quitting matches early, as well as tightening up some of the average scoring when playing against AI and real players.

Feature Improvement: Pilot Training

We’re also been making to adjustments to our Pilot Training modules in this update to make things a little less rigid in their objectives. The roll gates in Fighter, Heavy and Support training now have three variants of success – “Great”, “Good” and “Pass”. Depending on how perfectly aligned your ship is when passing through a gate you will be given more appropriate feedback. We’ve also removed the fail condition for incorrectly flying through a gate. This limits the frustration of having to back-track in such instances. The flight routes for all training modules have also been slightly tuned to create a smoother ride.

Multiplayer Playlist

Valkyrie is at its best when pilot-on-pilot action is at the heart of combat. Keeping our players together is a primary consideration when we look at our matchmaking rules and game options. In this update, we have combined all the multiplayer modes and maps into a single playlist. We feel that this will offer the best gaming experience and we will be tracking our server traffic over the coming months to verify this.

Bug and stability fixes

These include:

• Fixed: Carrier Defense Turrets not appearing in Kill Feed cam and in the Clone Vat
• Fixed: Ship Paint Jobs not refreshing in Hangar
• Fixed: AI not using Mines or EMP Mines
• Fixed: Rendering issue (white flash) when looking around the Clone Vat
• Fixed: Collision issue with wormholes launch position (out-of-bounds message)
• Fixed: Accepting a Squad invite through session list caused the invitation to expire
• Fixed: XP transfer issue when a ship tree is maxed
• Fixed: Pilot head location not re-centering
• Fixed: Lens flare issue on Necropolis map
• Fixed: Test Arena is not set to infinite time
• Fixed: Crossroads color pallet makes it hard to identify friendly players
• Fixed: Daily Challenge “next challenge in” timer resets after each log-in
• Fixed: Performance issues resulting in lag across multiple matches
• Fixed: Com Alerts not appearing in some Wormhole events
• Fixed: Persistent Gatling cannon audio after ship is destroyed
• LOD (level of detail) improvements to Heavy training module
• Color Balance improvements to some Pilot Suits and Helmets
• Improved camera positions when viewing Carrier Explosion from fixed locations (respawning)

If you are experiencing any issues with updating, please check this article.

Join us tomorrow for a full dev blog outlining everything you can expect from the Groundrush update.

See you planetside!