Battle Royale Shooter ‘Off the Grid’ Gets Biggest Update Yet—Here’s What’s New

Avalanche-based battle royale shooter Off the Grid has launched its most significant update since entering early access in October. Patch notes reviewed by Decrypt note that the game has reworked how scoped weapons work, added what developer Gunzilla Games framed as a notable performance boost, and made a number of weapon balance changes.

After entering early access in October, Off the Grid attracted mainstream attention with tons of clips that showcased the game’s unique mechanics going viral. This helped contribute to the title topping the Epic Games free-to-play PC game list, even surpassing Epic’s own mega-hit Fortnite in the process.

At its core, Off the Grid is a third-person shooter. However, scoped weapons—such as the sniper rifles—require some first-person elements. In previous builds, this has largely been ignored by the player base, as it felt jarring to go from third to first person. Even then, it didn’t feel like much of an advantage.

This system has been significantly reworked in what the team is calling Proper First-Person Perspective in Aim Down Sights mode—also known as TrueFPV. From gameplay seen by Decrypt, it does appear to be a marked improvement, giving scoped weapons a much better feel for players than in previous builds.

With this major rework, there are now new reticles, tweaks to field of vision, and accuracy changes. Namely, aim assist has been improved for controller players—although some users in the game’s official Discord server believe this is too overpowered in its current form.

An underrated but noticeable change comes with improvements to weapon sway and camera shake when using the weapon. This gives fighting a much more intense feel.

A prominent criticism of the game up until this point has been its poor performance, particularly on PC. In this update, the game promises a 10% to 20% frames-per-second (FPS) boost. On consoles, this comes in the form of fidelity and performance modes, with the former seeing a 10% frame boost and the latter marking as much as a 40% improvement.

Player backpacks have also received changes, mostly regarding visual effects to better communicate their purpose; for example, the limb accelerator backpack shows when a cyberlimb is being charged. That said, the Gridshield Backpack has been nerfed to only reduce 50% of zone damage, compared to its previous full protection.

Lastly, the patch notes have four pages worth of weapon and cyberlimb changes that are sure to mix up the meta. On top of this, in-game movement has received a number of changes, which has led to Discord users complaining that the game feels slower than before. 

These changes, the document says, are in preparation for an upcoming ranked mode.

Edited by Andrew Hayward