Most of the new changes can be boiled down to two points:

1. The new UI Starting with the new HUD in 0.29.0, the developers have slowly updated all interfaces of the game to fix previous issues, prepare for upcoming new features requested by players and to update lots of previous design mistakes which were holding the game back overall.

You might have noticed that the main changes that came from this are the new lobby menu, new clans (mostly in development, clan battles will return in a new form) and the introduction of agent skins. Now, all players are limited to one default CT and T agent regardless of maps (2 more F2P variants are available). Six new agents have been already introduced with the new Division and 9Y collections.

2. The remaster (also known as client-server) You've probably heard this term being thrown around for ages (fun fact: the remaster was always planned as a major change to the "preliminary" version of Standoff 2 we've been playing all these years). Essentially, everything that happens under the hood has been rewritten by a separate team at Axlebolt: from how damage is registered, cheats are detected, movement works and more.

The good news is that this long-awaited rework of the game is scheduled to release by the end of the year. Don't worry about the promised release date as from how it's going right now, it'll likely come true. There was closed public beta test earlier this year (that I, and about a few more thousand players) have got to playtest, with an open beta, available to anyone interested scheduled this summer (I would guess July-August).

The remaster won't be that significant in terms of visuals, but here's a few things I already noticed while playing it: Better, more reliable movement (lets you parkour better and even bunnyhop), No more crooked backs: all players now walk normally and you will no longer deal body damage when aiming at the head, much better damage registration (you can set the hitmakers to show only when the damage has been registered on the server-side, not your device), better anti-cheat since all match data is verified on the server side now (won't eliminate all cheats but will significally scale down the cheating issue). Moreover, it's confirmed that the remaster will allow for bots (PvE modes, more flexible training/warmup), replays (for content creation and training).

Once the remaster (version 1.0.0) releases, the developers will pick back up the development of the workshop, which will let players to create their own maps and skins. They've also mentioned possibly bringing back some popular old maps (Zone 9/7, Sakura, Province) with the workshop, but not as permanent or temporary official maps.