In the small list of games available only on the PlayStation 5, Destruction AllStars is arguably the most forgettable after a lukewarm launch in February this year, but the team at developer Lucid Games is still updating the title to improve the experience.
Community manager at Lucid Games, George Rule, outlines the bevvy of changes that have accompanied a recent update to the title. On the PlayStation Blog Rule points out that the team has been taking feedback from the community on sites like Twitter and Discord, as well as continuing internal play tests to improve the core experience.
This has lead the developer to extend the first season of the game while address three key areas: ghost hits, minute-to-minute gameplay and variety.
“One of the biggest points of feedback was on so-called ‘ghost hits’ during multiplayer games. Players have reported that they sometimes feel as if their vehicle loses health but with no clear cause presented to them on screen…. the majority of cases point to situations where other vehicles appear close by, but not coming into contact, or with no other vehicles appearing in view at all. We feel one of the possible causes is latency during a match of Destruction AllStars,” Rule writes.
When we played the game at launch we did experience this problem occasionally, as well as other grating problems when going online.
The latest update to the game will apparently fix some of these problems and, hopefully, keep everyone better in sync.
While ghost hits were a problem a much bigger factor in the lack of enjoyment in Destruction AllStars was more to do with the design of the game and less so its online architecture. For a game focused on vehicle combat you could spend long stretches of time simply puttering around with no collisions or anything exciting happening for a good while.
To spice up the minute-to-minute gameplay the cooldown on the ram has been decreased. The ram here acts as both a way of quickly getting into a fight as well as simply increasing your speed,, so this change may be the most impactful of the entire update.
Finally there’s the issue of variety. In our review we pointe pointed out that there just isn’t enough meat on the bones and you can quickly grow tired of Destruction AllStars.
To try and address this the update has a list of additions to try and keep things fresh:
• New high quality skins and cosmetics
• Online parties for solo game modes
• A new Quickplay playlist
• Buffs to AllStars and Hero Vehicles
• Two Reworked Mayhem maps with smaller arena size (going live in a few weeks)
• Three new premium AllStar Pass tiers
• Refreshed shop interface.
The smaller arena size is of particular note here as, together with the ram cooldowns, they added to a sense of aimless driving. Hopefully, by forcing players into closer proximity, combat will be more common.
Destruction AllStars was not without merit at launch and we’re happy to see more being put into the title. With Sony revealing that 10 million PlayStation 5s have been sold, there’s definitely a market for its exclusive titles.
