Insurgency: Sandstorm 1.4 update new map, playlists, and more

Published September 11, 2019 11:45 AM, by Chris Jarrard

Insurgency: Sandstorm managed to sneak its release out at the tail end of 2018 when almost everyone was preparing to take a break for Christmas, but its chaotic action and tension still managed to win hearts and minds. While the development team poured more effort and content into the game over the first half of 2019, it was not done there. The new 1.4 Update for Insurgency: Sandstorm might be the biggest improvement to the game yet, including a new snow map, additional cosmetics, a new mode, and an overhaul to playlists.

A partial list of new features, taken from the official blog posting on Steam, is listed below:

New Features

New PvP game mode “Frontline,” a tug-of-war inspired two way Push mode

• Capture all enemy objectives one by one, and then destroy the final weapon cache objective to win. Defend your own objectives and weapon cache from being captured or destroyed.
• After the neutral middle objective is captured, your team must defend your own objective and also attack the enemy’s objective.
• Every time a team captures an objective, they will gain respawn waves and respawn their team. A team loses all their respawn waves when the enemy team reaches their final weapon cache objective.

New snow map “Hillside” 

Official matchmaking games will now allow players to vote on the next map within their playlist and continue playing with the same players in their session instead of returning to the main menu between matches.

New light machine gun assault rifle hybrid weapons for the Gunner class

• Insurgents
• Galil
• Security
• Galil SAR

New Weapon Upgrade

• 3x Type 03 scope for QBZ-03

New Cosmetics

• Security soft shell style jacket
• Shell
• Shell Rolled
• Shell Camo
• Shell Camo Rolled
• Insurgent winter sport style jacket
• Winter Black
• Winter Blue
• Winter Red
• Winter White

Equipment (backpacks, vests, pouches) will now shift and jiggle with movement. This is enabled and disabled based on your “Effects” setting, where it is disabled on low and medium and enabled on high and above. We recommend users on minimum and medium spec machines disable this by setting their Effects setting to Low or Medium as this has an impact on performance.

Added Competitive rank decay wherein Diamond and Platinum ranks your rank will slowly decay if you do not play often enough.

Audio

• Added Panning rule dropdown which allows selection of speakers or headphones to provide the best positional audio experience for your hardware.
• Added Effects slider which controls the volume of all in-game sound effects.
• Added an option to mute the ear-ringing layer of the explosives and flashbang shellshock effects.
• VoIP no longer uses auto-ducking, and now uses side-chaining. This provides a more natural ducking of game audio when VoIP is used, and also fixes an issue where even if VoIP volume was set to 0 that game audio would still be ducked when VoIP was transmitted.

Spectator and Replays

New camera controls and options added with bindings available in the key binds menu.

• Camera zoom
• Hide HUD
• Disable camera smoothing
• Decrease and Increase playback speed bindings for Replays which default to the “Home” and “End” keys respectively.

An all-new playlist system is being deployed that aims to offer a fresh way to enjoy the content in Sandstorm without fracturing the existing player base and simultaneously keep server hosting costs manageable. Limited-time playlists will feature altered modes or mutators to change up the vanilla experience. These playlists will also allow the development team the opportunity to offer new content without the need for patches. A full breakdown of all bug fixes, changes, and additions can be found in the full patch notes.

For more game update announcements, trailers, and more,  keep checking in with Shacknews. For more information on all the biggest releases still coming this year, refer to our 2019 Release Date Guide.