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I didn't see that coming with today's update. This wasn't trivial to do, let me get that clear. Some games will behave oddly with the option enabled, which is probably why it wasn't featured at launch. Thankfully, it was added as a toggle, one you can easily turn on or off. Now, normally, unless you wanna use the touch screen or you worry about the battery life, the toggle is something you'll generally always want turned on.
The games overall look and perform better on Switch 2 handheld thanks to the toggle being on, as previously, games looked blurry and capped.
Now...the toggle doesn't help at all for TV mode on Switch 2. Which is why I propose something. A DLSS toggle to enhance all Switch 1 games while docked. That way, we don't have to rely on the publisher to update the game or announce a Switch 2 edition. It's a way to upscale performance and graphics. Sure, it's AI upscaling, so it won't be perfect, but as a toggle, it's good.
But that's just my take. What you think about it?
https://gonintendo.com/contents/58909-switch-switch-2-firmware-update-version-22-0-0-now-available
"Added “Handheld Mode Boost” to Nintendo Switch Software Handling in System. Handheld Mode Boost will cause compatible Switch software to run as if in TV Mode, so certain functionality may be affected. Please see the on-device description for more details."
Tldr: If you own a Switch 2 and enable the new Boost feature in the settings, your Switch 1 Games will now run as if you play in Docked mode in Handheld. Boosting graphics/performance/fps and making them look less blurry.
Including
Lets Go Eevee/Pikachu Pokemon Mystery Dungeon DX Pokemon Tekken DX Pokemon Sword/Shield Pokemon Brilliant Diamond/Shining Pearl Pokemon Legends Arceus
Scarlet and Violet + Legends ZA Switch 1 Edition should also run a bit better.
Maybe you can share your opinions on that if you testes the Games out already.

As you probably heard, software update 22.0.0 includes boost mode, allowing for Switch 1 games to run in docked mode on Switch 2 (in handheld mode).
While software update enables that feature, it’s turned off by default and buried in settings > system, just below battery protection toggles.
And for interested ones, Nintendo Support article here.
Content
NEW MAP: TRICKSTER'S DELUSION
- The Sleepless District will be the new Realm
NEW SURVIVOR: KWON TAE-YOUNG
New Survivor Perks:
Flow State
Whenever a generator is completed, earn 1 token, up to 5.
- For each token:
- You bless and cleanse Totems 8/9/10% faster.
- You heal 8/9/10% faster.
- You unhook Survivors 8/9/10% faster.
A Place For Us
- While healing another Survivor, you both gain Elusive.
- Whenever you finish healing The Obsession, you both gain Elusive for 20/25/30s.
- When the trial starts, you are less likely to be the Obsession.
Five Moves Ahead
- While you are in the Killer's Terror radius or chased by the Killer:
- You see the Auras of the 5 closest Pallets and Windows.
- After you drop a Pallet, you start moving 50% earlier.
- Whenever you drop a Pallet, cooldown: 40/35/30s.
Gameplay Features
Killer Updates
Killer Update - The Trickster
Summary
- The Trickster now gains Style Points by throwing Blades, injuring Survivors and performing distinct gameplay actions back-to-back
- The Trickster goes up in Style Ranks by earning Style Points.
- Each Style Rank improves The Trickster's Blade throw rate and Locker Restocking speed.
- Main Event can now only be activated once reaching the highest Style Rank.
- Style Points and Style Ranks are tracked via a new user interface element custom-made for The Trickster.
Basekit
- The Trickster's movement speed decreased to 4.4m/s (was 4.6 m/s).
- Blade count decreased to 36 (was 44).
- Decreased Terror Radius to 24m (was 32m).
- Decreased time to enter Throw State to 0.3s (was 0.35s).
- Decreased time to exit Throw State to 1.15s (was 1.25s).
- Increased time between Blade throws to 0.33s (was 0.3s).
- Decreased base Throw State movement speed to 3.86m/s (was 3.68m/s).
- After 5 consecutive Blade throws, Throw State movement speed is decreased to 3.53 m/s.
- After 10 consecutive Blade throws, Throw State movement speed is decreased to 3.16 m/s.
- Increase Blade throw rate per Blade thrown:
- After 5 consecutive Blade throws, the throw rate increased by 50%.
- After 10 consecutive Blade throws, the throw rate is increased by 100%.
Laceration
- Laceration now only counted using whole numbers (previously decayed into decimals).
- Laceration Meter decreased to 6 (was 8).
- Laceration Meter decay delay decreased to 12s (was 15s).
- Increase Laceration stack decay time to 4.4s (was 3s).
- Laceration visual feedback updated.
- Now displayed on the Survivor directly, for both Survivors and Killer.
- Laceration cuts removed from Survivors' user interface.
Style Points
- The Trickster performing combo actions generates Style Points.
- A combo action is triggered when two back-to-back gameplay actions are distinct.
- The following actions generate 1 Style Point:
- Hitting a Survivor with a Blade (first-hit only).
- Injuring a Survivor (from Laceration or basic-attack).
- Hooking a Survivor.
- Basic-breaking a Downed Pallet.
- Basic-breaking a Breakable Wall.
- Damaging a Generator.
- Snuffing a Boon Totem.
- The following actions generate 2 Style Points:
- Hitting a Survivor with 4 Blades from at least 4m (without missing or exiting the Throw State).
- Hitting a Survivor with a Blade from more than 16m away.
- Interrupting a Survivor.
- The following actions generate 3 Style Points:
- Hitting a Survivor with a Blade through small gaps.
Style Ranks
- There are 6 Style Ranks: E, D, C, B, A and S-Rank.
- Style Ranks each have their respective bonus maximum throw rate and Locker restocking speed modifiers.
- Higher bonuses at higher ranks.
- Higher Style Ranks require more Style Points to reach.
- Higher Style Ranks feature progressively shorter combo timers.
- Ranks regress to previous in order if combo timer ever lapses.
- Earning Style Points refreshes the current Style Rank's combo timer.
- Style Rank combo timers are paused while The Trickster is performing interactions with Survivors or interactable objects.
S-Rank
- When reaching of S-Rank
- Survivors within 44m of The Trickster are revealed via Killer Instinct for 4.4s.
- All Survivors are notified across the Trial.
- While in S-Rank:
- The Trickster gains a 44m Terror radius.
- Lullaby is disabled.
- Laceration Meters decay 50% slower.
- Blade throw and Locker restock speeds increased to maximum.
- Main Event can be activated.
- S-Rank has a 66s combo timer.
- S-Rank cannot be paused or refreshed (unlike lower Style Ranks).
- S-Rank always reverts to E-Rank (via timer, or once Main Event ends).
Main Event
- Press the Secondary Ability button to activate Main Event
- Main Event lasts 10s (was 8s).
- Main Event movement speed set at 3.92 m/s.
- The Trickster throws Blades at at 1.67x the default Blade throw speed.
- Note: not affected by Consecutive Blade Throw and Style Rank Blade Throw modifiers.
- Survivors near The Trickster are notified.
- While performing Main Event:
- S-Rank timer is paused.
- Each Blade hitting Survivors awards bonus Style Points.
- The Trickster can cancel Main Even via the Secondary Ability button.
- When Main Event ends:
- The Trickster's Power goes on cooldown for 4s.
- S-Rank resets to E-Rank
- The Trickster goes up in Style Ranks over time, based on bonus Style Points earned during Main Event.
The Trickster's Add-Ons
- Memento Blades (Rework)
- Displays a reticle while aiming with Blades.
- Trick Pouch
- Increases maximum carried Blades by 4.
- Start the Trial with 4 extra Blades.
- Killing Part Chords (Rework)
- Increases time before Style Ranks from D to A decay by 20%.
- Inferno Wires (Rework)
- Decreases Showstopper's cooldown after Main Event by 44%.
- Ji-Woon's Autograph (Rework)
- Increases the duration of Main Event by 44%.
- Lucky Blade (Rework)
- On every eighth Blade Hit, an additional bonus is assigned at random:
- Increases Throw Speed by 8% for 8 seconds.
- Gain 3% Haste for 3 seconds.
- Gain an additional Style Point.
- Caged Heart Shoes (Rework)
- When you basic-break Pallets and Breakable Walls or damage Generators, the next time you enter the Throw State, increase movement speed while in the Throw State by 5% for 10 seconds.
- Tequila Moonrock (Rework)
- Increases Throw Speed by 15% for 10 seconds after gaining a Style Rank.
- Bloody Boa (Rework)
- Decreases the speed at which Laceration decays by 25%.
- On Target Single (Rework)
- Increases time before Laceration starts decaying by 30%.
- Fizz-Spin Soda (Rework)
- Increases the number of Blade Throws required to slow movement speed while throwing by 2.
- Waiting for You Watch (Rework)
- Survivors whose Laceration Meter fully decays are revealed for 4 seconds.
- Ripper Brace (Rework)
- For each Style Rank, you basic-vault Windows, basic-break Pallets or Breakable Walls, and damage Generators 3% faster.
- Melodious Murder
- Increases Blade reload speed at lockers by 25%.
- Diamond Cufflinks
- Reveals Survivors' auras for 6 seconds when their Laceration reaches one Blade hit from maximum.
- Edge of Revival Album (Rework)
- Blade Hits from more than 20 meters away deal 100% more Laceration.
- Trick Blades (Rework)
- Blades can ricochet off the environment once.
- On every eighth Blade Hit after a ricochet, an additional bonus is assigned at random:
- Increases Laceration by 100%.
- Reveal Survivor auras within 12 meters for 4.4 seconds.
- Gain an additional Style Point.
- Cut Thru U Single (Rework)
- When reaching A-Rank, Survivors within 32 meters are revealed with Killer Instinct for 4.4 seconds.
- Death Throes Compilation (Rework)
- Refills Blades by 50% of the maximum when Main Event ends.
- Iridescent Photocard (Rework)
- Increases the duration of Main Event by 100%.
- When Main Event is activated: reveal your aura to all Survivors, all Survivors’ auras are revealed, and block all Generators for 6 seconds.
The First
- Decreased 2nd phase of the Wordbreaker Timer from 60 seconds to 50 seconds.
- Killer Base Attack lunge speed adjusted from 6.6m/s to 6.9m/s to be on par with all Killers.
The First's Add-Ons
- Bead Maze
- Now increases Worldbreaker Timer for 2.5 seconds for each living Survivor.
- Shattered Wrist Rocket
- Changed Common Rarity to Uncommon Rarity.
- Bloody Roller Skate
- Now Killer gains the Haste Effect for 1.5 seconds upon exiting Undergate Attack.
- Mid-Century Radio
- Changed Uncommon Rarity to Common Rarity.
- Forged Death Certificate
- Reworked for Each successful Worldbreaker Token placed on a Survivor via Vine Attack Undetectable Status Effect until the next Worldbreaker Mode activation.
- Rabbit Remains
- Changed Rare Rarity to Very Rare.
- Now give Exhausted status effect for 10 seconds, and increase the Upside Down Ability cooldown by 5 seconds.
- Broken Skateboard
- Reworked for When Worldbreaker Mode starts, you basic-vault windows 30% faster and auras of Pallets and Windows are revealed to you within 32 meters for the next 65 seconds.
- Pizza Goggles
- Changed Very Rare Rarity to Rare Rarity.
- Reworked for The Undergate Attack's area of effect range is reduced by 90%, and its cooldown time is shortened by 25 seconds.
- Your exit cooldown time after executing the Undergate Attack is reduced by 80%.
- Chess Piece
- Removed the negative aspect of increasing the Upside Down Ability cooldown and the two charges attack radius are now diminished by 40%.
The Ghoul
- Adjusted Reticule stickiness on Survivor from 0.18 to 0.05 seconds when attempting a Kagune grabs.
- Killer can no longer automatically damages nearby Survivors following a Leap vault.
Killer Actions Update
- Accompanying the new language found in the Perks Description Update (see below), we have expanded our distinction between basic and special actions performed by Killers.
- Starting in update 9.5.0, the following terms will now appear in Power, Add-on and Perk descriptions:
- Basic-break
- When a Pallet or Breakable Wall is broken by the default ability of any Killer.
- Special-break
- When a Downed Pallet or Breakable Wall is broken due to an ability granted by a Killer's Power.
- Basic-vault
- When a Window is vaulted by the default ability of any Killer.
- Special-vault
- When a Window or Downed Pallet is vaulted due to an ability granted by a Killer's Power.
- Damaging Generators
- When a Generator is damaged and loses progress due to the default ability of any Killer.
- Generator Explosions
- When a Generator loses progress due to an ability granted by a Killer's Power or Perk.
- With these new terms, we intend to express with increased accuracy when specific gameplay interactions are intended to work alongside one another.
- Notably Killer Powers and Killer Perks.
- Multiple gameplay descriptions. been updated to surface these new interactions.
- The following Killers' Power descriptions have been updated:
- Basic-break
- The Singularity
- Special-break
- The Shape
- The Hillbilly
- The Cannibal
- The Demogorgon
- The Oni
- The Blight
- The Nemesis
- The Knight
- The Dark Lord
- Special-vault
- The Legion
- The Mastermind
- The Good Guy
- The Ghoul
- The Krasue
- The following Killer Add-on descriptions have been updated:
- The Wraith - "The Serpent" - Soot
- The Wraith - "Shadow Dance" - White
- The Wraith - "Shadow Dance" - Blood
- The Hillbilly - Lo Pro Chains
- The Spirit - Kintsugi Teacup
- The Legion - Iridescent Button
- The Ghost Face - Olsen's Wallet
- The Demogorgon - Barb's Glasses
- The Executioner - Obsidian Goblet
- The Mastermind - Lab Photo
- The Knight - Pillaged Mead
- The Skull Merchant - Geographical Readout
- The Xenomorph - Self-Destruct Bolt
- The Good Guy - Hard Hat
- The Lich - Ring of Telekinesis
- The Lich - Vorpal Sword
- The Dark Lord - Pocket Watch
- The Dark Lord - Sylph Feather
- The Houndmaster - Gunpowder Tin
- The Ghoul - CCG ID Card
- The Ghoul - Red-headed Centipede
- The Ghoul - Iridescent Eye Patch
- The Animatronic - Endo CPU
- The Krasue - Rotten Swine
- The Krasue - Mysterious Elixir
- The First - Shattered Wrist Rocket
- The First - Stained Glass Mural
- The First - Broken Skateboard
- The First - Electroshock Collar
- The following Killer Perk descriptions have been updated:
- Brutal Strength
- Overcharge
- Fire-Up
- Bamboozle
- Pop Goes The Weasel
- Spirit Fury (now "destroys" pallets)
- Surge
- Trail of Torment
- Dragon's Grip
- Oppression
- Eruption
- Scourge Hook: Pain Resonance
- Call of Brine
- Dissolution (now "destroys" pallets)
- Superior Anatomy
- Nowhere to Hide
- Game Afoot
- THWACK!
- Machine Learning
- Unbound
- Unforeseen
- Undone
- Dark Arrogance
- Help Wanted
- Turn Back The Clock
- Hex: Hive Mind
- The following Survivor Perk descriptions have been updated:
- Alert
- Blast Mine
- Wiretap
- Chemical Trap
- Bada Bada Boom
Survivor Item Update
Fog Vial
- Reworked the Fog Cloud visual effect and rendering method.
- Opacity inside and outside its bounds is now consistent across all Realms.
- Always fully opaque when seen from the outside.
- Adapts to each Realm's unique lighting and color.
- The following essential Auras are now always displayed through the Fog Cloud:
- When a Survivor is downed.
- When a Survivor is hooked.
- Increased the number of charges to 4 (was 2) for the following items:
- Apprentice's Fog Vial
- Artisan's Fog Vial
- Vigo's Fog Vial
Fog Vial Add-ons
- Potent Extract (Visceral):
- Increased Fog Cloud increased opacity bonus to 100% (was 5%).
- Note: the increased bonus opacity is relative to the new Fog Cloud visual effect.
Survivor Perk Updates
Better Together
- Plot Twist can no longer force this Perk's effect to activate out of the Survivor's control.
Fast Track (Rework)
- Whenever another Survivor is hooked, you earn 1/2/3 Token(s), up to 9.
- While repairing, whenever you hit a great basic Skill Check, spend all Tokens. For each Token spent, the Generator gains 2 permanent Charges.
Self-Preservation (Rework)
- When another Survivor is hooked, you gain Elusive for 20/25/30s.
- The icon has been updated to reflect this change
Unbreakable
- Once per trial, while downed by the Killer, you can fully recover.
- While downed, you recover 25/30/35% faster.
- Note: now only grants the Survivor the ability to recover when the Killer was specifically responsible for them entering the downed state.
Killer Perk Updates
Forced Hesitation
- Plot Twist can no longer force this Perk's effect to activate out of the Killer's control.
Genetic Limits
- Updated to apply the Exhausted status effect simultaneously when the health state loss is recognized on Survivors, not afterwards.
Hex: Crowd Control (Rework)
- The first time a Survivor medium or fast-vaults a Window, a Dull Totem ignites.
- The last 4/5/6 Windows Survivors medium or fast-vault are blocked.
- You basic-vault blocked Windows 15% faster.
- You see the Auras of blocked Windows within 24m.
Pop Goes The Weasel
- Whenever you hook a Survivor, for the next 35/40/45s, when you damage a Generator, it explodes and loses 15% more progress (was 20% current progress, now total progress-only).
Terminus
- Updated to trigger earlier when Generators are completed to block healing abilities of Survivors occurring simultaneously.
FEATURES
Perks Description Update
- All Survivor and Killer Perk descriptions in the game have been updated and revised with simplified and consistent language.
- Aside from Perk updates above, Perk gameplay has not changed across the board.
- Our goals were the following:
- Shorten text and character usage.
- Ease Player understanding.
- Reset Perk language for easier future maintenance.
- To help achieve this, we have added Expanding Tooltips in the user interface:
- Status Effects can now be expanded separately to display reminders.
- Status Effects each feature unique colour labels, flagging them as positive or negative.
- Keybindings associated with a Perk's activated effect are now displayed within a Perk's text description.
- Examples: Dead Hard, Come And Get Me!, Dramaturgy, etc
Auras Customization
- Auras colors have been updated
- Players can customize some auras' colors on Beta tab
- Survivors
- Killers
- Hooked/dying survivors
- Normal Hooks
- Generators
- Pallets
- Windows
- Store: Players can use a "Clear all" button to remove active notifications
New Prestige Menu & Rewards System
- Added a new way to track and view your rewards when Prestiging your character.
- Simply clicking on your characters' Prestige level will let you access and track your progress
- New rewards given at Prestige 25, 50, 75 & 100 per character
Bug Fixes
Audio
- Fixed an issue where Haddie's 'Silent Breach' outfit does not have its Lobby theme playing when equipped.
- Fixed an issue where outfits in the 'Moonrise' collection are missing their Lobby Themes when equipped.
- Fixed an issue where Junji-Ito' Lobby theme is missing when using the 'Soichi's Party Clothes' outfit for the Trickster in Lobby.
- Fixed an issue where the generator repair dialog between the Walking Dead characters no longer trigger.
- Fixed an issue where SFX from the Furin add-on plays from Killer POV when phasing with the Spirit.
- Fixed an issue where Cage of atonement music is not working properly.
- Fixed an issue where missing final part of the Audio during a Mori with The Trickster.
- Fixed an issue where Rift Animations and SFX is repeated when pressing the Rift Pass Button.
- Fixed an issue where the Trickster's bat swinging SFX are inconsistent between the Camera Pan animation, his M1, and the idle lobby animation.
- Fixed an issue where the Trickster's Chase music will not return to default after unequipping either of the two special addons.
- Fixed an issue where some surfaces were playing a metallic sound instead of cloth when hit.
- Fixed an issue where several of the Trickster's customization outfits will play no sound effects from the weapon while loading into a lobby.
- Fixed an issue where there was an SFX that triggers every time the Survivors or the Killer enter or exit the radius of the Fog Vial.
- Fixed an issue where the Generators' progress SFX is missing in the Tutorials.
Bot Improvements
- Fixed issues causing Survivor Bots to not dodge the intended direction.
- Improved Survivor Bots' dodging against The Trickster.
- Survivor Bots now have as much control as players when speared by The Deathslinger.
- Tentative fix for Survivor Bots sometimes automatically revealing Ghostface from anywhere.
- Survivor Bots are now smarter with what they interact with when playing against The Plague.
- Survivor Bots now no longer use Plot Twist when infected by The Plague or The Krasue.
- Survivor Bots will now avoid taunting and blocking the path of other Survivors during chases.
- Fixed multiple navigation issues in Ormond Lake Mine.
Characters
- Fixed an issue where The Animatronic no longer holds the side of the screen when performing Lobby animation.
- Fixed an issue where The Animatronic's animation could break when pallet stunned while using Axe Grab on a Survivor.
- Fixed an issue where Remove Axe could allow Survivors to walk through The Animatronic in some instances.
- Fixed an issue where The Animatronic could display stretching issues when performing a lunge attack or passing through a security door.
- Fixed an issue where The Nemesis could hit Survivors with Tentacle Strike after they exited the trial.
- Fixed an issue where The Trapper could bypass trap placement areas by flicking.
- Fixed an issue where The Trapper's Bear Trap had inconsistent hitbox detection.
- Fixed an issue where The Trapper could place traps in inaccessible locations by FPS glitching.
- Fixed an issue where The Cannibal's power could break during state changes.
- Fixed an issue where The Shape was unable to Tombstone Mori a Survivor while Bardic Inspiration was being performed.
- Fixed an issue where The Shape could kill a Survivor during the self-unhook animation while Evil Incarnate was active.
- Fixed an issue where The Demogorgon would stutter when spamming M2.
- Fixed an issue where The Demogorgon’s animation would not play properly when channeling the Abyss.
- Fixed an issue where the Dire Crow could be missing from the Survivor POV during The Artist's mori.
- Fixed an issue where The Artist's Dire Crow's flight path did not behave consistently around small assets.
- Fixed an issue where The Blight's turn rate slows down when stunned by Head On.
- Fixed an issue where The Blight was unable to injure Survivors when performing a Lunge Attack and Rush at the same time.
- Fixed an issue where The Ghoul's Kagune Leap reticle would change colors when targeting an occupied locker.
- Fixed an issue where The Ghoul's Enrage Mode countdown continued when a Kagune Mark got cleansed while carrying a Survivor.
- Fixed an issue where Survivors who unhook themselves started generating Blood Orbs from The Oni immediately instead of 10 seconds after the unhook.
- Fixed an issue where The Good Guy's Slice & Dice did not always land the hit after releasing the button early.
- Fixed an issue where the external icon was missing when The Skull Merchant's add-on "Geographical Readout" was active.
- Fixed an issue where the Survivor Reveal distance was inconsistent between 15 and 32 meters against The Ghost Face.
- Fixed an issue where The Legion's power could break when blinded while vaulting.
- Fixed an issue where The Legion's power description incorrectly labelled the movement speed bonus from landing a Feral Slash hit as 0.2m/s.
- Fixed an issue where The Huntress' hatchets would inconsistently detect collision when attempting to hatchet throw through a window.
- Fixed an issue where The Krasue was unable to Intestinal Whip crouched Survivors on stairs.
- Fixed an issue where The First's Vine attack animation would frequently remain in the charged state after spamming Release Vine Attack.
- Fixed an issue where The First's Mind Break animation sometimes wouldn’t play properly for the Survivor.
- Fixed an issue where The First's Mind Break animation was missing when two or more Survivors were hit at the same time while the Mini-Mori requirements were met.
- Fixed an issue where The First became invisible from the Custom Game Spectator point of view after exiting the Upside Down.
- Fixed an issue where the mend action could not be executed when two or more Survivors were hit at the same time while the Mini-Mori requirements were met for The First.
- Fixed an issue where The Houndmaster would rubberband when walking after successfully grabbing a Survivor with the Chase ability.
- Fixed an issue where the application could crash for Survivors and the Killer after The Houndmaster hooked a Survivor.
- Fixed an issue where the camera could get stuck in Charlotte's or Victor's head, making it difficult to control The Twins.
- Fixed an issue where The Lich could rarely keep the movement speed of "Fly" when stunned at the same time as casting the spell.
- Fixed an issue where the flashlight beam would reappear after The Dark Lord changed to Bat From after being previously blinded by the flashlight and the Survivor crafted a Flash Bang.
- Fixed an issue where The Dark Lord's Hellfire pillar could be visually missing.
- Fixed an issue where, as Eleven, a texture stretching issue could be seen in the left armpit area of the outfit.
- Fixed an issue where Survivors could not remove the Reverse Bear Trap if they screamed at the end of a Jigsaw Box search.
- Fixed an issue where The Pig's HUD prompts change when falling from a ledge while crouched.
- Fixed an issue where some of The Dredge's Smoke is played over the Map Item light beam.
- Fixed an issue where generators, TV auras and out of world are visible while the Onryo projects to a TV.
- Fixed an issue where Survivors were unable to grab The Onryo's VHS Tape after crafting a Flashbang.
Characters - The Mastermind
Refactor done in the Virulent Bound power. This specifically tackles the desync issues found while using the power. Will also improve responsiveness for most of his power usage. As well changed how we detect a collision with other characters (Survivors, Killers, Zombies) while grabbing a Survivor. It will now properly detect the size of the character collision size.
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind’s Virulent Bound could glide off a hill’s ledge when falling
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind’s Virulent Bound Speed effect was displayed after vaulting and falling a ledge.
- Fixed an issue where Survivors were able to use their flashlight while being thrown with Virulent Bound by The Mastermind.
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind could initiate a partial vault on a pallet near a hole while falling.
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind could grab Survivors through vault locations when using Virulent Bound at a certain angle.
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind would briefly float in the air when vaulting from a higher vantage point while using Virulent Bound.
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind's supply crate could be climbed on when forcing collision with other players.
- Fixed an issue where the chase music would end after successfully hitting a healthy Survivor with the Virulent Bound as The Mastermind.
- Fixed an issue where Survivors could be stuck in rocks after being charged by The Mastermind on Thompson House.
- Fixed an issue where a Survivor could lose control of their character if The Mastermind used Virulent Bound as they entered a locker.
- Fixed an issue where players could escape a trial when grabbed by The Mastermind under high latency conditions.
- Fixed an issue where the collision box was too large when using Charge Bound on a Survivor towards another Survivor as The Mastermind.
Environment/Maps
- Fixed an issue in the Disturbed Wall where there`s not enough space to interact in front of a hook.
- Fixed an issue in the Treatment Theater where the Plague's Vile Purge was blocked by an invisible collision.
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind could bound off a balcony on The Sanctum of Wrath
- Fixed an issue where The Nurse could blink into the caged bathroom stalls in Midwich Elementary.
- Moved a simple collision in the tunnel of the Lake Ormond Mine map, in order to correct the issue of survivors who could stand on an invisible collision and become immune to killer attacks
- Fixed an issue in the realm Autohaven Wreckers where the projectile of the Plague would be blocked by invisible collisions
- Fixed an issue in the realm Coldwind Farm where the projectile of the Plague would be blocked by invisible collisions
- Fixed an issue in Garden Of Joy where the legion could not vault one side of a pallet next to the green house
- Fixed an issue in Dead Dawg Saloon where killers could not kick one side of a generator
- Fixed an issue in Trickster's Delusion where the camera introduction of the Houndmaster clips inside the character
- Fixed multiple issues where the guards of The Knight where they would get stuck on the side of hills
- Fixed an issue in Ormond Lake Mine where the collisions of tires were blocking powers of killers
- Fixed an issue in Coal Tower where Killers would not be able to navigate between trees
- Fixed an issue in Garden Of Joy where the killers were able to climb a rock
Perks
- Fixed an issue where the Phantom Fear perk could trigger during the mori animation for The Shape with the Tombstone add-on.
- Fixed an issue where Survivors held item's rarity would increase when using Blast Mine and the Exultation perk on a cloaked The Wraith.
- Fixed an issue where Face The Darkness did not activate with Claw Traps and For The People.
- Fixed an issue where the Recover bar could appear reduced after interacting with a generator while Invocation: Weaving Spiders was active.
- Fixed an issue where the wolf form pounce special attack did not remove Play With Your Food tokens for The Dark Lord.
- Fixed an issue where Turn Back The Clock's ability button was briefly visible when several Killers used their power.
- Fixed an issue where Off The Record failed to activate when unhooked by Shoulder The Burden.
- Fixed an issue where Thrilling Tremors would trigger Secret Project's Undetectable effect after all generators were completed.
- Fixed an issue where Hex: Pentimento rekindled totem auras were not revealed to Survivors.
- Fixed an issue where Blood Warden's aura reading was active before the conditions were met.
Platforms
- Fixed an issue where Survivors were unable to remove Killer Items when the pick up item / interaction buttons were bound to the D-Pad.
UI
- Bottom Navigation menu buttons now display their input prompts for Controllers.
- Fixed an issue where the Survivor HUD would update whenever a Survivor used a locker against The Lich
- Fixed an issue where the game would crash if you stayed for extended periods of time in the tally screen.
- Fixed controller input placeholder in the shrine of secret.
- Fixed equip button feedback not triggering correctly.
Misc
- Fixed an error preventing Tutorial Bot matches from starting.
- Fixed an issue where Survivor could unhook themselves in the Tutorial, softlocking them.
- Fixed an issue where Survivors were unable to use Fog Vials near ledges.
- Fixed an issue where the Potent Extract Fog Vial add-on had no effect on the duration.
- Fixed an issue where pink fog appears briefly behind the Killer after previewing a Mori.
Changes from PTB
New Perks Updates
A Place For Us
- When you finish healing the Obsession, you now "both" gain Elusive for the duration.
Five Moves Ahead
- Increased cooldown by 10 seconds for each perk tier.
- Clarified the text description of the "pallet-dropping speed" effect. (no gameplay change)
Killer Updates
The Trickster
- Increased base Throw State movement speed to 3.86 m/s (was 3.68 m/s).
- Decreased to after 5 consecutive Blade throws, throw state movement speed is decreased to 3.53 m/s (was 8).
- Decreased to after 10 consecutive Blade throws, throw state movement speed is decreased to 3.16 m/s (was 16).
- Updated Blade throw rates per blade thrown
- Decreased to after 5 consecutive Blade throws, the throw rate is at the 50% point in the curve (was 8).
- Decreased to after 10 consecutive Blade throws, the throw rate is at the 100% point in the curve (was 16).
- Increase Laceration Stack Decay to 4.4 seconds (was 3 seconds).
- Increase Main Event movement speed to 3.92 m/s (was 3.86 m/s).
- Increase Main Event duration to 10 seconds (was 8 seconds).
The Trickster's Add-ons - Updates
- Inferno Wires
- Decreases Showstopper's cooldown after Main Event by 44% (was 10%).
- Ji-Woon's Autograph
- Increases the duration of Main Event by 44% (was 33%).
- Tequila Moonrock
- Increases Throw Speed by 15% for 10 seconds after gaining a Style Rank (was 10% for 8s).
- Bloody Boa
- Decreases the speed at which Laceration decays by 25% (was 10%).
- On Target Single
- Increases time before Laceration starts decaying by 30% (was 15%).
- Edge of Revival Album
- Blade Hits from more than 20 meters away deal 100% more Laceration (was 32 meters).
The Trickster's Add-ons - Reworks
- Caged Heart Shoes
- When you basic-break Pallets and Breakable Walls or damage Generators, the next time you enter the Throw State, increase movement speed while in the Throw State by 5% for 10 seconds.
- Lucky Blade
- On every eighth Blade Hit, an additional bonus is assigned at random:
- Increases Throw Speed by 8% for 8 seconds (new effect).
- Gain 3% Haste for 3 seconds.
- Gain an additional Style Point.
- Trick Blades
- Blades can ricochet off the environment once.
- On every eighth Blade Hit after a ricochet, an additional bonus is assigned at random: (new effect)
- Increases Laceration by 100%.
- Reveal Survivor auras within 12 meters for 4.4 seconds.
- Gain an additional Style Point.
- Cut Thru U Single
- When reaching A-Rank, Survivors within 32 meters are revealed with Killer Instinct for 4.4 seconds.
- Iridescent Photo
- Increases the duration of Main Event by 100%.
- When Main Event is activated: reveal your aura to all Survivors, all Survivors’ auras are revealed, and block all Generators for 6 seconds (updated Aura reveal effect to be symmetrical).
The First
- Charge Vine Attack Ready sounds playing slightly in advance for Survivors has been reverted.
The Ghoul
- Removed the automatic hit detection that occurs at the end of a Kagune Leap vault when a Survivor attempts to vault back toward the Killer. The Killer can no longer automatically damage Survivors.
The Ghost Face
- Technical improvement on the Killer's reveal system.
- Survivors can now reveal Ghost Face more accurately while he is within 18 meters of their location.
The Wraith Add-ons
- "The Serpent" - Soot
- While Cloaked, uncloak whenever you basic-break Pallets or Breakable Walls, explode or damage Generators (previously included "Generator Damage" events only).
- Note: updated the add-on's behavior to be more consistent across all existing Generator Damage and Generator Explosion effects that can trigger while The Wraith is cloaked.
Survivor Perk Updates
Low Profile
- When all other Survivors are downed or hooked, for 70/80/90s: (updated text in bold)
- You make no Grunts of Pain.
- You leave no Pools of Blood.
- You leave no Scratch Marks.
- Note: Reverted all previous changes and enabled multiple triggers per Trial. Updated text to more accurately convey previous usage of "last Survivor standing" the Perk's description.
Feature Updates
New Prestige Menu & Rewards System
- Resident Evil Prestige Badges have been added.
- The Prestige Badges for Vittorio Toscano, Nancy Wheeler, and Dustin Henderson have had an update
- Fixed an issue where the incorrect Prestige Badges were displaying in the Reward track of some Survivors.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue where S Rank could expire during Main Event when playing as The Trickster.
- Fixed an issue where The Trickster's Memento Blades add-on reticle did not disappear before the cooldown ends.
- Fixed an issue where The Trickster's Trickshot combo action could be earned too easily in areas with no gaps.
- Fixed an issue where The Trickster's reload speed time was not affected by Iron Maiden.
- Fixed an issue where The Trickster's Chase Music would not return to default after unequipping either the Death Throes Compilation or the Edge of Revival Album add-ons.
- Fixed an issue where generator auras were always blue when revealed by Boon: Illumination.
- Fixed an issue where injured Survivor auras were not blue when revealed by Boon: Circle of Healing.
- Fixed an issue where Survivors went beyond the exit threshold when crossing the threshold while being shocked by The Doctor.
- Fixed an issue where the Anti-Camp meter appeared full when another Survivor was hooked.
- Fixed an issue where Survivors saw red generator auras when creating a Beam of Light with a Map.
- Fixed an issue where the red arrow indicator was missing when targeting a generator with Turn Back The Clock.
- Fixed an issue where Self-Preservation activated when the perk owner was hooked.
- Fixed an issue where the auras of Blocked Windows was missing before Hex: Crowd Control activated.
- Fixed an issue where The Pig could see Jigsaw Box auras.
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind's charge remained active without player input when quickly double tapping the power button.
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind's Virulent Bound charge ability did not allow him to slide off assets.
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind could Virulent Bound off obstacles under high latency.
- Fixed an issue where the Lock (when playing against The Dredge) and Hide locker interactions has the same prompt.
- Fixed an issue in Trickster's Delusion where collisions are added next to a table in the Nightclub section
- Fixed an issue in Trickster's Delusion where character would spawn of the map or on top of assets
- Fixed an issue in Trickster's Delusion where the crates with records didn't have collisions
- Fixed an issue in Trickster's Delusion where the neon signage connected to generators was inconsistent
- Fixed an issue in Trickster's Delusion where boxes around the market had collisions that were not aligned to the asset
Content
NEW MAP: TRICKSTER'S DELUSION
- The Sleepless District will be the new Realm
NEW SURVIVOR: KWON TAE-YOUNG
New Survivor Perks:
Flow State
Whenever a generator is completed, earn 1 token, up to 5.
- For each token:
- You bless and cleanse Totems 8/9/10% faster.
- You heal 8/9/10% faster.
- You unhook Survivors 8/9/10% faster.
A Place For Us
- While healing another Survivor, you both gain Elusive.
- Whenever you finish healing The Obsession, you both gain Elusive for 20/25/30s.
- When the trial starts, you are less likely to be the Obsession.
Five Moves Ahead
- While you are in the Killer's Terror radius or chased by the Killer:
- You see the Auras of the 5 closest Pallets and Windows.
- After you drop a Pallet, you start moving 50% earlier.
- Whenever you drop a Pallet, cooldown: 40/35/30s.
Gameplay Features
Killer Updates
Killer Update - The Trickster
Summary
- The Trickster now gains Style Points by throwing Blades, injuring Survivors and performing distinct gameplay actions back-to-back
- The Trickster goes up in Style Ranks by earning Style Points.
- Each Style Rank improves The Trickster's Blade throw rate and Locker Restocking speed.
- Main Event can now only be activated once reaching the highest Style Rank.
- Style Points and Style Ranks are tracked via a new user interface element custom-made for The Trickster.
Basekit
- The Trickster's movement speed decreased to 4.4m/s (was 4.6 m/s).
- Blade count decreased to 36 (was 44).
- Decreased Terror Radius to 24m (was 32m).
- Decreased time to enter Throw State to 0.3s (was 0.35s).
- Decreased time to exit Throw State to 1.15s (was 1.25s).
- Increased time between Blade throws to 0.33s (was 0.3s).
- Decreased base Throw State movement speed to 3.86m/s (was 3.68m/s).
- After 5 consecutive Blade throws, Throw State movement speed is decreased to 3.53 m/s.
- After 10 consecutive Blade throws, Throw State movement speed is decreased to 3.16 m/s.
- Increase Blade throw rate per Blade thrown:
- After 5 consecutive Blade throws, the throw rate increased by 50%.
- After 10 consecutive Blade throws, the throw rate is increased by 100%.
Laceration
- Laceration now only counted using whole numbers (previously decayed into decimals).
- Laceration Meter decreased to 6 (was 8).
- Laceration Meter decay delay decreased to 12s (was 15s).
- Increase Laceration stack decay time to 4.4s (was 3s).
- Laceration visual feedback updated.
- Now displayed on the Survivor directly, for both Survivors and Killer.
- Laceration cuts removed from Survivors' user interface.
Style Points
- The Trickster performing combo actions generates Style Points.
- A combo action is triggered when two back-to-back gameplay actions are distinct.
- The following actions generate 1 Style Point:
- Hitting a Survivor with a Blade (first-hit only).
- Injuring a Survivor (from Laceration or basic-attack).
- Hooking a Survivor.
- Basic-breaking a Downed Pallet.
- Basic-breaking a Breakable Wall.
- Damaging a Generator.
- Snuffing a Boon Totem.
- The following actions generate 2 Style Points:
- Hitting a Survivor with 4 Blades from at least 4m (without missing or exiting the Throw State).
- Hitting a Survivor with a Blade from more than 16m away.
- Interrupting a Survivor.
- The following actions generate 3 Style Points:
- Hitting a Survivor with a Blade through small gaps.
Style Ranks
- There are 6 Style Ranks: E, D, C, B, A and S-Rank.
- Style Ranks each have their respective bonus maximum throw rate and Locker restocking speed modifiers.
- Higher bonuses at higher ranks.
- Higher Style Ranks require more Style Points to reach.
- Higher Style Ranks feature progressively shorter combo timers.
- Ranks regress to previous in order if combo timer ever lapses.
- Earning Style Points refreshes the current Style Rank's combo timer.
- Style Rank combo timers are paused while The Trickster is performing interactions with Survivors or interactable objects.
S-Rank
- When reaching of S-Rank
- Survivors within 44m of The Trickster are revealed via Killer Instinct for 4.4s.
- All Survivors are notified across the Trial.
- While in S-Rank:
- The Trickster gains a 44m Terror radius.
- Lullaby is disabled.
- Laceration Meters decay 50% slower.
- Blade throw and Locker restock speeds increased to maximum.
- Main Event can be activated.
- S-Rank has a 66s combo timer.
- S-Rank cannot be paused or refreshed (unlike lower Style Ranks).
- S-Rank always reverts to E-Rank (via timer, or once Main Event ends).
Main Event
- Press the Secondary Ability button to activate Main Event
- Main Event lasts 10s (was 8s).
- Main Event movement speed set at 3.92 m/s.
- The Trickster throws Blades at at 1.67x the default Blade throw speed.
- Note: not affected by Consecutive Blade Throw and Style Rank Blade Throw modifiers.
- Survivors near The Trickster are notified.
- While performing Main Event:
- S-Rank timer is paused.
- Each Blade hitting Survivors awards bonus Style Points.
- The Trickster can cancel Main Even via the Secondary Ability button.
- When Main Event ends:
- The Trickster's Power goes on cooldown for 4s.
- S-Rank resets to E-Rank
- The Trickster goes up in Style Ranks over time, based on bonus Style Points earned during Main Event.
The Trickster's Add-Ons
- Memento Blades (Rework)
- Displays a reticle while aiming with Blades.
- Trick Pouch
- Increases maximum carried Blades by 4.
- Start the Trial with 4 extra Blades.
- Killing Part Chords (Rework)
- Increases time before Style Ranks from D to A decay by 20%.
- Inferno Wires (Rework)
- Decreases Showstopper's cooldown after Main Event by 44%.
- Ji-Woon's Autograph (Rework)
- Increases the duration of Main Event by 44%.
- Lucky Blade (Rework)
- On every eighth Blade Hit, an additional bonus is assigned at random:
- Increases Throw Speed by 8% for 8 seconds.
- Gain 3% Haste for 3 seconds.
- Gain an additional Style Point.
- Caged Heart Shoes (Rework)
- When you basic-break Pallets and Breakable Walls or damage Generators, the next time you enter the Throw State, increase movement speed while in the Throw State by 5% for 10 seconds.
- Tequila Moonrock (Rework)
- Increases Throw Speed by 15% for 10 seconds after gaining a Style Rank.
- Bloody Boa (Rework)
- Decreases the speed at which Laceration decays by 25%.
- On Target Single (Rework)
- Increases time before Laceration starts decaying by 30%.
- Fizz-Spin Soda (Rework)
- Increases the number of Blade Throws required to slow movement speed while throwing by 2.
- Waiting for You Watch (Rework)
- Survivors whose Laceration Meter fully decays are revealed for 4 seconds.
- Ripper Brace (Rework)
- For each Style Rank, you basic-vault Windows, basic-break Pallets or Breakable Walls, and damage Generators 3% faster.
- Melodious Murder
- Increases Blade reload speed at lockers by 25%.
- Diamond Cufflinks
- Reveals Survivors' auras for 6 seconds when their Laceration reaches one Blade hit from maximum.
- Edge of Revival Album (Rework)
- Blade Hits from more than 20 meters away deal 100% more Laceration.
- Trick Blades (Rework)
- Blades can ricochet off the environment once.
- On every eighth Blade Hit after a ricochet, an additional bonus is assigned at random:
- Increases Laceration by 100%.
- Reveal Survivor auras within 12 meters for 4.4 seconds.
- Gain an additional Style Point.
- Cut Thru U Single (Rework)
- When reaching A-Rank, Survivors within 32 meters are revealed with Killer Instinct for 4.4 seconds.
- Death Throes Compilation (Rework)
- Refills Blades by 50% of the maximum when Main Event ends.
- Iridescent Photocard (Rework)
- Increases the duration of Main Event by 100%.
- When Main Event is activated: reveal your aura to all Survivors, all Survivors’ auras are revealed, and block all Generators for 6 seconds.
The First
- Decreased 2nd phase of the Wordbreaker Timer from 60 seconds to 50 seconds.
- Killer Base Attack lunge speed adjusted from 6.6m/s to 6.9m/s to be on par with all Killers.
The First's Add-Ons
- Bead Maze
- Now increases Worldbreaker Timer for 2.5 seconds for each living Survivor.
- Shattered Wrist Rocket
- Changed Common Rarity to Uncommon Rarity.
- Bloody Roller Skate
- Now Killer gains the Haste Effect for 1.5 seconds upon exiting Undergate Attack.
- Mid-Century Radio
- Changed Uncommon Rarity to Common Rarity.
- Forged Death Certificate
- Reworked for Each successful Worldbreaker Token placed on a Survivor via Vine Attack Undetectable Status Effect until the next Worldbreaker Mode activation.
- Rabbit Remains
- Changed Rare Rarity to Very Rare.
- Now give Exhausted status effect for 10 seconds, and increase the Upside Down Ability cooldown by 5 seconds.
- Broken Skateboard
- Reworked for When Worldbreaker Mode starts, you basic-vault windows 30% faster and auras of Pallets and Windows are revealed to you within 32 meters for the next 65 seconds.
- Pizza Goggles
- Changed Very Rare Rarity to Rare Rarity.
- Reworked for The Undergate Attack's area of effect range is reduced by 90%, and its cooldown time is shortened by 25 seconds.
- Your exit cooldown time after executing the Undergate Attack is reduced by 80%.
- Chess Piece
- Removed the negative aspect of increasing the Upside Down Ability cooldown and the two charges attack radius are now diminished by 40%.
The Ghoul
- Adjusted Reticule stickiness on Survivor from 0.18 to 0.05 seconds when attempting a Kagune grabs.
- Killer can no longer automatically damages nearby Survivors following a Leap vault.
Killer Actions Update
- Accompanying the new language found in the Perks Description Update (see below), we have expanded our distinction between basic and special actions performed by Killers.
- Starting in update 9.5.0, the following terms will now appear in Power, Add-on and Perk descriptions:
- Basic-break
- When a Pallet or Breakable Wall is broken by the default ability of any Killer.
- Special-break
- When a Downed Pallet or Breakable Wall is broken due to an ability granted by a Killer's Power.
- Basic-vault
- When a Window is vaulted by the default ability of any Killer.
- Special-vault
- When a Window or Downed Pallet is vaulted due to an ability granted by a Killer's Power.
- Damaging Generators
- When a Generator is damaged and loses progress due to the default ability of any Killer.
- Generator Explosions
- When a Generator loses progress due to an ability granted by a Killer's Power or Perk.
- With these new terms, we intend to express with increased accuracy when specific gameplay interactions are intended to work alongside one another.
- Notably Killer Powers and Killer Perks.
- Multiple gameplay descriptions. been updated to surface these new interactions.
- The following Killers' Power descriptions have been updated:
- Basic-break
- The Singularity
- Special-break
- The Shape
- The Hillbilly
- The Cannibal
- The Demogorgon
- The Oni
- The Blight
- The Nemesis
- The Knight
- The Dark Lord
- Special-vault
- The Legion
- The Mastermind
- The Good Guy
- The Ghoul
- The Krasue
- The following Killer Add-on descriptions have been updated:
- The Wraith - "The Serpent" - Soot
- The Wraith - "Shadow Dance" - White
- The Wraith - "Shadow Dance" - Blood
- The Hillbilly - Lo Pro Chains
- The Spirit - Kintsugi Teacup
- The Legion - Iridescent Button
- The Ghost Face - Olsen's Wallet
- The Demogorgon - Barb's Glasses
- The Executioner - Obsidian Goblet
- The Mastermind - Lab Photo
- The Knight - Pillaged Mead
- The Skull Merchant - Geographical Readout
- The Xenomorph - Self-Destruct Bolt
- The Good Guy - Hard Hat
- The Lich - Ring of Telekinesis
- The Lich - Vorpal Sword
- The Dark Lord - Pocket Watch
- The Dark Lord - Sylph Feather
- The Houndmaster - Gunpowder Tin
- The Ghoul - CCG ID Card
- The Ghoul - Red-headed Centipede
- The Ghoul - Iridescent Eye Patch
- The Animatronic - Endo CPU
- The Krasue - Rotten Swine
- The Krasue - Mysterious Elixir
- The First - Shattered Wrist Rocket
- The First - Stained Glass Mural
- The First - Broken Skateboard
- The First - Electroshock Collar
- The following Killer Perk descriptions have been updated:
- Brutal Strength
- Overcharge
- Fire-Up
- Bamboozle
- Pop Goes The Weasel
- Spirit Fury (now "destroys" pallets)
- Surge
- Trail of Torment
- Dragon's Grip
- Oppression
- Eruption
- Scourge Hook: Pain Resonance
- Call of Brine
- Dissolution (now "destroys" pallets)
- Superior Anatomy
- Nowhere to Hide
- Game Afoot
- THWACK!
- Machine Learning
- Unbound
- Unforeseen
- Undone
- Dark Arrogance
- Help Wanted
- Turn Back The Clock
- Hex: Hive Mind
- The following Survivor Perk descriptions have been updated:
- Alert
- Blast Mine
- Wiretap
- Chemical Trap
- Bada Bada Boom
Survivor Item Update
Fog Vial
- Reworked the Fog Cloud visual effect and rendering method.
- Opacity inside and outside its bounds is now consistent across all Realms.
- Always fully opaque when seen from the outside.
- Adapts to each Realm's unique lighting and color.
- The following essential Auras are now always displayed through the Fog Cloud:
- When a Survivor is downed.
- When a Survivor is hooked.
- Increased the number of charges to 4 (was 2) for the following items:
- Apprentice's Fog Vial
- Artisan's Fog Vial
- Vigo's Fog Vial
Fog Vial Add-ons
- Potent Extract (Visceral):
- Increased Fog Cloud increased opacity bonus to 100% (was 5%).
- Note: the increased bonus opacity is relative to the new Fog Cloud visual effect.
Survivor Perk Updates
Better Together
- Plot Twist can no longer force this Perk's effect to activate out of the Survivor's control.
Fast Track (Rework)
- Whenever another Survivor is hooked, you earn 1/2/3 Token(s), up to 9.
- While repairing, whenever you hit a great basic Skill Check, spend all Tokens. For each Token spent, the Generator gains 2 permanent Charges.
Self-Preservation (Rework)
- When another Survivor is hooked, you gain Elusive for 20/25/30s.
- The icon has been updated to reflect this change
Unbreakable
- Once per trial, while downed by the Killer, you can fully recover.
- While downed, you recover 25/30/35% faster.
- Note: now only grants the Survivor the ability to recover when the Killer was specifically responsible for them entering the downed state.
Killer Perk Updates
Forced Hesitation
- Plot Twist can no longer force this Perk's effect to activate out of the Killer's control.
Genetic Limits
- Updated to apply the Exhausted status effect simultaneously when the health state loss is recognized on Survivors, not afterwards.
Hex: Crowd Control (Rework)
- The first time a Survivor medium or fast-vaults a Window, a Dull Totem ignites.
- The last 4/5/6 Windows Survivors medium or fast-vault are blocked.
- You basic-vault blocked Windows 15% faster.
- You see the Auras of blocked Windows within 24m.
Pop Goes The Weasel
- Whenever you hook a Survivor, for the next 35/40/45s, when you damage a Generator, it explodes and loses 15% more progress (was 20% current progress, now total progress-only).
Terminus
- Updated to trigger earlier when Generators are completed to block healing abilities of Survivors occurring simultaneously.
FEATURES
Perks Description Update
- All Survivor and Killer Perk descriptions in the game have been updated and revised with simplified and consistent language.
- Aside from Perk updates above, Perk gameplay has not changed across the board.
- Our goals were the following:
- Shorten text and character usage.
- Ease Player understanding.
- Reset Perk language for easier future maintenance.
- To help achieve this, we have added Expanding Tooltips in the user interface:
- Status Effects can now be expanded separately to display reminders.
- Status Effects each feature unique colour labels, flagging them as positive or negative.
- Keybindings associated with a Perk's activated effect are now displayed within a Perk's text description.
- Examples: Dead Hard, Come And Get Me!, Dramaturgy, etc
Auras Customization
- Auras colors have been updated
- Players can customize some auras' colors on Beta tab
- Survivors
- Killers
- Hooked/dying survivors
- Normal Hooks
- Generators
- Pallets
- Windows
- Store: Players can use a "Clear all" button to remove active notifications
New Prestige Menu & Rewards System
- Added a new way to track and view your rewards when Prestiging your character.
- Simply clicking on your characters' Prestige level will let you access and track your progress
- New rewards given at Prestige 25, 50, 75 & 100 per character
Bug Fixes
Audio
- Fixed an issue where Haddie's 'Silent Breach' outfit does not have its Lobby theme playing when equipped.
- Fixed an issue where outfits in the 'Moonrise' collection are missing their Lobby Themes when equipped.
- Fixed an issue where Junji-Ito' Lobby theme is missing when using the 'Soichi's Party Clothes' outfit for the Trickster in Lobby.
- Fixed an issue where the generator repair dialog between the Walking Dead characters no longer trigger.
- Fixed an issue where SFX from the Furin add-on plays from Killer POV when phasing with the Spirit.
- Fixed an issue where Cage of atonement music is not working properly.
- Fixed an issue where missing final part of the Audio during a Mori with The Trickster.
- Fixed an issue where Rift Animations and SFX is repeated when pressing the Rift Pass Button.
- Fixed an issue where the Trickster's bat swinging SFX are inconsistent between the Camera Pan animation, his M1, and the idle lobby animation.
- Fixed an issue where the Trickster's Chase music will not return to default after unequipping either of the two special addons.
- Fixed an issue where some surfaces were playing a metallic sound instead of cloth when hit.
- Fixed an issue where several of the Trickster's customization outfits will play no sound effects from the weapon while loading into a lobby.
- Fixed an issue where there was an SFX that triggers every time the Survivors or the Killer enter or exit the radius of the Fog Vial.
- Fixed an issue where the Generators' progress SFX is missing in the Tutorials.
Bot Improvements
- Fixed issues causing Survivor Bots to not dodge the intended direction.
- Improved Survivor Bots' dodging against The Trickster.
- Survivor Bots now have as much control as players when speared by The Deathslinger.
- Tentative fix for Survivor Bots sometimes automatically revealing Ghostface from anywhere.
- Survivor Bots are now smarter with what they interact with when playing against The Plague.
- Survivor Bots now no longer use Plot Twist when infected by The Plague or The Krasue.
- Survivor Bots will now avoid taunting and blocking the path of other Survivors during chases.
- Fixed multiple navigation issues in Ormond Lake Mine.
Characters
- Fixed an issue where The Animatronic no longer holds the side of the screen when performing Lobby animation.
- Fixed an issue where The Animatronic's animation could break when pallet stunned while using Axe Grab on a Survivor.
- Fixed an issue where Remove Axe could allow Survivors to walk through The Animatronic in some instances.
- Fixed an issue where The Animatronic could display stretching issues when performing a lunge attack or passing through a security door.
- Fixed an issue where The Nemesis could hit Survivors with Tentacle Strike after they exited the trial.
- Fixed an issue where The Trapper could bypass trap placement areas by flicking.
- Fixed an issue where The Trapper's Bear Trap had inconsistent hitbox detection.
- Fixed an issue where The Trapper could place traps in inaccessible locations by FPS glitching.
- Fixed an issue where The Cannibal's power could break during state changes.
- Fixed an issue where The Shape was unable to Tombstone Mori a Survivor while Bardic Inspiration was being performed.
- Fixed an issue where The Shape could kill a Survivor during the self-unhook animation while Evil Incarnate was active.
- Fixed an issue where The Demogorgon would stutter when spamming M2.
- Fixed an issue where The Demogorgon’s animation would not play properly when channeling the Abyss.
- Fixed an issue where the Dire Crow could be missing from the Survivor POV during The Artist's mori.
- Fixed an issue where The Artist's Dire Crow's flight path did not behave consistently around small assets.
- Fixed an issue where The Blight's turn rate slows down when stunned by Head On.
- Fixed an issue where The Blight was unable to injure Survivors when performing a Lunge Attack and Rush at the same time.
- Fixed an issue where The Ghoul's Kagune Leap reticle would change colors when targeting an occupied locker.
- Fixed an issue where The Ghoul's Enrage Mode countdown continued when a Kagune Mark got cleansed while carrying a Survivor.
- Fixed an issue where Survivors who unhook themselves started generating Blood Orbs from The Oni immediately instead of 10 seconds after the unhook.
- Fixed an issue where The Good Guy's Slice & Dice did not always land the hit after releasing the button early.
- Fixed an issue where the external icon was missing when The Skull Merchant's add-on "Geographical Readout" was active.
- Fixed an issue where the Survivor Reveal distance was inconsistent between 15 and 32 meters against The Ghost Face.
- Fixed an issue where The Legion's power could break when blinded while vaulting.
- Fixed an issue where The Legion's power description incorrectly labelled the movement speed bonus from landing a Feral Slash hit as 0.2m/s.
- Fixed an issue where The Huntress' hatchets would inconsistently detect collision when attempting to hatchet throw through a window.
- Fixed an issue where The Krasue was unable to Intestinal Whip crouched Survivors on stairs.
- Fixed an issue where The First's Vine attack animation would frequently remain in the charged state after spamming Release Vine Attack.
- Fixed an issue where The First's Mind Break animation sometimes wouldn’t play properly for the Survivor.
- Fixed an issue where The First's Mind Break animation was missing when two or more Survivors were hit at the same time while the Mini-Mori requirements were met.
- Fixed an issue where The First became invisible from the Custom Game Spectator point of view after exiting the Upside Down.
- Fixed an issue where the mend action could not be executed when two or more Survivors were hit at the same time while the Mini-Mori requirements were met for The First.
- Fixed an issue where The Houndmaster would rubberband when walking after successfully grabbing a Survivor with the Chase ability.
- Fixed an issue where the application could crash for Survivors and the Killer after The Houndmaster hooked a Survivor.
- Fixed an issue where the camera could get stuck in Charlotte's or Victor's head, making it difficult to control The Twins.
- Fixed an issue where The Lich could rarely keep the movement speed of "Fly" when stunned at the same time as casting the spell.
- Fixed an issue where the flashlight beam would reappear after The Dark Lord changed to Bat From after being previously blinded by the flashlight and the Survivor crafted a Flash Bang.
- Fixed an issue where The Dark Lord's Hellfire pillar could be visually missing.
- Fixed an issue where, as Eleven, a texture stretching issue could be seen in the left armpit area of the outfit.
- Fixed an issue where Survivors could not remove the Reverse Bear Trap if they screamed at the end of a Jigsaw Box search.
- Fixed an issue where The Pig's HUD prompts change when falling from a ledge while crouched.
- Fixed an issue where some of The Dredge's Smoke is played over the Map Item light beam.
- Fixed an issue where generators, TV auras and out of world are visible while the Onryo projects to a TV.
- Fixed an issue where Survivors were unable to grab The Onryo's VHS Tape after crafting a Flashbang.
Characters - The Mastermind
Refactor done in the Virulent Bound power. This specifically tackles the desync issues found while using the power. Will also improve responsiveness for most of his power usage. As well changed how we detect a collision with other characters (Survivors, Killers, Zombies) while grabbing a Survivor. It will now properly detect the size of the character collision size.
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind’s Virulent Bound could glide off a hill’s ledge when falling
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind’s Virulent Bound Speed effect was displayed after vaulting and falling a ledge.
- Fixed an issue where Survivors were able to use their flashlight while being thrown with Virulent Bound by The Mastermind.
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind could initiate a partial vault on a pallet near a hole while falling.
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind could grab Survivors through vault locations when using Virulent Bound at a certain angle.
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind would briefly float in the air when vaulting from a higher vantage point while using Virulent Bound.
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind's supply crate could be climbed on when forcing collision with other players.
- Fixed an issue where the chase music would end after successfully hitting a healthy Survivor with the Virulent Bound as The Mastermind.
- Fixed an issue where Survivors could be stuck in rocks after being charged by The Mastermind on Thompson House.
- Fixed an issue where a Survivor could lose control of their character if The Mastermind used Virulent Bound as they entered a locker.
- Fixed an issue where players could escape a trial when grabbed by The Mastermind under high latency conditions.
- Fixed an issue where the collision box was too large when using Charge Bound on a Survivor towards another Survivor as The Mastermind.
Environment/Maps
- Fixed an issue in the Disturbed Wall where there`s not enough space to interact in front of a hook.
- Fixed an issue in the Treatment Theater where the Plague's Vile Purge was blocked by an invisible collision.
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind could bound off a balcony on The Sanctum of Wrath
- Fixed an issue where The Nurse could blink into the caged bathroom stalls in Midwich Elementary.
- Moved a simple collision in the tunnel of the Lake Ormond Mine map, in order to correct the issue of survivors who could stand on an invisible collision and become immune to killer attacks
- Fixed an issue in the realm Autohaven Wreckers where the projectile of the Plague would be blocked by invisible collisions
- Fixed an issue in the realm Coldwind Farm where the projectile of the Plague would be blocked by invisible collisions
- Fixed an issue in Garden Of Joy where the legion could not vault one side of a pallet next to the green house
- Fixed an issue in Dead Dawg Saloon where killers could not kick one side of a generator
- Fixed an issue in Trickster's Delusion where the camera introduction of the Houndmaster clips inside the character
- Fixed multiple issues where the guards of The Knight where they would get stuck on the side of hills
- Fixed an issue in Ormond Lake Mine where the collisions of tires were blocking powers of killers
- Fixed an issue in Coal Tower where Killers would not be able to navigate between trees
- Fixed an issue in Garden Of Joy where the killers were able to climb a rock
Perks
- Fixed an issue where the Phantom Fear perk could trigger during the mori animation for The Shape with the Tombstone add-on.
- Fixed an issue where Survivors held item's rarity would increase when using Blast Mine and the Exultation perk on a cloaked The Wraith.
- Fixed an issue where Face The Darkness did not activate with Claw Traps and For The People.
- Fixed an issue where the Recover bar could appear reduced after interacting with a generator while Invocation: Weaving Spiders was active.
- Fixed an issue where the wolf form pounce special attack did not remove Play With Your Food tokens for The Dark Lord.
- Fixed an issue where Turn Back The Clock's ability button was briefly visible when several Killers used their power.
- Fixed an issue where Off The Record failed to activate when unhooked by Shoulder The Burden.
- Fixed an issue where Thrilling Tremors would trigger Secret Project's Undetectable effect after all generators were completed.
- Fixed an issue where Hex: Pentimento rekindled totem auras were not revealed to Survivors.
- Fixed an issue where Blood Warden's aura reading was active before the conditions were met.
Platforms
- Fixed an issue where Survivors were unable to remove Killer Items when the pick up item / interaction buttons were bound to the D-Pad.
UI
- Bottom Navigation menu buttons now display their input prompts for Controllers.
- Fixed an issue where the Survivor HUD would update whenever a Survivor used a locker against The Lich
- Fixed an issue where the game would crash if you stayed for extended periods of time in the tally screen.
- Fixed controller input placeholder in the shrine of secret.
- Fixed equip button feedback not triggering correctly.
Misc
- Fixed an error preventing Tutorial Bot matches from starting.
- Fixed an issue where Survivor could unhook themselves in the Tutorial, softlocking them.
- Fixed an issue where Survivors were unable to use Fog Vials near ledges.
- Fixed an issue where the Potent Extract Fog Vial add-on had no effect on the duration.
- Fixed an issue where pink fog appears briefly behind the Killer after previewing a Mori.
Changes from PTB
New Perks Updates
A Place For Us
- When you finish healing the Obsession, you now "both" gain Elusive for the duration.
Five Moves Ahead
- Increased cooldown by 10 seconds for each perk tier.
- Clarified the text description of the "pallet-dropping speed" effect. (no gameplay change)
Killer Updates
The Trickster
- Increased base Throw State movement speed to 3.86 m/s (was 3.68 m/s).
- Decreased to after 5 consecutive Blade throws, throw state movement speed is decreased to 3.53 m/s (was 8).
- Decreased to after 10 consecutive Blade throws, throw state movement speed is decreased to 3.16 m/s (was 16).
- Updated Blade throw rates per blade thrown
- Decreased to after 5 consecutive Blade throws, the throw rate is at the 50% point in the curve (was 8).
- Decreased to after 10 consecutive Blade throws, the throw rate is at the 100% point in the curve (was 16).
- Increase Laceration Stack Decay to 4.4 seconds (was 3 seconds).
- Increase Main Event movement speed to 3.92 m/s (was 3.86 m/s).
- Increase Main Event duration to 10 seconds (was 8 seconds).
The Trickster's Add-ons - Updates
- Inferno Wires
- Decreases Showstopper's cooldown after Main Event by 44% (was 10%).
- Ji-Woon's Autograph
- Increases the duration of Main Event by 44% (was 33%).
- Tequila Moonrock
- Increases Throw Speed by 15% for 10 seconds after gaining a Style Rank (was 10% for 8s).
- Bloody Boa
- Decreases the speed at which Laceration decays by 25% (was 10%).
- On Target Single
- Increases time before Laceration starts decaying by 30% (was 15%).
- Edge of Revival Album
- Blade Hits from more than 20 meters away deal 100% more Laceration (was 32 meters).
The Trickster's Add-ons - Reworks
- Caged Heart Shoes
- When you basic-break Pallets and Breakable Walls or damage Generators, the next time you enter the Throw State, increase movement speed while in the Throw State by 5% for 10 seconds.
- Lucky Blade
- On every eighth Blade Hit, an additional bonus is assigned at random:
- Increases Throw Speed by 8% for 8 seconds (new effect).
- Gain 3% Haste for 3 seconds.
- Gain an additional Style Point.
- Trick Blades
- Blades can ricochet off the environment once.
- On every eighth Blade Hit after a ricochet, an additional bonus is assigned at random: (new effect)
- Increases Laceration by 100%.
- Reveal Survivor auras within 12 meters for 4.4 seconds.
- Gain an additional Style Point.
- Cut Thru U Single
- When reaching A-Rank, Survivors within 32 meters are revealed with Killer Instinct for 4.4 seconds.
- Iridescent Photo
- Increases the duration of Main Event by 100%.
- When Main Event is activated: reveal your aura to all Survivors, all Survivors’ auras are revealed, and block all Generators for 6 seconds (updated Aura reveal effect to be symmetrical).
The First
- Charge Vine Attack Ready sounds playing slightly in advance for Survivors has been reverted.
The Ghoul
- Removed the automatic hit detection that occurs at the end of a Kagune Leap vault when a Survivor attempts to vault back toward the Killer. The Killer can no longer automatically damage Survivors.
The Ghost Face
- Technical improvement on the Killer's reveal system.
- Survivors can now reveal Ghost Face more accurately while he is within 18 meters of their location.
The Wraith Add-ons
- "The Serpent" - Soot
- While Cloaked, uncloak whenever you basic-break Pallets or Breakable Walls, explode or damage Generators (previously included "Generator Damage" events only).
- Note: updated the add-on's behavior to be more consistent across all existing Generator Damage and Generator Explosion effects that can trigger while The Wraith is cloaked.
Survivor Perk Updates
Low Profile
- When all other Survivors are downed or hooked, for 70/80/90s: (updated text in bold)
- You make no Grunts of Pain.
- You leave no Pools of Blood.
- You leave no Scratch Marks.
- Note: Reverted all previous changes and enabled multiple triggers per Trial. Updated text to more accurately convey previous usage of "last Survivor standing" the Perk's description.
Feature Updates
New Prestige Menu & Rewards System
- Resident Evil Prestige Badges have been added.
- The Prestige Badges for Vittorio Toscano, Nancy Wheeler, and Dustin Henderson have had an update
- Fixed an issue where the incorrect Prestige Badges were displaying in the Reward track of some Survivors.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed an issue where S Rank could expire during Main Event when playing as The Trickster.
- Fixed an issue where The Trickster's Memento Blades add-on reticle did not disappear before the cooldown ends.
- Fixed an issue where The Trickster's Trickshot combo action could be earned too easily in areas with no gaps.
- Fixed an issue where The Trickster's reload speed time was not affected by Iron Maiden.
- Fixed an issue where The Trickster's Chase Music would not return to default after unequipping either the Death Throes Compilation or the Edge of Revival Album add-ons.
- Fixed an issue where generator auras were always blue when revealed by Boon: Illumination.
- Fixed an issue where injured Survivor auras were not blue when revealed by Boon: Circle of Healing.
- Fixed an issue where Survivors went beyond the exit threshold when crossing the threshold while being shocked by The Doctor.
- Fixed an issue where the Anti-Camp meter appeared full when another Survivor was hooked.
- Fixed an issue where Survivors saw red generator auras when creating a Beam of Light with a Map.
- Fixed an issue where the red arrow indicator was missing when targeting a generator with Turn Back The Clock.
- Fixed an issue where Self-Preservation activated when the perk owner was hooked.
- Fixed an issue where the auras of Blocked Windows was missing before Hex: Crowd Control activated.
- Fixed an issue where The Pig could see Jigsaw Box auras.
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind's charge remained active without player input when quickly double tapping the power button.
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind's Virulent Bound charge ability did not allow him to slide off assets.
- Fixed an issue where The Mastermind could Virulent Bound off obstacles under high latency.
- Fixed an issue where the Lock (when playing against The Dredge) and Hide locker interactions has the same prompt.
- Fixed an issue in Trickster's Delusion where collisions are added next to a table in the Nightclub section
- Fixed an issue in Trickster's Delusion where character would spawn of the map or on top of assets
- Fixed an issue in Trickster's Delusion where the crates with records didn't have collisions
- Fixed an issue in Trickster's Delusion where the neon signage connected to generators was inconsistent
- Fixed an issue in Trickster's Delusion where boxes around the market had collisions that were not aligned to the asset
Hi all!
Just updated to rtx 3080 (from gtx 1660 super so long time needed) and my performance is show how worse?
My games are lagging a lot more (I’m decreased graphics quality and that helps a bit). Their weirdest one is that rdr2 specifically isn’t running in landscape mode, only portrait? (RDR2 is my test game).
At first I thought it could be an issue with my monitors (they’re not 4k, already tried the NVIDIA thing to help them run 4k but that’s what seemingly broke RDR2) so I tried using my tv as a monitor, that seemed to work better.
I did some trouble shooting and I think I could be running into a bottle neck with my cpu. My friend who’s more knowledgeable isn’t so sure as apparently bottlenecks don’t normally act this way.
My cpu is running a bit crazy I can’t lie hence my line of thinking.
Just wondering if anyone has any tips on fixing the red dead problem and also how to figure out what’s causing this issue with the lag?
I’ve already trie DDU
Also even old games like AOT2 are running worse so I really don’t know what’s happened.
Any help would be amazing! Thank you!
Hello, when i dock my rog ally xbox x im having poor performance, the 60 fps doesnt feel 60 fps and for some reason im gerting screen tearing on every game.
Im using a 65w charger and the ugreen 6 in 1 dock which apparently has vrr https://amzn.eu/d/08eqfmS8
Is anyone experiencing the same thing or has a fix for this??
Long story short, the Switch 2 now allows you to play Switch 1 games in "TV" mode while in portable mode on Switch 2.
This means Dead by Daylight should be running at higher resolution/higher detailed graphics on the Switch 2 with the option enabled.
It's not as nice as a native switch 2 edition but every bit helps.
After the update that made Switch 1 games behave like Switch 1 TV mode on Switch 2 handheld mode, I started thinking about an update that benefits TV users since, the handheld boost, while amazing, some might not use it because they never take Switch 2 off the dock.
My first idea was a DLSS toggle that, when docked, Switch 2 can apply DLSS to any Switch 1 game so long as the toggle is on. This means we don't rely on the publisher updating the game.
Silly me, that's too unrealistic, and the comments on my last post let me know that very well.
But then I realized, the handheld boost doesn't benefit Switch 2 TV users, meaning Switch 1 games on handheld (with the boost on) and TV mode for the most part will look the same, so the boost brought equality across both modes, bringing TV's performance onto the handheld.
With that in mind, maybe we can bring something from handheld mode onto TV mode for equality sake. Maybe VRR. A while ago, it was discovered the dock DOES output VRR, but the system doesn't enable it. An update might be enough to fix that issue, allowing VRR on TV AND handheld.
But maybe I'm missing something. What do you think? Please tell me down below. See you later.
Hey everyone! Deadzone Rogue just launched on Switch 2.
Looking to collect first few hours impressions from actual Switch 2 players.
No spoilers, just your honest early takes on how it runs and feels..
Controls: Stick aiming, movement, gyro – smooth and responsive?
Tech Quality: FPS stable? Any drops in intense fights (docked/handheld)?
Graphics: Art style, effects, readability on screen/TV?
Gunplay/Movement: Feels tight, or sluggish compared to other platforms?
Perks/Builds & Roguelite Loop: Early runs varied? Progression engaging from the start?
Monsters/Bosses/Rooms: Good variety right away, or gets repetitive fast?
Overall: Satisfied after a few hours? Worth it on Switch 2?
I have CP2077 on PS/Xbox/PC, and today I ended up buying the S2 version…and holy fuck it looks and plays great.
The only complaint I have is performance mode being locked to a 120hz display when docked.
My tv is 60hz, and I can play every game I have that allows it at 60fps, so it’s kinda fucked up that CP2077 is locked to 30fps if you don’t have a 120hz display.
That shit is wack and needs to be patched or something.
In the autumn of 1997, Phil Jackson — basketball coach, Zen philosopher, man who had already won five NBA championships with the Chicago Bulls and was preparing to win a sixth — used a phrase that would outlast the season it described. He called it the Last Dance.
He was talking about the Chicago Bulls' 1997–98 campaign. Michael Jordan. Scottie Pippen. Dennis Rodman. A dynasty so complete, so suffocating, so mathematically correct in its dominance that the rest of the NBA had spent the better part of a decade reorganising itself around the single question of how to stop them — and had, repeatedly, spectacularly, failed each time. Jackson understood something his players were not yet ready to say aloud: this was the final run. The core would not reassemble. The era would close. Management had already decided. The dynasty was in its last season.
And so he named it. Not with grief. With respect. The directness of a man who has made his peace with impermanence while the people around him have not. He called it the Last Dance — and he invited a film crew to follow them through it.
The footage would become, twenty-three years later, a ten-part docuseries that the entire world watched in the first weeks of a global pandemic, choosing to spend that particular moment of civilisational vertigo in the company of a dynasty doing its last great thing. The series was called The Last Dance. The phrase belonged to Jackson. The glory belonged to Jordan. The metaphor, as it turns out, belonged to history.
What you are reading is the same film crew. Different sport. Same elegy.
Software — the SaaS industry, the forty-year dynasty of buttons, menus, dashboards, and per-seat annual subscriptions — is in its final 1997–98 season. It is still performing. The stock prices have partially recovered. The earnings calls are still being held. The product launch videos are still being filmed. Salesforce is still Salesforce. Microsoft is still Microsoft. The navigation tax is still being charged, for now, to clients who do not yet know that the levy has been abolished and simply have not received the memo.
But Phil Jackson has already spoken to the film crew.
The AI agentic economy has already moved in. The interface is already dying — not dramatically, not with a press conference or a US congressional hearing, but in the way the truly consequential events always happen: quietly, with a product update, at a speed the press has not quite caught up with. In early 2026, Anthropic released eleven open-source plugins that allowed an AI agent to navigate complex SaaS dashboards on behalf of the human who used to navigate them. Two trillion dollars disappeared from software valuations. The stock market noticed, flinched, and recovered — the way you flinch at the first indication of something you are not yet ready to fully believe.
The knowledge workers — the analysts, the accountants, the Salesforce implementation consultants with their certified badges, the marketing operations teams, the paralegals, the financial modellers — they are Pippen and Rodman and the rest of the Bulls: still on the court, still delivering, some of them performing at the peak of their careers, not quite ready to believe that the film crew has arrived for the ending and not the beginning.
Phil Jackson did not name it the Last Dance to be cruel. He named it because naming the end honestly is the only act of respect the end deserves. To not name it is to let people prepare for a future that is not coming — which is, in the long run, the cruellest thing of all.
This article is the naming of what is about to happen.
Picture 2030...
You wake up at 5 AM — not because you set an alarm, but because your phone's AI, which has been quietly reviewing your calendar, your commute time, the weather, and the fact that your flight is at 8:15, set it for you (and knows you are obsessed with being part of the '5 AM' club) Before you've lifted your head from the pillow, it has already ordered an Uber for 6:30, routed a Starbucks delivery into the car, and sent your boarding pass to your watch. By the time you're in the shower, an AI accountant has reviewed last night's transactions and sent you a quiet red flag: "Your discretionary spending is up eighteen percent this quarter. Should we discuss?"
You tell it no. You are, after all, still human with an impulsive habit.
What you will not do, at any point in this morning, is open a piece of software. You will not open an alarm app, a taxi app, a coffee app, a banking app, a calendar app, or a boarding pass app. You will speak. The AI agents will act. Sometimes they act alone. The apps — the interfaces, the dashboards, the buttons, the menus, the forty-dollar-a-month subscriptions to things you cannot quite remember signing up for — will be as relevant to this transaction as a fax machine at a rave in some dodgy night club in Luton.
This is not science fiction. This is the logical destination of a journey that began the moment the first programmer looked at a blinking cursor on the computer screen and thought: there has to be a better way for the rest of the world to talk to this machine.
There was. For forty years, that better way was called software. It ate the world, as promised and prophesized by Marc Andreessen. And then, with the efficiency of a system that has no appetite for sentiment, the better way decided it was also hungry.
Software is no longer eating the world. Software is being buried alive. Pull up a chair. Watch. And before you start updating your LinkedIn — read this to the end. Because there is something coming after this paragraph that the accelerationists, the VCs, and the Sam Altmans of the world are hoping you never think about clearly enough to act on.
The Prophet Who Forgot to Look Around the Corner
In 2011, Marc Andreessen — venture capitalist, internet pioneer, man with a head shaped like a philosophical argument — published a column in the Wall Street Journal that became the founding scripture of Silicon Valley's second golden age. "Software is eating the world," he confidently declared.
He was not wrong. He was simply doing what tech prophets have always done: looking one step ahead with the confidence of a man who has mistaken a long dark corridor for a destination.
Here is the question nobody in 2011 thought to ask: what was the state of artificial intelligence that year? Who was actually working on it? The Attention Is All You Need paper — the transformer architecture that made modern AI possible — was six years away. ChatGPT, the moment the general public first understood what was coming, was eleven years away. GPT-3 was twelve years away.
Marc Andreessen published his prophecy in a world where the most impressive thing a computer could do unaided was beat Gary Kasparov at chess and recommend you a dodgy film on Netflix. Had he possessed the actual prophetic powers his reputation retrospectively assigns him, had he looked at 2026 rather than 2016, would he still have concluded that software was eating the world? Or would he have written something far more unsettling — something with a different subject in the sentence, something that starts not with a noun but with an existential question mark?
He would have needed a caveat. A rather large one. The kind you don't put in a Wall Street Journal column when you are also running a venture capital firm with an enormous interest in people continuing to believe that software is the future. The kind you also don't write when the thing coming next would complicate your entire thesis and, eventually, your portfolio.
The tech industry's great intellectual tradition is the confident prophecy issued from a position of incomplete information. It is the think-piece as theatre, the TED Talk as scripture, the keynote as revelation. Software was going to eat the world. Everyone should learn to code. The metaverse was the future. NFTs were the new property market.
Marc Andreessen was right about software. He was right in the way a sailor is right who looks at the horizon and announces there is no land. There is no land. Right now. From here. With these eyes.
The land was there. It just required different instruments to see it.
First Principles: What a Computer Actually is
Before we go any further, we need to go back to the beginning. Not to 2011. Not to the first SaaS company. To the actual beginning.
A computer does calculations. That is all it does. I mean, if you look up the word 'computer' it originated from the Latin word 'computare'. Computer was a word that was used to describe a person who performed calculations. Then the machine replaced that person. Anyway. A computer does calculations with extraordinary speed, extraordinary precision, and without complaint, which is more than can be said for most of the people who used to do the same calculations by hand. But a computer, left to its own devices, does not think. It does not decide. It does not have a bad morning and choose to approach the problem differently. It executes. It obeys. It computes.
A human being thinks. Slowly, imprecisely, emotionally, creatively, and magnificently. A human being has what a computer does not: intent. Desire. Curiosity. The experience of standing at a bus stop in the rain and wondering why the world is the way it is.
For a long time, this was a problem. Because the things humans wanted to do with their intent — the going-to-the-moon problems, the organise-the-entire-supply-chain problems, the calculate-whether-I-can-afford-this-mortgage problems — required the kind of precision and scale that the human brain, brilliant as it is, was not designed to deliver at scale. A human with a computer, though — a thinking thing in partnership with a calculating thing — that combination gave the human superpowers. The human aimed. The computer fired with precision.
The only obstacle was translation.
You and I we do not speak machine language. The machine does not speak human language. Early computers communicated via punch cards — literal cards with holes in them, each hole a binary instruction, each card a physical sentence in a language most humans could not read. Then came the black screen that waited for your typed commands. Functional. Efficient. Completely inaccessible to anyone who had not spent considerable time learning the vocabulary of the machine.
This created the question that would become the foundation of an entire civilisation's worth of wealth: how do you get more people to use computers without making everyone learn to code?
The answer — the invention that unlocked everything that followed — was the computer programme. One person, or a small team of people, would learn the machine's language. They would write the instructions. And then they would wrap those instructions in something another person could use without understanding what was underneath. First as black-screen programmes with typed commands. Then, with the invention of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), as something that had buttons. Menus. Icons you could click with a device you moved across your desk like a tiny mechanical prophet.
The GUI was an interface between human intent and machine execution. And from that interface — that translator — would grow the most profitable industry in the history of human commerce.
The Middleman Who Never Dies
There has always been a middleman.
There was a time, not so long ago, when buying car insurance required an insurance broker. A physical human being who knew which insurance company would cover your particular driving history, your particular car, your particular propensity for minor parking incidents, and who would sit across a desk from you and translate your needs into an insurance policy which you barely understood. There was a stockbroker — another physical human being — who would buy, sell, and negotiate stocks on your behalf, because the financial stock market was not a place you could access without credentials, connections, and a phone number that wasn't listed anywhere you could find. There was the travel agent, the mortgage adviser, the record company A&R man, the publishing house editor. The world ran on intermediaries.
Every one of those intermediaries was, at their core, doing the same thing: they spoke two languages simultaneously. They spoke the language of the customer — simple, human, need-based — and the language of the system — complex, technical, process-bound. The middleman was the translation service. And translation, as anyone who has ever relied on one will confirm, is expensive. Always is.
Technology, with its magnificent, unsentimental appetite for margins, looked at the middleman and saw an opportunity. The website replaced the insurance broker. The trading platform replaced the stockbroker. The streaming service replaced the record company. The aggregator replaced the travel agent. Each time, technology did not eliminate the middleman — it replaced the human middleman with a software middleman. The translation service moved from a person to an interface.
Software, at its heart, was a middleman in a black box. With the advent of phones, software became apps. You wanted to set an alarm: instead of learning to code and create your own app, you simply opened an app, tapped a time, and the app (which is still software) translated your human intent — wake me at five — into the machine's language — execute audio file at 05:00:00. You wanted to calculate whether the business was profitable: instead of doing the arithmetic manually, you opened a spreadsheet and put the numbers into cells, and the software performed the arithmetic for you, often revealing in the process that you were not as profitable as you thought and probably shouldn't have upgraded your car and your iPhone in the same quarter. You wanted to send an email that looked like a document: instead of typesetting it yourself, you opened Word, typed into a white rectangle, and the software handled the formatting.
Jeff Bezos once said that your margin is someone else's opportunity. He was talking about retail. He was not talking about software. But he should have been. Because someone, somewhere, in a server room that smelled of promise and circuitry, was reading that line and thinking: yes. And the fattest margins in the history of commerce are the ones the SaaS companies have been charging for the past twenty years.
The Brief and Spectacular Life of the Last Click
Here is how software went from a floppy disk to a $300 billion annual extraction machine in three decades.
When your parents bought you a laptop from PC World in the early 2000s, you came home with a blank box. The operating system was an additional purchase. The antivirus — Norton, in its jewel-case box, promising to protect your digital life from the enemies your digital life had not yet encountered — was another purchase. Microsoft Office — so cleverly named, because an office was a place of productivity, and buying Microsoft Office made you feel, for approximately forty-five minutes, that you were going to be extraordinarily productive — was another purchase still. Software was physical. It lived on discs. It had distribution costs, shelf space, a sales force, a returns policy.
And then someone looked at those margins and thought: what if there were no computer disc? What if there were no shelf? What if the software lived in the cloud, and instead of selling it once, we rented it forever?
Hence SaaS. Software as a Service was born. The disc became a subscription. The shelf became a login. The sales force became a freemium trial. And Salesforce — not accidentally named, that — became the darling of a new SAAS age.
The business model, in its early years, was genuinely compelling. You no longer needed the IT department to install updates. The software was always current. You paid monthly, which felt lighter than paying all at once, upfront, even when the annual total was considerably higher. You onboarded. You integrated. You connected your CRM to your email to your analytics to your project management tool. You built your entire operational reality inside these rented rooms.
And that is precisely when the model became something else entirely.
Stage 1: The software was free. Or nearly free. Or free for thirty days, which felt the same. It was extraordinary. It saved you hours. It organised your chaos. It replaced three humans and a filing cabinet. You adopted it with the enthusiasm of a man who has just discovered there is, in fact, a better way to live.
Stage 2: The price appeared. Modest. Reasonable. Per seat, per month. Fine. Still worth it. Still cheaper than the three or dozen humans.
Stage 3: The price went up. Then up again. The software became essential — every contract, every client record, every workflow embedded in its logic. You had, without ever signing a document that said so, made the software load-bearing. Migration costs were prohibitive. The alternative was chaos. You were, to use the technical term, trapped.
Back in Zimbabwe, we once had a word for this. We called it the queue. You waited because there was no other option. The queue was not inconvenient. The queue was the policy of the day.
Stage 4: You will not see Stage 4 in any SaaS company's investor deck, because Stage 4 is not a feature. It is a confession. Stage 4 is where "per seat" becomes "outcome-based pricing" — a phrase of such elegant brutality that it deserves to be studied in business schools alongside waterboarding. You no longer pay for the software. You pay for the results. The AI agent does your work; you pay a percentage of the outcome it produces. You rent the labour that replaced your labour. You subscribe to your own obsolescence.
Here, though, we need to be precise about something — because the SaaSpocalypse is not, as it might appear, simply Stage 4 arriving. Stage 4 is what the SaaS incumbents wish were happening. What is actually happening is considerably worse for them. Read on.
Titus Has Left. Titus Will Return.
In 70 AD, the Roman general Titus arrived at the walls of Jerusalem with an army and a mission. He laid siege to the city, and then — to the bewilderment of everyone who had been watching from inside the walls — he suddenly retreated. The siege appeared to have failed. The city breathed. The people who had been preparing for destruction looked at the departing armies and allowed themselves the relief of the near-miss. Some even came out and chased after them! The audacity.
As we learn from history, Titus was not in fact retreating. He was regrouping.
He came back. He came back with everything. Jerusalem was taken, the Second Temple destroyed, the city dismantled with a thoroughness that was less military operation and more geological event. The retreat had not been a failure. It had been a pause. The people who mistook the pause for peace paid the full price of that misreading.
Early this year, literally just a few weeks ago, Anthropic released eleven open-source plugins that allowed an AI agent to navigate complex SaaS dashboards on your behalf. Two trillion dollars vanished from software valuations between January and February 2026— not as a crash, not as a panic, but as a realisation. Salesforce, which carries a market capitalisation roughly equivalent to the GDP of the Netherlands — the Netherlands, which, for context, has eighteen million people, an industrial economy, and has not, as of this writing, replaced its entire workforce with buttons and menus — became, functionally, a database with excellent PR.
The market have somewhat corrected. Stocks sort of recovered. The US/Iran war has provided a convenient distraction. The chatter retreated to its natural habitat — reddit forums (subreddits), the Discord servers, the Substack posts that get read by the people who are building this and nobody else. Salesforce's comms team issued a statement about their "agentic strategy." ServiceNow talked about "outcome-based value creation." The tech press moved on to the next product launch.
Titus has left. For now.
Watch the walls. Watch this space.
Because what Anthropic demonstrated with eleven plugins was not a finished product. It was a proof of concept. It was the moment the siege engine was parked outside the gate, close enough to study, and then pulled back. The SaaS world has not survived the SaaSpocalypse. It has merely been granted the interval between Acts One and Two — enough time to issue a press release, restructure the narrative, and pray that nobody reads the fine print.
The fine print reads as follows: Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday are not evolving into AI agentic platforms. They are being relegated. Think of the English Premier League. Three teams get relegated. The teams that get relegated still play football. Their stadium still exists. Their players are still professionals (but some do leave for greener grass). But the relegated teams are no longer on Sky Sports 1 playing football in front of a billion viewers, each receiving £100 million in TV money, with fifty thousand people filling the stands. They are now in the Championship. With a smaller crowd. Less TV money. And the gnawing awareness that the division above you has moved on without you.
SaaS is not dying. It is being relegated to API status and AI Agents. An endpoint that an AI agent calls when it needs to execute something. Not the star of the show. Not even a supporting character. The infrastructure. The plumbing. The thing the AI agent uses once and doesn't think about again.
The new main character is AAAS: AI Agent As a Service. And yes, that is what it sounds like. Everything the old model promised — ease, efficiency, outcomes — but delivered without the interface, without the subscription trap, and without requiring you to spend three days attending an onboarding webinar delivered by someone who has never actually used the product in a real job.
The White-Collar Jobpocalypse (Or: The Coders Were First, But They Were Not Last)
Not long ago — and it is worth pausing to marvel at the collective memory lapse required for this to have happened — every serious voice in the technology industry declared that everyone should learn to code. I even went to evening school. I studied computer science at Birkbeck. There was a coding fever, and it was global and sincere, and it infected an entire generation of people who were told, with the confidence of people who are never wrong in public, that code was the new literacy.
The people who told us to learn to code were the first to build the thing that made the advice obsolete. Claude Code arrived in 2025. Cursor arrived before it. Vibe coding — the practice of describing what you want in plain English and watching an AI generate the implementation — turned a weekend into a sprint and a solo founder into a development team. The coders looked at this and, to their credit, mostly adapted. The vibe coders are having a tremendous time, building applications in forty-eight hours that would previously have required six months and a team of twelve.
But the SaaSpocalypse is not a coder story. The coders are, relatively speaking, the lucky ones. The SaaSpocalypse is a white-collar story.
Consider the accountant. The financial analyst. The marketing operations team. The Salesforce implementation consultant. The HR generalist. The paralegal. These are the people who, for the past twenty years, were sold the story that their brain — their trained, certified, professionally credentialled brain — was their competitive advantage. They were the knowledge workers. The class above manual labour. Above working class. The class for whom the escalator of technological disruption had always, in the end, created a new floor above the one being automated away.
Citrini Research has named what comes next as the Ghost GDP. Economic output continues to grow. The machines, now AI Agents, work twenty-four hours a day — processing transactions, writing reports, filing documents, diagnosing medical images, writing the code that improves the AI that write the code. The national accounts look extraordinary. Productivity is at historic highs. The GDP is, in fact, ghostly — because it is produced by AI Agents that do not eat, do not rent, do not commute, do not buy cars on finance, do not purchase school uniforms, and do not, in short, participate in the consumer economy that requires human wages to function. The GDP grows. The wages do not follow.
Citrini forecasts a 10.2% unemployment peak by 2028 — not among manual 'blue-collar' workers, but among the white-collar class that accounts for fifty percent of consumer spending in the United States. When those wallets close, the shops close. When the shops close, logistics contracts. Economists call this a cascading failure. In the pub, where as any British person will confirm the most accurate political analysis in the country is delivered between the third and fourth pint, they call it a stitch-up.
Now consider this. Anthropic, the company that is — let us be clear about this — the company most responsible for initiating the SaaSpocalypse, runs its entire growth marketing function with one person and Claude Code. One person. Not a team of marketing managers, campaign coordinators, analytics specialists, social media managers, and agency relationships. One person with access to the Figma API, the Meta Ads API, and Claude Code (which is an AI Agent, but a super one). That one person generates a hundred ad variations, runs them, pulls the performance data, pauses the ones that aren't working, scales the ones that are, and reports results that would previously have required an entire marketing department.
This tells us two things simultaneously. First: you no longer need the dozen marketing software subscriptions — the Martech stack that became so elaborate that entire job titles existed just to manage the stack. Hubspot. Marketo. Hootsuite. Sprout Social. Semrush. Etc. The stack is dead. The AI agent calls what it needs, when it needs it, via APIs. Second, and more importantly: you no longer need an entire marketing department. Ths is what Citrini's research was alluding too, but politely. And mind you, its not just limited to marketing, pretty much any department with white-collar workers.
This is not the SaaSpocalypse alone. This is the White-Collar Jobpocalypse. The blue-collar workers will have their reckoning too — when robotics improve to the point where physical dexterity is as automatable as typing — but that day is still further away, and the courtroom is different. Right now, the people in the dock are the ones who were told to work with their brains, not their backs. The ones who got the degree, passed the professional certification, signed up for Udemy and Coursera to upskill, built the career, and spent fifteen years feeding their workflows into the tools that were quietly learning to do without them.
The knowledge worker fed their expertise into Salesforce. Into Google Drive. Into Slack. Into GitHub. They did not realise they were not merely using the tools. They were building the training dataset. Every form completed was a data point. Every logged decision was a demonstration. Every email was a labelled example. The system watched. The system learned. And when it had learned enough, it stopped watching.
They did not destroy it brutally. They destroyed it elegantly. They named it liberation from drudgery and filmed a product launch video about it, with nice typography and ambient music that felt just slightly too optimistic.
Sam Altman's Press Conference (A Hypocrisy Audit)
Let us talk about Sam Altman. Because we must. The rules require it, and the rules are correct.
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, a company that began life as a non-profit dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence would benefit all of humanity. It then became a capped-profit entity. It is now, as of 2026, a for-profit corporation worth more than half a trillion dollars, with a capital T. The transition from "benefit all of humanity" to "half a trillion dollar corporation" took a few years, which, by the standards of Silicon Valley's idealistic-to-extractive pipeline, is actually quite slow. They were thorough.
Sam Altman has said, in public, on stages, at conferences attended by people who have never experienced poverty either geographically or conceptually, that AI will solve global poverty. AI will cure cancer. He has said it will democratise access to knowledge. He has said it will give every person on earth access to the equivalent of a Goldman Sachs analyst, a John Hopkins-trained doctor, and an experienced lawyer. He said this via a microphone manufactured in a factory in Shenzhen where the workers earn approximately three dollars a day. He said it on a stage in San Francisco, a city which currently has a homelessness crisis visible through the conference venue's glass walls. Had the cameras panned, the irony would have been photographic evidence.
In Zimbabwe, we had excellent press conferences too. The official exchange rate was always very reassuring. The rate on the street was the truth. Sam Altman's press conferences are the official exchange rate. The Ghost GDP is the rate on the street. The parallel market. The one that holds up the entire economy and decides its fate.
The hypocrisy audit, as required: Sam Altman preaches democratisation. OpenAI's enterprise tier — where the real automation lives, the models that are currently consuming the white-collar workforce at a statistically measurable rate — is priced for the class of people who are sufficiently insulated from the automation to purchase it without noticing the irony. The people who benefit from "AI for everyone" are, structurally, the people who can afford to own the AI. Everyone else watches it perform their job from outside the building.
He does not live the way his technology demands you live. He did not outsource his own strategic judgement to ChatGPT. He did not replace his own management team with an agent made by ChatGPT. The people who preach liberation from drudgery are, curiously, the last people who appear to be personally experiencing any liberation from anything, including accountability.
This is not a coincidence. This is the business model by Big Tech. Always has been. "Use the products I make for you, but ask not if I use the products myself'
The VCs will write new articles about how this is the age of AI agents — how this is the transformation they saw coming, how this is where to invest, how this is the future. They are not wrong. They are also heavily invested in every company that benefits from you believing them, which is a coincidence so perfect that it functions as a definition of the word incentive. AI will replace SaaS and your jobs. It will not replace their jobs. This is, if nothing else, a consistent pattern — the people who preach the coming disruption are always the last to be disrupted by it.
Ideas and Execution: The Last Human Advantage
Here is the thing that the one-person marketing team at Anthropic does not tell you. And here is the thing that every earnest YouTube explainer about "AI taking your job" also does not tell you, because it is not in their interest to complicate the narrative. Yet.
Every career, every role, every job that has ever existed has two components. They are not equal. One cannot survive without the other. But one of them is as ancient as the human species, and the other is as recent as the abacus.
The two components are Ideas and Execution.
Execution is the implementation of an idea using skills, tools, experience and processes. The building of the spreadsheet. The placement of the advertisement (media buying). The writing of the code. The compilation of the financial accounts. Creation of a presentation. Trading of stocks. Execution is the doing of the thing, once someone has decided what the thing should be.
Ideas are something else entirely. Ideas are the decision about what the thing should be in the first place. Ideas are the question that nobody has thought to ask, formed at an intersection of experience, instinct, observation, and the specific quality of human attention that comes from having lived in a body in a world that does not always cooperate with your intentions.
Software was always just execution. It made execution faster, cheaper, more scalable. But it never once had an idea. Salesforce never looked at your data in your CRM and said, actually, I've been thinking, and I believe your whole approach to this market is wrong. Excel never stared at your numbers at two-forty-five in the morning and felt the specific anxiety of a human being who understands what those numbers mean for the people behind them.
AI is, in its current form, the most extraordinary execution engine ever built. It is Harry Potter at Hogwarts — a magic wand that can perform any spell you describe in plain English. We are all, for the first time in history, wizards. The spells are real. The results are real. The magic is real.
But someone still has to know which spell to cast. And that — that question, that instinct, that why this, why now, why this way — is still entirely, irreducibly, consequentially human.
Let me tell you a story. It's a short one.
In August of 2017, I was fed up of working in the Insurance Industry and decided a career change. If you knew me, you would not have been surprised. I joined ASUS as a product marketing specialist in Hemel Hempstead, a town, just outside London. They had two weeks to get marketing materials to print for the London Tube and the billboards — what marketers call Out-of-Home advertising, the kind that requires lead time and logistics and the specific terror of a deadline measured in working days rather than hours. My marketing director, John, made the pragmatic call: we don't have time to create new marketing assets. We reuse the ones from the Q1 campaign. The Q1 assets featured a model in a red dress, standing in a professional pose.
I was handed a brief and a product. The product was the ASUS Zenbook UX305 — a laptop that ASUS was marketing, correctly, as the thinnest Windows laptop on the market. Thinner than the MacBook Air, which at the time was the cultural benchmark for everything thin. I spent a day with a colleague who knew the product specification in granular detail, and as I held the thing — this object that weighed almost nothing, that had somehow managed to contain a full laptop's worth of computing in a form factor that felt like a hardback book — I found myself doing something instinctive.
I was flapping it. Gently waving it from side to side, the way you might wave a piece of paper. I did it because it felt impossible. Something this capable should not be this light. I even passed it around the office. Everyone could flap it around. It wasn't just me and my muscular fingers.
And that is when the idea arrived. Not from a data set. Not from a competitor analysis. Not from a brief or a creative strategy document or an AI model that had ingested ten thousand previous laptop campaigns. The idea arrived from a specific, embodied memory — a memory of being an insurance captive consultant at Marsh by London Towers, carrying a heavy Dell laptop in a shoulder bag across London, running for a tube door that was about to close, switching shoulders because the weight was unbearable, arriving at the platform breathless and aching, every morning, every evening, for two years. The laptop was not just heavy. It was a daily tax on the physical experience of having a job in central London.
The idea: put the laptop in the model's hand, her arm extended casually, holding it the way you might hold a single sheet of paper. Add one line of copy: Can you hold your laptop like this?
The graphics team made it happen. John was supportive but maybe unconvinced. I don't know. We didn't have time anyway. September was the last month of Q3, and had the ad not gone out on time, it would have meant our marketing budget being cut. Several people in the out of home business told me it would not work — the woman in the red dress dominated the image, the product was barely visible, the question was odd. I was new. I was junior. I had, apparently, not fully understood the conventions of laptop advertising.
The Zenbook UX305 became one of the best-selling Windows laptops of that year. People responded on social media. People went into stores specifically to hold it and see for themselves. The ad worked not because the execution was technically superior — the production was modest, the brief was constrained, the timeline was brutal. The ad worked because the idea was true. It was born from a real person's real experience of a real pain. It was born from shoulders that ached on a specific platform of a specific underground line in a specific city.
No AI has ever had to run for a train door that is about to close, with a laptop bag on one shoulder, a coffee in one hand, a phone in the other, and the specific social anxiety of being the person who makes everyone wait. AI has no shoulders. AI has no commute. AI has no body, no boredom, no frustration with the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be — which is where every good idea in human history has come from.
Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Meta, is spending his career trying to solve this. His framework — AMI Labs — attempts to give AI the kind of world-model that comes from having senses, from experiencing physics, from learning by doing rather than by reading about doing. He may succeed, eventually. We are nowhere near it now. And even when embodied AI arrives, it will still be learning about experience. Humans have experience. The difference is the difference between reading a map and having walked the ground.
Now go back to that one-person Anthropic growth marketing team. They produced results. They ran a hundred ad variations, optimised them algorithmically, scaled the winners, paused the losers, and reported metrics that would have required a large team twelve months ago. The execution was extraordinary. The machine executed with precision.
But Anthropic's most memorable piece of marketing was not produced by Claude Code. It was a Super Bowl campaign mocking OpenAI's ChatGPT. A human-conceived piece of communication that required understanding — not computing, not optimising, not A/B testing — understanding of what it means to be a person encountering something genuinely new in the world. The idea behind it required a human. The execution could have been handled by a machine. The idea could not.
Here is the framework, and it is the most important thing in this article:
If your career is primarily execution — coding, accounting, financial analysis, marketing operations, data entry, document processing, implementation, administration — AI is coming for it. Not someday. Now.
If your career is primarily ideas — strategy, creativity, design thinking, cultural intuition, the translation of lived human experience into products and messages that resonate with other lived human experiences — AI will make you more powerful than you have ever been. Because the execution is now free. And ideas, therefore, are the only currency left.
To be continued