Meet Lucas and Lynette

Introducing Lucas Van Rooyen and Lynette Casey, two fearsome higher-ups in their factions that are looking for new recruits to do their bidding in return for rewards that will help you stay on top of the ever-changing street wars of San Paro.

Unlike previous contacts, Lucas and Lynette are not of the specialist tier, instead, these contacts are positioned a little more in APB Reloaded’s mid-game progression and have 15 levels each which means that these contacts can be unlocked as early as Rank 88 if you focus your efforts on maxing just Blood Rose or Prentiss Tiger contacts!

Unlocking Lucas Van Rooyen requires you to reach level 10 with the following Blood Rose contacts:

• Tyron Sennet
  
• Jeung Bloodrose

Unlocking Lynette Casey requires you to reach level 10 with the following Prentiss Tigers contacts:

• Chiza
  
• Byeong Lee

If you have already maxed out the contacts named above you will be referred to Lucas or Lynette when logging in with your character on Version 1.31 “New Horizon”.

When reaching the maximum level with Lucas Van Rooyen, he will refer you to Michael Simeone. Similarly, reaching the maximum level with Lynette Casey will result in her referring you to Orlenz' Moretti.

New contacts bring new rewards, so here’s a quick overview of what Lucas and Lynette have in store for you!

The following weapons are available as part of the standard contact progression with Lucas and Lynette:

• Showstopper Pistol
  
• OCA ‘Nano’ Pistol
  
• Obeya CAP40-C NFCP 2
  
• N-SSW 74 Adeen
  
• VBR ‘Temptress’
  
• VAS C2 NFCP 1
  
• N-TEC 7 Adeen
  
• N-HVR 243 ‘Scout’ Nol

If you have maxed out Lucas or Lynette you may also be eligible for a rare daily activity awarding you with the following weapon:

• N-ISSR-B ‘Recon’

Additionally the following Weapon skins are awarded for reaching the maximum level of Lucas or Lynette:

• Short Circuit - Blue
  
• Short Circuit - Red
  
• Short Circuit - Green

New contacts are a perfect opportunity to add new modifications and spice up the gameplay, here are three new modifications as well as one returning modification available in v1.31 New Horizon:

• Display Banner

Orange character mod allows you to place down a large Display Banner with your personal symbol on it! This feature was originally a refer-a-friend reward, and we are bringing it back for those who missed the chance to unlock it previously.

• Long-Range Rifling

The red weapon modification increases your weapon's effective range by 25% at the cost of reducing the weapon's rate of fire by 10%. Additionally, burst weapons suffer a 20% burst rate penalty for using this mod.

• Muzzle Brake (Vertical)

Muzzle Brake (Vertical) is a red weapon modification that will reduce the vertical recoil of your weapon by 30% at a minor drawback of increasing horizontal recoil by 7%.

• Suspension Tuning

Lastly Suspension Tuning, our very first “Tuning” vehicle modification uses a red vehicle modification slot. This modification will decrease the Suspension Stiffness and Damping of your vehicle by 50% with no additional downside. We’re excited to see which cars can use this modification to greatly empower their maneuverability.

These modifications are going to be available for purchase after unlocking them and players will not receive a free version as part of unlocking them as we felt like this behavior should be kept exclusively for Specialist contacts.

Vehicles
The following vehicles are unlocked as part of leveling Lucas and Lynette:

• Growl S3
  
• Sungnyemun Mirage S-22

Maxing our Lucas or Lynette will award you with their respective outfit as well as Blood Rose/Prentiss Tiger inspired presets using some of our new clothing items such as the Trench Coat. Here’s a sneak peek:

Inventory Expansions
More items require you to have more inventory capacity, fortunately, Lucas and Lynette have you covered! Players will be able to earn the following inventory expansions as part of Lucas and Lynette’s contact progression:

• +5 Vehicle Inventory Space
  
• +10 Clothing Inventory Space
  
• +5 Symbol Inventory Space
  
• +5 Weapon Inventory Space

Hi everyone.

It's been quite a while since we have had a new version of APB this large.

So I thought I would take some time to break everything down that is coming over a series of blog posts. But before I do, I want to acknowledge a couple of things about version 1.31.

First, and most importantly, we focused a lot on new free content. It's something I have wanted to do in the past, but for various reasons we haven't been able to. It's a bit of an experiment, as we're now giving away more free items than ever in the regular progression of the game. We took time to identify and fill in gaps for weapons and vehicles that otherwise weren't available.

Second, this patch brings together content and features that have been in the development for a while. Honestly, it sort of snowballed. As the weeks and months have passed, more and more items have been pushed into this new version. As the name implies, we're hoping New Horizon sets a new bar for APB and offers a "jumping on point" for many players who have felt there was nothing new in the game.

Third, there was a lot of R&D required for this patch. Little Orbit has never added contacts to the game or modified any of the district geometry. In some cases, we had to write entirely new plugins to build compatibility between APB and newer modeling systems. We've also had layoffs, so there was some retraining required to even do some of the things we've already done in the past. Regardless, I feel like our progress will enable updates like to happen a bit more quickly going forward.

Lastly, we are in final testing on many of the components in this patch, but it is our goal to launch Version 1.31 New Horizon in the next couple of weeks.

With that out of the way, let's jump into what is coming.

Major Additions

• (2) New Contacts - Lucas 'Van' Rooyen and Lynette Casey

These two fearsome higher-ups in their factions are looking for new recruits to do their bidding in return for rewards that will help you stay on top of the ever-changing street wars of San Paro. Both of these characters have been in the APB lore for quite a while, and it was important to me that their rewards and storylines feel on par with other contacts that were already in the game. I will be posting a separate News blog with a full run-down of Lucas and Lynette's rewards soon.

• SARD Anti-Cheat

APB has had many different integrations in the past, but I felt it was important to take the proper time to evaluate both old and new solutions. This time around, I had two major criteria: (1) client and server side support and (2) custom integration where Little Orbit collects the penalty information, but we apply our own rules on how to handle cheaters. The team at SARD has been fantastic to work with, and after months of development, we are finally ready to launch.

• Re-distribution of contact rewards and lowered all mod Rank requirements

We feel this is a significant quality of life improvement. We decided to lower the Rank requirements for R195l mods to level the playing field between older and newer characters. With that same goal in mind, we also identified gaps in the vehicle progression and redistributed vehicles to unlock more cars sooner. And finally, we added missing weapons like the Showstopper, the NTEC 7c, and the N-HVR '243' 'Scout' to the player progression.

• Changes to the Waterfront

We knew we couldn't launch two new Waterfront contacts without addressing some of the player complaints about that district. We've added more cover around common spawn areas and objective locations as well as more access routes to spots that were previously very hard to attack. These edits are still be completed, so I will be posting a separate News blog with the new changes to Waterfront soon.

• The ISSR-C 'Kingdom' Legendary

We decided to have a little fun and also add a new legendary. The ISSR-C 'Kingdom' is RedHill Homeland Defense's new cutting-edge, fast, short-ranged burst rifle made up from parts of Nekrova's infamous ISSR weapon series with an integrated RedHill burst module. Its quick four-round bursts make it suitable for close to medium-range fights whilst retaining Nekrova's trademark of deadly accuracy.

Full Patch Notes:

• Added two new Tier 4 Contacts to the Waterfront district.
  
• Added three new modifications.
  
• Added many new clothing items for both body types.
  
• Added SARD Anti-Cheat.
  
• Reworked many areas of the Waterfront district to improve gameplay.
  
• Added the ISSR-C 'Kingdom' burst rifle as a new Legendary gun available for purchase at Anne inside the Joker Store through Joker Tickets.
  
• Changed the Rank requirement of all mods that previously required a Character Rating of 195 or above. These mods will now have a Rank Requirement of R40, 60, or 80 and cost 20.000, 40.000, and 60.000 APB$ respectively.
  
• Increased the range in which Mobile Spawn Points become invalid from 35m to 55m.
  
• Decreased the Health and Stamina damage to the DMR-AV Sniper Rifle to decrease the range in which it can Kill in two shots from 88-100m to 95-100m. The ability to stun in two shots has been removed entirely. The DMR-SD is unaffected by these changes.
  
• Decreased the range of the OBIR by 5 meters. We are going to revisit this change once we are closer to making larger balance adjustments but we feel like the gun is currently too dominant and would like to address that for the time being.
  
• Added 3-Point Sling 3 to the ARMAS and Joker Store versions of the non-legendary Showstopper Pistol and renamed it to Showstopper 'Quickdraw'.
  
• The following vehicles unlock their 0 to 4-slot versions one entire Contact Tier sooner.
  
  • Balkan Varzuga
    
  • Balkan Ravan
    
  • Macchina Calabria
    
  • Macchina Cosenza
    
  • Packer Ceresco
• Retroactively added the following vehicles to late-game contact progression:
  
  • Growl S4
    
  • [Dolton Fresno D400
    
  • Charge Sentinel CS904
    
  • Dolton Montane D230
    
  • Dolton Montane D430
    
  • Balkan Varzuga Rally 353 XS
• The Sungnyemun Mirage now supports primary and secondary police lights.
  
• Fixed various LOD issues of the Sungnyemun Mirage.
  
• Fixed multiple minor issues of the Sungnyemun Mirage.
  
• Added the Mirage 'Sundown' and 'Horizon' presets to the Joker Ticket Store. These were designed by an awesome community member that goes by the name of ElinSylwiaVT.

More to come.

Thanks, Matt