Watch the Match Through Their Eyes

The Camera Belongs to the Player

Watching someone should look like being there. Their strafe lean, slide dip, ledge lift and crouch are part of how the match feels, not decoration to replace with a perfectly level camera.

Demos and live spectating now share the game's first-person camera and HUD. Those movement details are recorded in every snapshot in demo format v5. Older demos still play, without the data they never recorded.

Bodies fall as ragdolls. Slow motion follows the recording's clock rather than lurching between ticks. Highlight reels gain transitions, fly-by shots, a movie mode and, mercifully, an exit.

Bot Games Finally Count

Private bot games had been waiting for reviewed calibration records that were never installed. You could play, keep a match record and still never reach a rating board.

Each standard bot preset is now a rated account on the Private board: Easy, Medium, Hard and Insane. Adding a bot picks the level rated closest to you in that mode, using Medium until you have a rating.

Custom-difficulty bots and bots changed during a match stay unrated, with their records retained. A duplicate preset in one match uses that preset's rating without changing the account again.

The bots have noodle-shop names now too. Ramen, Tonkotsu and Gyoza have replaced the interchangeable ominous roster. Udon and Soba remain team names.

Less Waiting at the Front Door

The first visit loads package metadata instead of every archive. Packages can come from an HTTP mirror, with the host copy as fallback.

Loading can recover from browser and lobby failures rather than leaving a dead screen. Settings imports report what they applied, optional preferences survive storage failures for the current session, and chat composition no longer treats an unfinished IME entry as a message to send.

Team chat is filtered by the server. A match-local mute lets you ignore a player without carrying that decision into the next match.

The World Has a Voice

Map ambience, Warfork world fog and sky portals, distance-based sound falloff, an announcer for every match, and an effects mix fill out the arena around the fight. Water behind walls stops paying for reflection and refraction passes you cannot see.

The game manual is refreshed, and the engine manual gets checked against the code page by page.

Still Open in This Release

Duel bots time the Red Armor less well than the other major items: its median wait after respawning is about 35 seconds. The lobby still needs a concurrent-match cap; a player cap alone bounds matches only indirectly. Both items carry forward to v0.9.30.