KEEP CALM AND HAUNT ON

How’re you doing, Ghosts & Hunters? 👋

Another week of MGH Early Access is in the books so we wanted to check in with you all! Let’s hop right in and check out what’s been going on behind the scenes.

REGULAR PATCHES

Since our last blog post, we’ve put out two patches. We go through the feedback all of you fantastic people so kindly provide for us on our official Discord server, as well as the Steam forums & our social channels, and work on fixes and/or new additions to the game.

Here’s a quick run-through of some of the biggest things we’ve been fixing up and/or adjusting since the last patch. 

Matchmaking

We have deployed a number of matchmaking adjustments in the most recent patch, and we’re already seeing some promising data showing more fair matches being made. These might result in slightly longer wait times, but so far it seems to be working better.

We will continue to make adjustments as feedback and data comes in. Thank you for all the feedback and ongoing discussions!

Changes to the Generator

The Generator is where Hunters can change their loadout during a match. We’ve seen the feedback and understand the frustration of having a coordinated group of ghosts targeting the generator right from the get-go, and leaving your team vulnerable for the remainder of the match. This is why we’ve decided to make the Generator invulnerable for the first 10 seconds after a match starts. Eventually, we’ll be incorporating salt circle visual effects around the generator to better illustrate this.

If you’re keen on checking out all the details, you can check the full patch notes HERE.

If you missed patch #2’s patch notes, you can check them HERE.

POLL RESULTS & NEW POLL

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you what kind of content you would like to see us add to the game next. Almost 900 of you answered the poll, so we want to thank you all for participating - it really means a lot to us!  Out of the options (see below), maps was the clear winner with over 46% of all voters choosing said option. 

Game modes and gear/abilities were neck and neck with a bit over 25% and 22% of the answers respectively.

Your answers really help us as we move forward and plan our first update. While we can’t reveal just what we’ve got in store quite yet, we think you’ll like it! That being said, it’s also important to manage expectations - maps take a great deal of time, work, and deep consideration. So, while we definitely intend to add more maps, it’s important to keep in mind that these take more time than any other content, so they may not always come as fast as you might hope.

We’d love to hear more from you so we put together a second poll! We’re still keeping things fast and easy to answer, so worry not. This time we’d like to hear a little more about your map and prop preferences. You can answer the questions here:

NEW DISCORD CHANNEL

You might’ve noticed that we’ve put together a new Discord channel for you all. The point of #update-suggestions is quite self-explanatory, it’s for you to make suggestions for our upcoming updates (not patches). Updates are (generally speaking) much larger than patches and, in addition to bug fixes, they’ll contain new MGH game content.

Please note that the #update-suggestions channel differs from #game-feedback. We’ll prompt you to give us suggestions about specific subjects and hope to receive these suggestions during the decision-making period.

In keeping with the theme of our survey, this time around we would love to hear specifically about MAPS! What’s your dream MGH map? Let us know your best, craziest concepts, and vote on the ones others suggest. We can’t wait to read through all of your ideas! 

WELCOME TO MY CRIB 😏

The team has been hard at work behind the scenes. In addition to fixing known issues and tackling the bugs you’ve reported (thank you! 🙏) we’ve been putting together something spooky that we think you will really like. It’s spooky season at MGH HQ year-round, after all. 👻

As we work on the upcoming update, we’ve also been putting together an Early Access roadmap so you can get a clearer picture of what we’ve got planned. We’ll have more news to share with you soon! 

LET’S CHAT!

As a quick reminder, we’d like to let you know that if you’d like to give us feedback, report a pesky bug, chat about MGH, or find a group to play with, we have a very active Discord full of lovely folks, where you can do all that.

In addition to our Discord, we also have a fantastic community over on Twitter, and we often post updates and other fun stuff there. We’re also not opposed to retweeting a juicy meme when we see one!

Our Steam page is the right place to go if you want to find the latest patch notes or chat about the game in our Community Hub. It also has a great place for sharing screenshots and fan art!

See you on the hunt, Ghosts & Hunters! 👻

Tinny
Community Manager

ONE WEEK OF EARLY ACCESS!

What’s up, Ghosts & Hunters!

It has been a bit over a week since we launched into Early Access. We’re overwhelmed with the support and extremely thankful for all the feedback you’ve given us. It’s been fun to play MGH with all of you. If you ever catch any devs in a match, don’t be a stranger! 

TAKING A LOOK AT THE NUMBERS

Win rate: Hunters vs. Ghosts

We’ve been digging through the data from the first week of Early Access, and wanted to share some of our findings with you all.

When it comes to the overall win rate over the past week in total, it appears the Hunters have been winning 52.6% of all the matches compared to the Ghosts’ 47.4%. In the first few days, it was much closer to 50/50, but as the days have gone on and people learn the game, the Hunters started shining more.

In our first patch, deployed on Thursday, we made some changes to the Harpoon Bazooka & the Reaper, as well as a slight bump to prop health and Ghost speed. We’re hoping these changes will continue moving us closer to the coveted 50/50 split.

Game balance is a living breathing thing, so we will continue to make adjustments as needed to keep things playing in a way that's fun and fair. Keep the feedback coming!

We’ve already seen some changes to the win rates after deploying the first patch - things are trending towards the Ghosts a little bit now. We’re monitoring data regularly to make sure the balance doesn’t tip too far one way or the other, and we’ll continue to make tweaks if needed.

EARLY ACCESS PATCH #1

As mentioned above, our first patch has been released into the wild! We attempted to go through as many of the feedback and bug reports you all sent in as we could. Thank you for those! They're incredibly helpful. Let's go through some of the main things we fixed or added!

Small changes to Quick Play

By default, Quick Play-created games now end after 2 matches and put everyone back into the queue. This should help mix up the matches a bit and improve our matchmaking pool significantly. Server browser-created games are not affected. If you’re playing with a group of friends or you find yourself in an awesome group while Quick Playing, you can vote for a rematch to continue the rounds with the same group of people.

We’re still looking at how this is affecting actual results.

Granting XP & Shards

Both XP and Shards are now granted as soon as the game is over, rather than waiting until after the MVP screen. This will ideally improve situations where the host quits to deny other players progress. 

We’re looking into a way for XP and Shards to be granted as the events take place in a match, but this type of change may still take some time to implement and test properly.

4 new language options

We are happy to tell you that we’ve added French, Spanish, Polish, and Brazilian Portuguese language options to the game. We’re already working on bringing Korean and Italian to MGH, as well, and will add more languages if we have enough demand for them. 

Harpoon Bazooka nerf

Harpoon Bazooka now has a reload/cooldown animation to make it less spammable, and the duration of Harpoon attachment has been reduced. 

We got quite a bit of feedback from people facing teams stacking two or even three harpoons and this choice led to very frustrating matches. After testing the changes internally, we feel that the Harpoon Bazooka is in a much better place balance-wise. 

These were some of the highlights of Patch 1! You can check the full list of patch notes on our Steam Page. 

WHAT’S NEXT?

Anti-cheat

We’re currently looking at improvements to our anti-cheat system that will improve the player experience. Naturally, we don’t want to give away too much here. 😉

However, we take all player reports seriously and are taking action to make sure cheaters are banned from MGH.

Prop hit detection / low damage bug

We have gotten some reports regarding the prop damage and hit registration issue, and are in the process of tracking the issue down. Internally we’ve solved a few of these issues already, and we’re hoping to have an update for you by the time the next patch rolls around. 

Matchmaking

Matchmaking is a tricky beast! We hope that the changes made to Quick Play in the first patch will result in the matchmaking pool having a larger player base to choose from when creating matches. We’re surely keeping a close eye on this.

Generally, I think we are seeing an issue where some players may be marked in the default region of North America due to localization not coming into effect when initially selecting a region on first game startup. We’re looking at ways we can potentially improve this and have a more accurate region selected.

Performance

As we go throughout early access, we will be continuing to improve overall performance, both on CPU and GPU. We have noticed some reports of performance being a bit worse after Patch #1, and we are investigating this as well. We’ve got some things we’re trying internally that is having some promising results on GPU performance on some of our maps. Stay tuned on that!

POLL

We’re interested to see what type of content you’d like to see us add to Midnight Ghost Hunt next! Let us know by answering this one-question poll!

LET’S CHAT!

If you’d like to give us feedback, report a pesky bug, chat about MGH, or find a group to play with, we have a very active Discord full of lovely folks, where you can do all that.

In addition to our Discord, we also have a fantastic community over on Twitter, and we often post updates and other fun stuff there, as well as share the latest screenshots and teasers. Our Steam page is the right place if you want to find the latest patch notes or chat about the game in our Community Hub.

We look forward to playing more with you all, see you on the hunt! 👻

Tinny
Community Manager

REVIEW OF EARLY ACCESS DAY 1

Greeting Ghosts, and Hello Hunters! 👋

We launched into Early Access yesterday! The entire team here would like to express our most heartfelt thank you to all of you who’ve already purchased the game, the Early Backer Pack/Bundle, or soundtrack. We appreciate the support immensely and will continue to improve upon the game as we continue through Early Access!

It’s been an absolute joy to play with you all, chat about the game, and check all of your wonderful MGH creations - whether they were memes, screenshots, YouTube videos, or live streams. We love to see that, and hope to see them coming! 😊

WHERE TO FIND US

There are a couple of things we wanted to point out to make sure that you can access all the information that’s out there. We have a wonderful, active Discord community where you can discuss the game, look for a group to play with, give us valuable feedback, post memes, and screenshots, and promote your stream or channel.

If you come across any pesky bugs while playing, you can report them over at https://midnightghosthunt.featureupvote.com/ As a quick reminder, we want to point out that our board at Feature Upvote is solely for bug reporting. Feedback and suggestions can be discussed over on our Discord.

You can also join us on Twitter or Reddit!

INCOMING UPDATES

We have a long list of languages on their way to MGH:

• French

• Spanish

• Polish

• Brazilian Portuguese

• Korean

• Italian

These will be added to the ones already in-game:

• English

• German

• Russian

• Chinese (simplified)

We’ve also gone through your feedback and are keeping a close eye on the matchmaking concerns, as well as Harpoon Bazooka balance.

Matchmaking is something we’re continuing to look at, and it appears related to how many players often find one good lobby and play there for awhile, instead of being thrown back into the matchmaking queue after a few games. So the amount of open slots available tend to be reduced at any given time. We’re looking into ways to reduce the chance of being put into very high ping lobbies as much as we can.

Teams of Hunters stacking the Harpoon Bazooka is also something we’re looking into. There’s a few potential routes we could take here, be sure to let us know your thoughts on our Discord. We’ll try some things internally and keep you all posted.

We’ve also heard about hosts leaving before XP and shards are granted. This will be improved in an upcoming update, with XP/shards being granted immediately on game over instead of when the top players screen appears a bit later.

Eventually, we will set up a way for shards/XP to be granted as you go in a match, though that may take some time to implement and test properly.

We’ve seen the discussion about dedicated servers - this is something the team is working on with high priority. We were hoping to have them in for launch, though we hit some technical hurdles. We’ll continue to work on them and hope to have them ready in a future update. Stay tuned for news on that.

On a lighter note, a little bird told me there are some cool new emotes in the works, too, so remember to keep an eye out! 👀

See you on the hunt!

Tinny

Community Manager

WELCOME TO EARLY ACCESS!

Midnight is nigh, Ghosts and Hunters - and it’s time for phantasm pandemonium! 

Midnight Ghost Hunt is now available on Steam Early Access. It’s been a long and exciting road as we ramp up to this Early Access release, but now we’re ready to show MGH to the world! Here’s all the packages you can now get in your ghostly grasp:

Midnight Ghost Hunt - $19.99

This is the base game that gets you in the action.

Early Backer Pack - $39.99

Even buying and playing the base game is more than we could ever ask for! But if you’re keen on showing your support as we march onward toward full release and you’d like to get your hands on some spooky extras, then this is the perfect pack for you. The Early Backer Pack is a means for those who wish to support development to be able to do so. 

As a heartfelt thank you, you'll get a couple of treats included in this pack, some of which are in production and will be available in-game very soon. You’ll get: 

• A fancy in-game title that identifies you proudly as an “Early Backer” (if you choose!)

• Ghost Skin: The Lord, as seen in our Cinematic Trailer (TO BE ADDED SOON)

• Ghost Skin: The Lady, famous for her appearance in the same Cinematic Trailer (TO BE ADDED SOON)

• Hunter Skin: The Veteran, who's been around the haunted block and is definitely getting too old for these shenanigans (TO BE ADDED SOON)

• Hunter Skin: The Rookie, who's new to the game but makes up for it with ambition and spunk (TO BE ADDED SOON)

Early Backer Bundle - $49.30

This package will get you the base game, Early Backer Pack, and the soundtrack bundled up with a discount!

This is the package for you if you want it all! If you want to support the team, snag all the content, and jam out to sweet MGH tunes, you’re in luck! The Early Backer Bundle includes all of the stuff from the Early Backer Pack, as well as the official Midnight Ghost Hunt soundtrack (which will be updated with more songs as they’re released!)

Midnight Ghost Hunt Soundtrack - $4.99

If you’re more excited by ethereal audio or don’t want the added skins and in-game title, the MGH soundtrack can be picked up on its own, as well.

So there you have it! MGH is out now, and we’re thrilled to welcome you to Early Access!

As a small thank you for those of you who helped us test in the past, we will have 2 exclusive skins for you in game, as well as the "Alpha/Beta Tester" title. We are still working out the details, but we are fairly certain it will just work. 🤞

For all the new players joining us, we also invite you to join our community of players and devs!

We have a very active Discord full of lovely folks, where you can discuss strategies or find other players to team up with. You can also share feedback directly with our development team there.

In addition to our Discord, we also have a fantastic community over on Twitter, and we often post updates and other fun stuff there, as well as share the latest screenshots and teasers, and we plan on posting quite a bit on our Steam page as well if you want to follow us there!

We look forward to playing with you all, and we’ll catch you around midnight! 😉

- Tinny
Community Manager

EARLY ACCESS LAUNCHES MARCH 31ST & THE LAST EVER BETA STARTS MARCH 28TH

Hey Ghosts and Hunters,

Another week with more exciting news! This time around, we’ve got a release date for you, as well as an awesome new cinematic trailer. 

THE BIG ANNOUNCEMENT
Today at the Future Games Show, we announced that we are releasing into Steam Early Access on March 31st, at a price of $19.99! This is wildly exciting for our team, as we’ve been working for years to develop Midnight Ghost Hunt, and now we’re finally closing in on the day it’s available to everyone.

THE TRAILER
As mentioned, we also released an incredible new cinematic trailer today. We’re excited to share this with all of you, as we’ve been working on it for quite some time. It definitely evokes the spirit of MGH, and it’s awesome (if we do say so ourselves). Be sure to check it out!

ONWARD TO EARLY ACCESS!
Now that you’ve watched the cinematic trailer and you’re all pumped for Early Access (...you DID watch it, right?) we can let you in on a little secret. Before we get to Early Access, we’ve got one last hurrah planned. On March 28th, we’ll kick off a two-day closed beta!

All of you long-time players have one more chance to sharpen your hiding and hunting skills! This is also a fantastic opportunity for some of you who have never had the chance to play to get another crack at experiencing MGH before it kicks off worldwide.

While we won’t be able to grant access to everyone, new players can still request access to this Beta on Steam for a chance to get to play during the Beta period. We’re planning to really open the flood gates for this final test, so we’ll do our best to give access to as many folks as we can manage.

Also, this beta will NOT BE UNDER NDA! Content creators rejoice, it’s finally time! 🙏

Here’s some of what’s new for our final beta:

CUSTOM GAME OPTIONS
This is by far the biggest feature we’ve added since our last test. With custom game options, you can take even more control of server settings to randomize loadouts, choose which weapons to allow and which to ban, and even do things like adjust movement speeds or give everyone a mystery loadout! This should make for all sorts of fun scenarios (who doesn’t like 5x movement speed and only weapons that make for big booms?!), and we can’t wait to see what crazy game modes you all come up with!

NEW HERO PROPS
We’ve also added two new hero props to MGH! The new hero props are… T-Rex Head and the Skeleton! We’ll leave it up to you to figure out where you can find them, what they do, and how they work. Suffice it to say T-Rex Head has more than a little bite to it!

FIRE, FURY, AND BALANCE
As we’ve had the balancing of the Flamethrower on our minds for quite some time, we’ve decided to make it a heavy weapon from now on, similar to Project-X. Gone are the days of rapidly razing every prop in sight to the ground - now you’ll need to employ a more measured pace when using the Flamethrower, as your movement speed will be reduced while it’s equipped.

COOKING WITH A BANG
Grenades can now be cooked and will cause self-damage if cooked too long (just like mom’s macaroni recipe) or if standing too close to their explosion radius, similarly to C4.

LIFE TRACKING
In order to prevent players from quitting games and rejoining to be alive again, we’ve implemented a new life tracking system. Now players won’t be able to game the system by hopping in and out of servers.

ACCESSIBILITY - COLOR VISION DEFICIENCY OPTIONS
We want as many people as possible to be able to play and enjoy MGH. To make that easier for our friends with color vision deficiency, we’ve added a first pass feature aimed at easing the difficulties of play they experience. We intend to continue improving this feature for the future, so if you experience color vision deficiency, be sure to let us know how this works for you!

SHOW ‘EM HOW YOU FEEL
There will be FIVE new emotes to try out with this beta!

• Admire the Duck

• Kung-Fu

• So Scary

• Nirvana

• Peek-a-boo

NEW VICTORY POSES
We’ve added 13 new unlockable options for victory poses! Of course, you’ll need to win to use them yourself, so… best of luck!

NEW HUNTER SKINS
We have added several new Hunter skins and have reworked a couple of the existing ones as well! Let us know which one is your favorite!

TITLES AND ACHIEVEMENTS
In addition to victory poses and emotes, we’ve also added 29 Titles, and 42 Achievements for you to unlock!

RECENT PLAYERS LIST
In order to make it easier for you to add new friends and connect with awesome players (and report ones the less awesome ones who left before you had a chance to report them), we’ve added a recent players list. You can find it in the add to party panel.

NEW VAN AND RIDE-INS
Last but not least, we’ve hooked you all up with a new whip. The van has been totally redone, and vehicle ride-ins are much more realistic now! There’s stuff to look at, the vehicles turn and maneuver, and the experience is overall more dynamic and enjoyable. And before you ask… yes, you can still spray your profile picture in the van - don’t worry!

And much much more - we will publish a full changelog as usual on Discord when the closed Beta goes live!

That about wraps it up this time around, Ghosts and Hunters. We really hope you’ve enjoyed the cinematic trailer, and we look forward to playing with you all in the upcoming Beta and then Early Access. If you haven’t yet, be sure to wishlist MGH on Steam ahead of the Early Access launch to be notified when MGH is finally available for everyone. We’d love to hear all your thoughts regarding the last Beta, Early Access, and all things MGH so let’s chat over on Discord and Twitter! 

Tinny
Community Manager

STEAM EARLY ACCESS HERE WE COME!

Greetings Ghosts and Hunters,

Exciting news! We’ve just been featured at the SXSW (South by Southwest) Gaming Awards with a new in-depth gameplay trailer, voiced by our very own lead developer Kite!

The trailer serves as a good introduction to the basics of MGH - feel free to check it out!

We’re also very, very excited to reveal that we are headed to Steam Early Access THIS SPRING!

(Exact date to come later, stay tuned for more info!)

So why Early Access?

We’re absurdly proud of Midnight Ghost Hunt in its current state. We’ve been playing with all of you in closed alpha and beta tests over the last few years of development, and we think those of you who have played extensively will agree that we’ve laid out a brilliant foundation - and that’s how we view it. We’ve built a strong foundation, and now we’re ready to build something incredible on top of it with the help of our community.

We believe the best game mechanics, the coolest gear and maps, and the most stable balance will emerge during the Early Access period when players truly start to get their hands on the game and we get a better feel for how things play out when we have a bigger scale of players.

We’ve built up a good amount of content over the last few years and we want players to experience that, but we also want to keep adding more and hearing about how players feel before we get to a full release. We want players to be able to play continuously now, so that we can get an even sense of what balance changes might need to happen.

As we go into the Early Access release, MGH will have a pretty robust set of features. These include:

• 4v4 hide n seek mode with matchmaking

• 7 maps inspired by spooky tropes

• 10 Hunter weapons, 10 Hunter gadgets, 9 Hunter perks

• 10 Ghost abilities, 10 Ghost Perks, 8 Ghost Haunts

• Bots: can fill in for players, but are also able to play pure bot matches with you

• +40 skins, emotes, and taunts

• Custom game rules editor

• Voice chat integrated into the game

For all of you who have been here with us from the beginning, thank you for your support and help in making MGH the game it is today! This Early Access phase is truly just the beginning.

For those of you who are new around these parts or those of you who haven’t managed to find us on the official Midnight Ghost Hunt Discord server yet, please do join us there! We actively chat with the community on a daily basis, so come and join us! We’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts so that we can make MGH even better together. 

We encourage you all to tell us what you’d like to see more of, what you’d like to see less of, and what your feelings on the overall balance are. Our Lead Developer Kite has been known to queue up for some late-night matches to get a better understanding of our players’ impressions, so keep an eye out and don’t be afraid to say hi to Kite or any of the other devs! We love to chat and talk about strategy and our favorite wombo combos! 😉

We’re really excited to head into Early Access and play more Midnight Ghost Hunt with you all! See you on the hunt, actually SOON™️! 👻

Tinny
Community Manager

BETA 2 REVIEW

Hey, MGH Squad! 👻

Our second closed beta is now in the books and we’ve had a bit of time to digest and consider some learnings from the feedback we received and the in-game analytics. We appreciate all of you who took the time to play with us and gave us your thoughts!

Overall, we are very pleased with how the test went!

Before diving into some stats, let’s discuss first some of the main feedback that we received, and what we are currently doing about them.

We saw that many players reported worse frame rates and overall performance during this test compared to previous ones. This is something we are currently in the process of tracking down, but we think we’ve found and solved a number of things that could be contributing to this. We will continue to focus on improving performance going forward.

We also finally may have a solution to the elusive audio crackle/popping issue that many players experienced, though we’ll have to see with more testing if it occurs again.

Flamethrower balance, of course, was another hot🔥topic during this test.

“This is fine…”

We’ve tweaked damage and burn duration a number of times, but this test gave us the clarity that a bigger rework was needed. We’re currently experimenting with making the Flamethrower a heavier/slower weapon that is much less effective chasing Ghosts and much easier to get away from. Internally, this seems to feel much more balanced and gives the weapon a nice weight to it. We will continue to experiment and keep everyone posted, and let us know what you think!

Another big point of player frustration during the test were already killed players leaving the match, and having others join in their place alive again. This could mean you would need to kill much more than 4 Ghosts in a given match, creating unfair matches. We’ve already implemented a fix for this and will continue to strive to make matches as fair as possible!

Now let’s take a peek at some stats!

GHOSTS VS. HUNTERS

Balancing-wise, the most important stat is the overall win-rate between Ghosts and Hunters. During this beta test, the Ghosts had the edge all weekend long, winning around 54% of the matches. This result was quite surprising to us, because the feedback we gathered pointed towards this test feeling the most balanced to date. Did you feel the Ghosts were stronger than the Hunters? We’d love to hear from you on Discord or Twitter!

Win rate: Hunters vs. Ghosts

MAPS

Throughout the beta weekend, we saw a pretty balanced play rate for each map. We did get some feedback about some old hiding spots being eliminated, and we hear you, this is something we are looking at. We want to make sure that every map creates a unique, visually interesting environment and also offers a wide range of good hiding spots.

Map popularity

GHOST SHARD UNLOCKS

We’ve been working hard to create a meaningful progression system that gives players the choice of what they want to unlock, and when. So let’s take a peek at which weapons, gadgets, abilities, perks, and haunts you were itching to get your fingers on first! Let’s start with the Hunters.

Note that these do not take into account the default loadout since they are already unlocked. We’re just looking at what players thought fit to unlock.

Flamethrower and Frostbite were on the top of the list, with Frostbite having a slight edge over the Flamethrower. Balance-wise, we’ve noticed that there’s a bit of ground to cover for both of these choices. As mentioned before, for Flamethrower, we’ve made it a slower heavy weapon with a more niche use-case, and in our Internal Tests it has made a huge difference.

We’re still taking a look at how best to address Frostbite - we’d like to give it a bit of a boost, but we are not entirely sure how best to do so. Please do feel free to give us your thoughts while we think it over!

Shard unlocks: Hunter Weapons

Pathfinder was by far the most popular gadget during the January Beta test. In the past, some Pathfinder users reported feelings of motion sickness while using the gadget, but we didn’t hear many complaints on that front during this beta. Pathfinder did go through some tweaks between the first and the second beta, but please do let us know if you had issues using Pathfinder due to nausea and we’ll take a second look!

Trap came in at number two on our list of most used gadgets. We were happy to see people using the reworked Trap in-game, and we feel that it’s definitely moving in the right direction. If you have any thoughts on how to improve other gadgets, we’re always happy to hear them!

Shard unlocks: Hunter Gadgets

Healing Aura was a favorite in the Hunter Perks category with almost a quarter of you choosing to unlock it. Juggernaut and Quick Reload were also among the most popular perk unlocks, both having great qualities if you like to take a more aggressive approach even after midnight.

Shard unlocks: Hunter Perks

Let’s move on, and take a peek at what the stats looked like for the Ghosts. 

There were far fewer clear favorite Ghost abilities when compared to Hunter weapons. Poltergeist and Doppelganger led the pack, though.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, however, Death Grip and Trickster were the least chosen. We’d love to get these more in line with other Ghost abilities, so we’re quite keen to get feedback from you all in the community to see what improvements you’d like to see made to improve their usage.

Shard unlocks: Ghost Abilities

Ghost haunts were also quite even - Shove Hunter and Push Object were the most often unlocked haunts. These haunts have a visible impact on the game, so that clarity of impact means they are quite fun to use (in addition to being useful) and thus chosen more frequently. Cold Spot came in as a close third, this one is my personal favorite, I must say! 

Shard unlocks: Ghost Haunts

Ghost Perks had a pretty extreme variation when it came to unlocking amounts. Perception and Ectoslow were clear favorites, as both are extremely useful perks when staying away from nearby Hunters, or moving locations without being spotted.

Glutton, Untrappable, and Blast Resistant perks have a much more niche use-case, but people who use them a lot really seem to enjoy what they have to offer. Some players do enjoy a more niche style of play, and it’s great to keep this varied - both to support different playstyles and also to give those who play against these niche players the interesting experience of taking on off-meta tactics.

Shard unlocks: Ghost Perks

Whether you’ve tested with us multiple times over the years or this was your first test, feel free to leave your best tips on ability - haunt - perk combos on our Discord, we chat about MGH on the daily and it’s always fascinating to check out the strategies you’re testing!

Thanks again for joining us for our second beta and providing your thoughts and feedback as well as checking out our deep dive into the data! We’re looking forward to playing with you all again soon. Have a great weekend!

Tinny

Community Manager

UPCOMING JANUARY CLOSED BETA TEST!

Hey, MGH Squad! 👋

If you’ve been keeping an eye out, you might have seen our hint about another test this month! Well, today we have more information to share.

Our next closed beta test will start on Friday, January 28th, and will run through the weekend! The test is currently planned to conclude at 3 AM EST Monday, January 31st.

This is our second closed beta, and our NDA/no streaming rules will still stand. This is still in effect due to some experimental new features that need stress testing before we go loud on streaming.

We’ve been hard at work improving the balance, polish, and overall quality of the game since our last test. Before allowing content creation at a larger scale, we want to make sure everything runs smoothly and the game feels fun and fair for all participants! Thank you for understanding, we’ll make sure to keep you updated on all the news about content creation soon™.

Now, let’s take a closer look at what’s new in this closed beta!

🖥️ NEW FEATURES 🖥️

Map Polishing/REWORK

Our most iconic map, Mansion, has gone through quite a visual transformation! We’ve made it feel closer to the haunted Victorian mansion concept that inspired it. Take a peek at the above video to get an idea of how it looks now.

Museum has also seen a visual polishing pass, cleaning up meshes and improving the lighting.

Factory has seen some layout tweaks in an effort to make the map more balanced - internally these changes have made a big difference, we are looking forward to seeing how it turns out!

A few other maps have had some polishing as well, we can’t wait to hear what you think!

Progression (v2)

Last test, we introduced progression to unlock gear and abilities based on player level. We received great feedback on this topic and we’ve decided to try a different approach.

Now, you can unlock gear and abilities with your Ghost Shards, just like the cosmetics. This game is all about counters and switching your loadout to best suit the situation - so it makes sense to let players pick what they want to unlock first instead of an arbitrary level requirement.

The costs to unlock gear are relatively low, so you can quickly gear up without overwhelming new players immediately with all of the choices available. Simply earning XP and completing matches will give you Ghost Shards.

Bots

Our AI-controlled bots are now ready for testing! By default, they will fill empty player slots until players join and replace them. This ensures a 4v4 match at all times. The host of the match can disable this if needed in the Server Tools interface.

Keep in mind they are very much a work in progress, but definitely give us feedback! The easiest way to do this is by joining us on Discord.

Anti-cheat

We’ve implemented a new anti-cheat system to ensure all MGH matches are as fair as possible! Please note this is also an experimental new feature that needs testing on a large scale.

Matchmaking IMPROVEMENTS

We introduced matchmaking in our previous beta and received great feedback on how it worked out. We’ve taken that into consideration and made various tweaks and bug fixes that should ideally make more balanced matches going forward if the players queue through the quick play system.

As always, this is a work in progress, so let us know what you think after playing some rounds.

Server browser improvements

Server browsing is better than ever! We’ve included some new filters in the server browser, including regions, friends only, and by map! If any of your Steam friends are playing on a server, that server will appear at the top of your server list and be denoted with an icon to make playing with them even easier.

Vaulting

Vaulting is here! Now Hunters can climb up and over any obstacles in the way. From what we have seen internally, this has helped the Hunters feel much more nimble and mobile, but be sure to let us know what you think!

VAN RIDE IMPROVEMENTS

The iconic van ride (or the boat ride if you’re heading to the Ghost Ship) has been fine-tuned, making the ride feel better with realistic bumps, camera tweaks, and new sitting animations.

TRAP REWORK

In an effort to make Anti-Ghost Traps more consistent, they now pull you out of your prop into Ghost form when you are caught in it. You simply need to punch the trap a few times to break loose, but you are vulnerable in this state.

There’s also new visual polish and animation tweaks for the trap - including a range indicator that gives you a sense of how close you can get to it.

The Untrappable perk for Ghosts makes it so you are not pulled out or slowed very much.

Cosmetics

Ghost skins are finally here! We have 9 new ghost skins for you to choose from. We also have a few new hunter skins, and they are now visible in first-person! Pretty nifty.

NVIDIA DLSS Support

If you happen to be one of the lucky ducks who have an RTX 20 or 30 series graphics card, feel free to test out NVIDIA’s DLSS functionality. You can read more about it in our previous blog post.

🗝️KEYS🗝️

If you have a key from any previous test, you can join the MGH beta by simply reinstalling Midnight Ghost Hunt - Beta Test on Steam to participate.

If you don’t have a key, things have changed a bit this time around. We are now using the Steam playtest feature to manage access!

All that you have to do is go to our Steam store page and click “Request Access” under the Playtest section. If you are chosen you will get notified on email and on Steam directly, and the game will automatically show up in your Steam library! If you want to click that “Add to Wishlist” button while you are there, we sure wouldn’t mind. 😉

There’s many more changes, including many balance tweaks based on feedback (Yes, the Flamethrower got tweaked) - stay tuned closer to the test for a full changelog.

JOIN US ON DISCORD!

To give us feedback on the test, we will still be using our Discord, so make sure to join us! We might throw a few keys in #general still, just for old times sake 👀

We’re beyond excited to play Midnight Ghost Hunt with all of you again! We’d also love to hear what you are most looking forward to. Let's chat on Discord & Twitter, and we’ll see you on the hunt on the 28th of January!

Tinny 👻
Community Manager