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[Note from Paul - Microsoft has confirmed that the tuning update should go live first thing Saturday (Sept 12th) morning...]

Hi all, my name is John, and I am the Senior Designer on Madballs in… Babo:Invasion. We are going live with our first weapon and character tuning update and my boss Paul asked me to put together a list of changes players will experience in this update for Madballs.

About Tuning Updates…

When we were making the game, we wanted to ensure a long life for the multiplayer community. We devised our tuning system, (known internally as a TMS Update), which is a special feature not seen in other XBox games.

It allows us to update the attributes of characters, special abilities and weapons without going through a lengthy and expensive recertification process.

This lets us act on community feedback and keep refreshing the gameplay over the life of the product. Indirectly, it also allowed us to make a game with deeper gameplay, since there is confidence that balance issues can be adressed quickly and easily.

We look forward to your feedback and adjusting the flavor of the game over time to keep things interesting!

Overview for Tuning Update #1

The theme for this tuning update sees substantial improvements for 2 BDI characters, power upgrades for 7 weapons, and Invasion mode upgrades for base durability and both deployable types.

Here’s the breakdown:

Characters:

• Robo (BDI Heavy) gets a health boost and improved radius for his Mass Disarm ability making him a much better tank character than before.
• Boba (BDI Flyer) is now slightly less vulnerable to cold attacks, but due to improvements to cold damage in several weapons, he is still a situational character.
• Jenkins (BDI Support) has discovered how to build a bigger healing bubble and a more powerful nuke making his role easier to fulfill.
• Magmor (Scorched Heavy) Rockshield mode now resists 3/4 of all incoming damage (was 4/5ths), and temporarily removes his vulnerability to cold.
• Asceu (Scorched Support) is now slightly less vulnerable to fire damage.
• Daemonak (Scorched Flyer) is slightly larger in stature, but a bit less resistant to impact damage types. He remains king of the skies with his double jump and glide abilities.

Weapons:

• BDI Shotty now does more damage and knockback and has improved range in both modes. Watch out for the kickback though!
• BDI Lobber Ice mode can now fire faster, and heat mode does more splash damage.
• Players using Scorched Ruptor’s ninja stars deal more damage and players can now see farther ahead while fliging them, making it easier to supress enemies at extreme range.
• Scorched Incindiary Rocket mode can see farther, travels faster and does more splash damage.
• The Scorched Stormer energy mode (mobile minigun), shoots farther.
• The Scorched Flamer does more instant damage but the sustained napalm effect does not last as long.
• Some of the damage of the Scorched Heat Riffer mode was transferred over to the Cold mode of the same gun, bringing this weapon closer in character to the BDI Beamer.

Invasion game mode:

• Invasion bases have 50% increased health which should increase match times and allow more back and forth.
• Invasion base turrets and rocket turrets now deal piercing damage to all enemy characters regardless of the character’s natural resistance.
• Rocket turrets shoot farther and their rockets do more splash damage, and this deploy now self-repairs faster.
• Healing towers now have additional hitpoints, making them tougher to destroy. Each healing tower deployed also increases allies max health by 10 (on next respawn)

Conclusions:

BDI gets some big upgrades in this update, especially the Shotgun, which is bound to become a staple item for faster characters. Both faction’s Support characters are better, but in different ways. Scorched players have more long range options to counter the Beamer and Dual Machine Gun. And the Invasion equipment changes will change combat quite a bit as well.

Look forward to seeing you online, and hearing your wishlist for the next Tuning update.