Subway Station & Kill Rewards System

This update marks a significant expansion of the playable world. The Subway Station is our first true free-roam combat zone—five interconnected areas with progressive enemy encounters that scale as you push deeper into the tunnels.

The KillRewards system was something players have been asking for since we introduced party members. Previously, only player kills counted toward rewards, which felt punishing when your companions were doing their job well. Now Kiro, Hani, and Aria all contribute to the team's earnings. It changes the dynamic in interesting ways—you're no longer rushing to secure every kill yourself.

We've also added voice overs for Act 1 dialogues. Hearing the characters speak brings a completely different energy to the story beats. The sound ducking system ensures dialogue never gets drowned out by combat audio, which was a persistent issue in earlier builds.

On the technical side, we've been aggressively moving performance-critical systems to C++. The CaptureObjectiveActor conversion alone improved frame times in objective-heavy scenarios. The Tactics AI now has proper difficulty thresholds, so enemies actually adapt their aggression based on how the fight is going.

The revive system rounds out our party mechanics. When a companion goes down, you have a window to get them back in the fight. It adds a layer of tactical decision-making—do you push forward or fall back to recover your team?