H1Z1 King Of The Kill's next update revamps hit detection, shotguns & inventory

The goal for the folk behind H1Z1's battle royale spin-off King Of The Kill [official site] is a game that is "consistent, competitive, fair, and fun to watch", but there a few bumps in the road to smooth out first. The next update's having a crack at two of these: hit detection and the shotgun - the latter being a weapon that can kill in one shot in one situation, but takes two in an ostensibly similar one. Because all should be fair in war and more war, right? The patch is also reinstating skirmish mode to the game.

The hit registration stuff is primarily an under-the-hood tweak that involves both a "large server revamp" and improved lag compensation. In other words, the update should put cause and effect back in tandem with each other - so if you shoot someone, they should more reliably get shot. Projectile tracking has also been tweaked, so it's "less likely for you to accidentally shoot the driver in your car if you are firing from the passenger seat." Oof.

The issue with the shotgun was apparently because it shoots out eight pellets in a random pattern, and, presumably other than by ramming your shooter right into someone's guts, there's been no way to control how many of these actually connect with a target. While I kind of dig the blunderbussy description of the old system, the devs acknowledge that it's been a headache in a game in which every shot can matter. "This inconsistency makes a difference in a high-stakes close gunfight, so we needed to find a way to remove the randomness." Their solution? 17 pellets, spewed out in a fixed pattern.

"We increased the pellet count to improve the likelihood of striking your target and opted for a defined pattern for better consistency of the shot across all of your matches," they explain. "We also removed damage scaling over distance, opting instead to rely on the shotgun’s spread to reduce the number of pellets which actually strike your target at longer distances."

Also in the upcoming update are a few UI tweaks, most notably including the merging of inventory and crafting into one menu screen "to accentuate the pace of play", and similarly bundling both locked and unlocked crates into one place.

It'll also see the return of the alt-ruleset Skirmish mode, which runs on weekends "to provide variety to the game." The first draft of the resurrected Skirmishes is a mode in which only shotguns and sniper rifles spawn on the map. Short v long, basically, which sounds like a pretty brutal mix.

More stuff and things are planned too - details on those are here.

This update sounds like biggie, basically. No word on release date, but the devs are asking for feedback on their plans for it, "which will help determine the timing and contents of the update that gets promoted to the Live Servers."