New features of the upcoming season. Part 2: Co-drivers system rework

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New features of the upcoming season. Part 2: Co-drivers system rework

1st part of the devblog

Hello!

We continue to share the details of what you can expect with the start of the ninth season in Crossout. It’s time to tell you about one of the most long-awaited changes that you’ve been regularly asking us about. Today’s devblog will be devoted to the co-drivers system rework.

Please note that all co-drivers changes described in this devblog are preliminary. It’s possible that the final version of this mechanic, which will be presented in the update, will receive a number of additional changes. In this devblog, we will discuss only our current plans.

Let’s start with the fact that the co-drivers system will be completely redesigned. We took the maximum amount of comments and suggestions from the players into account, and we are working on turning this mechanic with doubtful benefits into an important part of the game.

List of co-drivers

We will abandon the current list of co-drivers and present you with new characters. Each of them will have their own personal card, where you will be able to see the co-driver’s skills, additional information and their visual appearance. A certain number of co-drivers will be available at the start, and their list may be expanded in the future.

Co-driver skills

In the current system, the skills of co-drivers rarely affect the outcome of the battle. Among them, only a few really useful bonuses can be distinguished, and in order to receive them, the co-driver must reach his maximum level. The new system will change this situation.

Our main goal is to make each co-driver useful for certain kinds of armoured vehicles and to give them specific roles on the battlefield. Long-range combat enthusiasts will definitely be interested in choosing “Sniper”, and thanks to a co-driver codenamed “Rogue”, the fans of close-range battles will become even more dangerous while they are being close to their enemies.

Each co-driver will have several passive skills that will improve your armoured car’s parts in one way or another. They can include: a bonus to weapon rotation speed, reduced spread, increased projectile speed, increase in mass limit and tonnage, increased radius of explosions or flame puddles, and much more. There will also be a “tank” co-driver, and all his skills will be aimed at providing maximum survivability on the battlefield.

In addition to useful passive skills, each co-driver will have their own “talent”. In order to activate it, you will need to perform certain actions. One of the co-drivers, for example, will be able to increase the damage you deal to the enemy for a certain time and highlight the weak spots on the enemy’s car. To activate this talent, you will need to hold your crosshairs on the enemy for a certain time. And the other co-driver will be able to restore the durability of their car by collecting the remains of destroyed enemies.

Of course, the skills that are listed here are not final and may be changed several times before we are ready to present the final version to you. But, we think that you have caught the essence of future changes and how the right co-driver can affect the course of the battle.

Co-drivers leveling up system

With the new system, there will be no need to level up a co-driver to get the next skill. Each co-driver with all his skills will be purchased for “glory points” (this name may be changed later). Glory points will be earned in every battle. Just by playing the game, you will gradually be able to accumulate the required number of points and unlock the next co-driver of your choice. After you have unlocked a co-driver, all his skills immediately become available to you.

Will there be some kind of compensation for old co-drivers and the resources spent on them?

Of course! We will take all the unlocked levels of all your co-drivers into account and issue a corresponding amount of glory points. You can use these points to unlock new co-drivers.

When will we be able to try out this new system?

We will definitely launch a test server where everyone will be able to try out the new co-drivers. After this testing, you will be able to share your feedback, thoughts and comments with us. We will additionally inform you when the test server is going to be open to everyone.

That’s all for today! In the next devblogs, we will continue to show you new parts of the season and talk about other features planned for the next major update.

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it’s about time,i posted this idea on the old forum.glad to see they been working on it. :upside_down_face:

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I am cautiously excited about this! I predict it will cause chaos for a while, until they work out the balancing, but I also think it is a much needed shakeup of the game mechanics.

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I think I would have gone with a simpler system where co-drivers belonged to one of the factions and only buffed parts belonging to that faction in order to give factions more relevance, but this should be interesting.

It’s quite the overhaul. I’m sure it will make a lot of people mad (I’m not sure what I think), because their updates always do shake things up a bit, but I’m impressed that they are taking up such a massive re-work.
I hope their vision pays off for them, but I’m not convinced this is a terribly relevant issue warranting the man-hours it will take to implement. It sounds like a lot of work, and I salute them for their tenacity, but I’m not sure it’s worth it.
After all is said and done, I think it will likely be a feature largely ignored that doesn’t really add anything to the game as far as fun goes.
Co-drivers are a static and non-interactive feature that aren’t a part of game play. They get assigned and forgotten and have little to do with anything other than being a generic perk. I would suggest that there are other areas of the game that are more interactive and are entirely ignored by developers, like Adventure Mode. An improvement to Adventure Mode could result in hours of entertainment, exploration, points of interest, Ace training grounds, resource collection, and could serve as a window into other interesting features. I think you would get more bang for your buck by spending the man-hours on that feature, more maps, or something. I’m not convinced Co-drivers are that interesting, or even have that much potential as a feature other than offering another grind for players to endure the way they are being approached…but we’ll see.
I think it’s a lot of work that will result in very little improvement to game play or fun. They could focus on something more relevant.
WTF is their ignorance of Adventure mode about anyway? Why do they refuse to develop this very significant feature? Some games base their entire income on the open-world premise, but these developers act like it doesn’t exist and can’t seem to find any meaningful purpose for it at all. I think that’s nutz, but whatever.

They appear to have a vision, are going to go for it, and I hope it works out. I don’t get it though, and I don’t think that when all is said and done their effort will be worth that much here. People will check a box and be done with it, and this overhaul will be out of site and out of mind, and just as irrelevant as it was before.

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I like this.
Also like that there is no cost of buying the talents, but just play and unlock.
I am a little concerned about the repair one, but it will all be unbalanced at the start anyway, like Poony said, chaotic.
It will all settle down and overall, I like this.
Thumbs up!

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I see what you are saying, but the introduction of active perks is a big change, and I suspect will quickly become a big part of the new meta.
And while I share your desire for Adventure to be improved, I think that’s a bigger and more long term problem to solve, which will require more work.

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Ah cool. The new codrivers are sooner than later. I really want to find out what all the perks are.

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in most games they have a skill tree…Co-drivers is just a rename for skill tree…
here’s an example that is in almost every game and is a focus point to achieve…

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The generic names like “Tankman” or “Rogue” are a symptom of the current trend of Crossout degenerating into a sad affair for kids or less interested/devoted/smart players. It’s like telling them: “OK, you noobs… This one is for tanks. TANKS. Repeat: ‘tanks’. Jimmy, stop playing with your special helmet’s straps or you’ll hurt yourself.”
I prefer for the co-drivers to be based in the lore, with more unique names.

Also, notice how it’s a console screenshot. Is it some simplification aimed at console players? So they don’t get lost if the co-drivers are too complex for them? Something PC players wouldn’t have any problem with.

It’s so we won’t complain. It’s not a rework, it’s new! It’s better! :lying_face:
This could be another sign of how many players have been quitting, and Targem’s striving for acquiring and focusing on new ones. I mean, I choose co-drivers for one main skill, so if the new ones’ skills will synergize better for practical combat roles, it will be an improvement. But maybe let’s not dumb it down just because some out-of-touch ‘exec’ perceives the playerbase so uniformly.

But will they be able to accommodate all the functional roles? They don’t play the game (enough), so they don’t know what the players need. I assume the developers mostly rely on the moderators’ opinion. I wouldn’t trust someone whose time is so cheap with analyzing things for my business. E.g., I need at least Hans’ +2 seconds to make those long-range Clarinet hits possible . The weapon would be substantially limited without this perk. A few examples of how it works:

When I sent an early version of this video to Sipovec in March 2021, who was in charge of the Garage back then, he didn’t even watch it. The PM was in relation to them mentioning they were interested in showing a high-PS Clarinet vehicle. Six weeks later, they showed a Goliath tank with a Clarinet and two Caucasuses, and the narrator even said it wasn’t doing very well at high PS. And I’d made it clear my suggestion would save them time.

How can the developers be expected to know what we need if they don’t play the game enough, and they’re not interested in gathering feedback from those who do? (Recently I found out that Sipovec works in the support department, despite having a “Developer” tag. At this point, I’m not even sure if Woody is a developer. Maybe they outsource most of the work to cheaper Indian subcontractors to save costs and then just try to put new content together into an update.)

BTW, it seems that I can no longer use a booster Clarinet car after the latest Cockpit nerf. 40% may not be enough. So all this spectacular gameplay is probably gone now. And a unique role on the battlefield. In late 2021, I sent 3 videos to the Crossout Show, but because it’s some biased simpletons doing the selection, those unique clips weren’t featured. Instead, it was shown how some lucky new players were able to do a funny trick, etc. One player told me that his submission wasn’t shown when he sent it, but when a friend sent it, they showed it.

Maybe we should participate somehow? Give us a detailed poll or something? And I mean, detailed. Not like the one from early 2021, IIRC, where you asked very generally if we thought the Game Masters were doing a good job. I already feel disenfranchised with the official comments section being on reddit, in order to use players for free advertising. How is it working out, BTW? You get many new spenders from reddit?

This means it’s mostly a done deal. We want to be able to suggest skills that we actually need.

Let’s hope this change will freshen up Crossout’s essence… :nauseated_face:

After spending hundreds of coins to level up the current co-drivers, we get a bunch of otherwise free glory points, on the whole. :scream:

In the latest dev stream, it was mentioned the skills would have bigger buffs, e.g. more than +5% from all 3 skills of the same type. Did it take them 4+ years to notice?

It’s a nice place to chill out. Too bad it’s so limited.

As for the game in general, I’d at least want some quasi-open world with driving out into the wasteland and randomly meeting raiders, and players for pvp battles. Not just this simplified, basic grind.

There will be vehicles purpose-built for this skill. :rofl: Something cheesy, high alpha damage, high speed…

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Yeah, kinda sad they didn’t go the skill tree route. Just give us co-drivers slots and let us save our custom ones. Alas, this system wouldn’t require players to grind their asses off.

Mixed feelings on this. I’m glad to see it and it looks like an imrovement. Just do not take my +5 kmh on Cohort and Humpback buff or I be grump.

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Long time waiting, Cautiously optimistic. These aspects all seem good:

  • free cost to unlock co-drivers, just play the game and you’ll get them
  • co-drivers don’t affect specific parts any more, instead they boost general play styles (example: tanker has damage resist and speed increase for slow parts)
  • additionally of what we see so far, it doesn’t look like co-drivers are locking you in to specific combos which was a concern, like if tankmans movement perk only affected tracks that would be bad, but luckily you can use it on any build and you have no wasted perks even if it’s not the ideal build for it

some remains to be seen concerns:

  • Damage increasing co-drivers. I think this is inevitable, if not on release then down the road and it’s a bad idea. Old co-drivers had so small damage buffs that it was negligible, but the new ones are supposed to have stronger impact so that may not be the case. I don’t want to see a blight / old icebox scenario where you are forced to use a single co-driver because the damage increase is too good to pass up / weapons get balanced around that damage increase and are useless without it
  • repair perk, robocraft players get PTSD over this for good reason, it doesn’t belong in a game like crossout, it’s like adding healing to CS. Now, the implementation of drop on kill sounds like it benefits the competitive mode very little but benefits the raid modes a lot so it doesn’t sound like it will be a problem for PvP, and will in fact make raids a lot less painful to complete. I’d ask that you consider making PvE exclusive co-drivers so that there is no risk to PvP with perks like these
  • I hope the glory points are not too grindy to earn, they may be free but the trend in crossout is that every new thing is more grindy than the last, no one wants to spend 100 hours unlocking the co-drivers
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I currently have a maxed out master jack co driver that is all I use for the extra weight so of nothing can compensate for that I might just stop playing instead of reworking every single build again for the nth time

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Because even if I’m not playing Crossout, sometimes I’m still playing Crossout…ya, this post breaks a few rules, probably.

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So,I’m excited and scared for the new system at the same time.

I love the idea of the drivers having a “Special” ability.

BUT

We know this dev teams track recorded and I’m scared that some of those abilities will be so good that you will use that driver even if everything else does not work with your build.

I welcome this change 100% and I’m looking forward to it. It’s always a fun ride.

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“Not a cashgrab feature” ©

Dixi

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Will they forget to include Masterjack lvl 15/Jade’s gen perks and break 50% of the CW builds? (^:

I really hope they do the thing that makes sense and include a “mass limit and tonnage +500kgs” and a “heavy cabs +5 kmh” codriver.

Honestly “tankman” stresses me. Perk has no numerical value shown (I hope they don’t do that crap again), and the -20% gen explosion… hmmmmmm…

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Wow, these new perks are going to be game changers for a lot of builds. It seems like every main type of build will become more extreme in their own way. Faster dogs, tougher bricks, more devastating snipers, etc.
I am a bit scared, but also very excited!

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The evil part of me hopes they go for it and break every build that depended on one of the maxed out perks. Burn it all down and rebuild!
(Have I mentioned how much I love building? Every update is an excuse to make new cars!)

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I hope codrivers get a PowerScore value - its bad as it is with fused items, having high level driver with actually boosted stats will be really painful to new players.

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Bullshit! was passiert mit den ressorcen die investiert wurden bisher in den beifahrer? futsch! über 3000 coins einfach weg pro Beifahrer! ich verlange einen anständigen ausgleich!