VERTAL STRIKE

Chat works. It had been invisible since April: pressing T put you in a text box you could not see, and the same key froze your mouse, your movement and your weapon, so it looked like the game had locked up. T talks to everyone, Y to your team, Enter sends, Escape cancels, and the keys are listed under Settings → Controls. The game has a soundtrack now — three original menu tracks that shuffle and crossfade into each other instead of cutting dead, victory and defeat stings, and ambience on every map, where before this not one map had a single ambient sound. Music and ambience volume can be set from the pause menu during a match, not only from the lobby. In the armoury, a weapon you own no longer announces itself as unreleased content with a release date to be announced, locked weapons can be inspected before you buy them, and BUY now takes you to that weapon in the shop instead of to the top of a 24-tile catalogue. Falling into the sea or off the edge of a map respawns you, where it used to drop you through the world for the rest of the match. A grenade indicator shows when your next one is ready, reloading no longer leaves you unable to fire, and bot kills no longer count toward the public leaderboard — they still pay coins and XP. Battle pass, daily and quest rewards are decided and paid by the server, so clearing your save file cannot claim them twice. A saved resolution is no longer restored onto a display that cannot show it. Settings no longer offers voice chat, a microphone picker or a push-to-talk key for a feature the game has never contained. And a win is captured to your Steam screenshot library, ready to share.

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Grenades and launchers have their own LETHAL tab in the armory now — Frag, Molotov, Shrapnel, Thumper and Scatter are picked there, separately from your knife, and MELEE is blades only. A grenade you had equipped moves across on its own, and so does a launcher you were running as your primary, so nothing you own is lost. Grenade details read honestly instead of borrowing rifle figures. On the store side, weapon prices are now enforced by the server: the shop charges the listed price, no more and no less, and refuses a purchase the wallet cannot cover. Steam sign-in is verified with a session ticket, failed sign-in attempts are rate limited rather than sign-ins — so nobody can lock you out of your own account by guessing at it — and coin rewards are written under a lock, so two arriving together no longer erase each other. Three fixes came from players running the build: the game checked whether it was online by fetching google.com, which meant anyone whose network does not serve Google never got past “No Internet Connection”; choosing a resolution and then a display mode wrote the old resolution back over the new one; and pressing APPLY handed the resolution to a second, stale system and turned a sharp picture soft. All three are gone. Every armory tab, slot chip and the KILLED BY caption were checked across all nine languages.

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The armory listed one item in the melee slot and it was almost always a Frag, because grenades sorted ahead of blades — so a player who had bought a Hatchet, a Cleaver or a Karambit could not see any of them. Every knife you own is listed now. The kills, deaths and headshots chips at the end of a match carried English captions in every language, and the scoreboard column read DEATHS regardless; both are translated. Player nameplates drew straight through the pause menu, so the menu sat behind the names of people you were shooting at; the pause menu holds the screen on its own now. New accounts made through Steam take your full Steam persona as the nickname rather than a truncated version of it.

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DEPLOY now looks for any open public room before it creates a new one, so a player who picked FFA and a player who picked TDM meet instead of sitting in two separate rooms. Quick Play from the Servers screen respects your mode and the featured map instead of rolling a random one, and its rooms are always 8 slots and 15 minutes — a random 2-slot room used to bounce the third player straight back out into an empty one. The server list shows your real ping rather than an estimate. The first launch now picks a quality preset from your GPU: integrated graphics and 2 GB cards no longer start with 8× MSAA and every post effect on, and strong cards start on Ultra — your own choice in Settings is never overridden. Settings → Video gains FRAME CAP (30–260 or unlimited) and VSYNC. Steam achievement names and descriptions are translated into all nine languages, and Settings → Video and Controls, the last English-only screens, are translated too. A very long, very good match is no longer refused by the server outright — the excess over the sanity cap is trimmed instead of the whole match being lost.

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On a scaled HiDPI desktop — Linux especially — the game rendered at the compositor's shrunken logical size and the whole frame arrived bilinear-soft. It starts at the largest real display mode now, and Settings → Video has working RESOLUTION and DISPLAY MODE controls (fullscreen, borderless, windowed) that are remembered. Achievements went from 5 to 21: career tiers for kills, score, play time and the full rank ladder, plus first win, headshot kills, a melee kill and a five-kill streak — career progress you already have unlocks retroactively on your next login. Button labels no longer run edge-to-edge in longer translations; every button was checked by eye in all nine languages.

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The entire interface — menus, inventory, shop, barracks, missions, settings, scoreboard and match results — is available in English, 简体中文, Русский, Deutsch, Français, Español, Português (BR), Polski and Türkçe. Switch language any time in Settings → Accessibility · UI; the menu rebuilds on the spot with no restart. Weapon names stay in English on purpose — they are proper names. If a translation reads wrong, tell us on Discord or at info@vertalstrike.com and it goes into the next patch.

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Five Steam achievements are live: First Deploy, Century (100 kills), Ten Thousand (10,000 score), Veteran (10 hours played) and Captain (top rank). Progress you already have counts, so long-time players unlock theirs on the first login after updating. The home screen shows how many operators are online before you queue, the deploy panel is rebalanced so the DEPLOY button is properly sized, and the highlight sweep on primary buttons is visible instead of a dark smudge. The PLAYTIME stat in Barracks under-reported by sixty times, which also made the ten-hours-deployed milestone unreachable; both are fixed. There is a proper privacy policy at vertalstrike.com/privacy, linked from Settings and the store page.

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Weapon unlocks were all packed into levels 3, 8 and 15, so about 58 kills cleared the entire catalogue and the remaining 63 levels handed out nothing. Unlocks run from level 2 to level 62 now, and every price is set to half the grind to its own unlock level — buying a weapon means having it at half the wait instead of paying for something the level track was about to give you anyway. Match rewards pay one coin per point of score, so a kill is worth roughly 10 gold. Nothing was taken away: the first time you sign in, every weapon your old unlock level had given you is added to your account for free. The store no longer offers weapons you already own, and it had been charging full price for weapons the loadout unlocked for nothing. Clicking a weapon opens its details instead of instantly spending your gold, and purchases happen on a BUY button with the price written on it. Battle pass coin rewards were larger than the server would accept, so claiming one silently did nothing and left the tier unclaimed; they arrive now.

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The menu scene used to ship with a camera, the interface and nothing else, so every screen was drawn on a flat grey slab. There is a set behind it now: a floor with a pool of light where the operator stands, a backdrop far enough away that the frame ends in a surface, light shafts angled through the dark, and haze along the ground. He is not a photograph either — he checks his weapon between screens, and the whole set drifts a couple of centimetres against the camera, so the crates in front of him travel further across the frame than he does. Every screen was rebuilt to share one design: Home as a dashboard with your profile and loadout down one rail and the featured map and DEPLOY down the other, and the armory, store, barracks, quests and settings in the same type, the same spacing and the same colours. The end of a match used to hand you two pieces of interface that had nothing to do with each other; it is one card now, and the final standings are on it — they used to exist only while you held Tab — with the score broken down into where it came from. And the armory tells the truth: the weapon pictures were square renders stretched across a frame three times their width, so guns arrived soft, oversized and cropped, and every weapon is photographed at the shape it actually is now. That exposed descriptions written from the weapon names rather than the models — SCATTER sold as a sawn-off shotgun while holding a six-shot grenade launcher, PHANTOM and TOMMY carrying each other's weapons, BREAKER called an assault rifle while being a pump shotgun — all corrected, along with the classes, the calibres, and a magazine figure that told both shotguns they held 30 rounds. Parts of this arrived across the last few updates and parts land here; 3.0 is where the whole front end is finished. Presentation only — nothing about gameplay, matchmaking or progression changed.

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When a match ended you got two pieces of interface that had nothing to do with each other, or with the rest of the game: a banner across the top in a different typeface, the countdown to the lobby floating loose at the bottom of the screen, and a summary panel below it in a different orange. It is one card now, in the same typeface and the same colours as everything else. The standings used to vanish along with the match — they existed only while you held Tab — and they are part of that card now: who finished where, with kills, deaths and score. You always appear in the table at your real placing, even when it runs longer than the space for it. Kills, deaths, K/D and headshots are shown together, and the score is broken down into where it came from — combat, headshots, time played and the win bonus — so the total and the coins earned are not numbers out of nowhere. Presentation only — nothing about gameplay, matchmaking or progression changed.

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He did not before: the idle he was given is a humanoid clip — muscle curves, not per-bone curves — and the component playing it could only read the second kind, so he stood perfectly still while the menus were built around him. The menu scene also shipped with a camera, the interface and nothing else, so every screen was drawn on a flat slab. There is a set behind the interface now: a floor with a pool of light where he stands, a backdrop far enough away that the frame ends in a surface, light shafts angled through the dark, and haze along the ground. Home was rebuilt around him — profile and loadout on the left rail, map and DEPLOY on the right, the middle his. The buttons are cut at the corners instead of being rectangles with a one-pixel border, and the primary action carries chevrons. Presentation only — nothing about gameplay, matchmaking or progression changed.

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The menu scene contained a camera, the interface and nothing else, so every screen was drawn on a flat grey slab. There is a room behind it now: an operator standing in the profile column, three lights, and embers drifting up through the dark. The weapons catalogue was four columns of text — item, stats, price, status — and is now a grid of tiles showing each weapon's render, class and rarity; grenades and launchers no longer borrow a picture of an assault rifle when they have none of their own. Thirty-four places where text was drawing outside its own box are fixed, the worst of them on the Battle Pass, where the next-reward strip was sized as a fraction of a card too short to hold it. One card per screen now leads instead of every panel claiming to. Presentation only — nothing about gameplay, matchmaking or progression changed.

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When the clock ran out the match simply stopped: you were left standing in the map with the timer on 00:00, never told who won or what you earned, while the coins were awarded silently in the background. The end-of-match summary is back, and so is the kill camera — the panel naming who killed you, with which weapon, and how long until you respawn, which had been drawing nothing at all. Post-processing runs for the first time in any released build, so there is ambient occlusion, colour grading and a vignette; the lighting and saturation were re-tuned against it, because every one of those values had been chosen against a stack nobody had ever seen applied. Desert Arena's sand is sand again rather than highlighter yellow, and barrel fires look like fire instead of orange rectangles. The mix no longer clips, the download drops from 294 MB to 181 MB, and the shop stops asking you to buy Gold for weapons you can already afford with earned XP.

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Anything the sun did not reach was being drawn as pure black: barn interiors on Farm, the whole skyline on Cartoon City, the undersides of props and the shaded faces of trees and rocks. None of the maps ship baked lighting, so the ambient light they were configured for never existed in game. It does now, on all five maps that were affected. Cartoon City used to start both teams on an empty field 199 metres from the level, with the city a smudge on the horizon; matches now begin in the streets. Post-processing also stopped throwing an error on every single frame.

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The antialiasing setting never reached the renderer, so every edge in the game was drawn as raw stair-steps no matter what the menu said. It works now, up to 8x. The weapon in your hands is lit properly instead of turning into a black silhouette in shade, and it no longer drops a gun-shaped shadow at your feet. Desert Arena stops rendering itself nine times a frame. Bullet holes are a third of their old size and look like holes.

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Settings moved into the pause menu, so mouse sensitivity, field of view and volume can be changed without leaving the match, and Quit to Desktop now asks first. The kill feed sits on a solid backing and stays readable over bright skies, and the score bar shows both teams in their own colours. Menu panels across Home, Store and Barracks render the dark navy they were designed as. Bots advance properly on the smaller maps.

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The sniper scope shows the world again instead of a dead lens. Every spawn point on all six maps is reachable from every other one. Matchmaking now defaults to the EU region instead of US West. Settings screen laid out properly at any resolution. Download cut from 2.0 GB to 730 MB.

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Clearer Host form labels and instructions. Bots are enabled by default on every new custom room. Cleaner leaderboard with a "YOU" highlight on your own row. Operators tab temporarily hidden while the class-based bonuses system is being reworked.

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All 24 weapons got operator-style names (Striker, Viper, Buckshot, Hawkeye, and more). Sharper map previews. Clean silhouette icons on weapon pickups. Barracks Progress tab cleaned up. Server-side stat validation with per-player rate limiting. Audit rollback of a handful of inflated accounts — all legitimate progress preserved.

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Crisp map thumbnails across the room browser. Redundant Unlocks section removed from Barracks Progress tab. Auto-match focus on Desert Arena and Tropical City. Rank insignia pass, real weapon renders, lobby polish, menu + login fixes.

Shop weapon gating enforced correctly (locked weapons can no longer be equipped without purchase). Respawn queue drain fix. Resolution IndexOutOfRange crash fixed on certain displays.