Bodycam v0.9 The Dead & Damned is OUT NOW

Hi everyone,
Bodycam v0.9, The Dead & Damned, is now live.
The zombies are back, with a brand new mode on Trenches and a full pass on Village and Asylum. Multiplayer gets its share too: Easy Anti-Cheat, a reworked Public Pool, a new drone and RC car room in the lobby, and two new weapons in your loadout.

Before getting into the details, we want to take a moment to explain why this update looks the way it does, and where the studio is heading.

A year ago, v0.7 brought Village to Zombies. It was a demanding update, and right after it, we went heads-down on Locked & Loaded.
As Locked & Loaded was getting ready to ship, we simply didn't have the resources to properly test, fix and validate Zombies, including the regressions the update could have introduced, and to keep it at the level of quality we expect. So we made the call to take Zombies offline in early September, when Locked & Loaded launched.

We know there is a strong Zombies community, and that many of you love Bodycam for it. It's the only real PvE experience in the game today. Bringing it back around Halloween, like last year, was important to us.
At the same time, it takes a lot of the dev team's time to work on two games at once. We want to take Zombies much, much further: we know there is a strong community around it that wants more, and this game mode deserves real dedication. We have a lot of plans for it, and we'll talk about them when the time is right.

But back to now. Since Trenches was so well received, one idea came naturally: build a unique Zombies experience on that map. This time, we kept the scope reasonable. Village took an enormous amount of design, production and iteration. Zombie Trenches is simple by design: survive for 10 minutes, in a heavy, rain-soaked night.
From there, we went back over Village and Asylum, with big passes on cleanup, stability, bugs and visuals. You'll find some pretty nice volumetric fog on Village. A few things also fell into place naturally, like weapon boxes that now hand out weapons built with the loadout system from Locked & Loaded. It adds a lot of variety to every run.
Zombies is back for a limited time, until February 15, 2027. Then we'll take it out so the team can stay focused on what comes next, including v0.10.

This year has been one long run. Locked & Loaded kept us busy all summer. After it launched on September 2, we shipped six patches through September to react quickly to the bugs you reported. Then, with Halloween approaching, we went straight into 0.9.

Now we need to catch our breath. Once 0.9 is out, we'll stay on standby to react fast if something major slipped through. After that, the team moves into a big definition and preparation phase, for v0.10 and above all for what comes after it: 1.0 and beyond.
We already have a plan we're really excited about. We expect to share it with you in early 2027, along with a roadmap of where we want to take Bodycam and what 1.0 should look like. We'll also try to bring you updates more often.

We strengthened the team and our production a lot this year, and the project keeps getting better and healthier. We still need a bit more time. We know there are still issues in the game, and we're sorry to those of you running into technical problems. Bodycam is still in Early Access, and we're doing everything we can to keep stabilizing it. The ambition that drives us hasn't changed: to make the most groundbreaking FPS out there.

• Zombie Trenches. A new co-op mode for up to 4 players. Hold out for 10 minutes against a dedicated zombie roster, gas-mask zombies included, under heavy rain, lightning and fog. A radio announcer keeps you posted on the time left.

• Village and Asylum. Both maps are back with new lighting, materials and audio, and we fixed a lot of what you reported, especially around spawns and zombie behavior. Village gets a new sprinters-only wave with the church bell ringing non-stop, and Asylum's special wave now hits every 5 waves.

• Weapon boxes. Box weapons now come with random attachments, and a new Loadout box gives you the primary and secondary weapons of your equipped loadout.

• Reissad Points. Zombies matches now earn Reissad Points.

Want to see how it was made? Watch the Zombies devlog.

Easy Anti-Cheat is live from today. It's the first building block of our anti-cheat, not the end of the road. We know it won't stop every cheater, but it should bring more fairness to your matches. We'll keep a close eye on it after release, and more anti-cheat features will follow in future updates.

The lobby gets its biggest room yet, dedicated to drones and RC cars. It was a real challenge to build, and we're very happy with the result.

For the drone, we teamed up with TRYP FPV. They helped us design the drone race and bring native FPV radio controller support to Bodycam. If you have a radio controller, plug it in and give it a go. This is a first version that we'll keep improving. If you want more FPV, check out TRYP FPV: The Drone Racer Simulator on Steam.

The room also has an RC car dirt track. We polished the controls and game feel of both the Kyoshin and the Trataxes, so they should be more fun to drive in every mode. Both tracks have lap timing and a leaderboard for your lobby session.
Try them out and tell us what you think. Adding drone and RC races to some of our maps is an idea we'd love to explore later on.

Internally, Public Pool is one of our favorite maps for competitive matches between devs, alongside CQB and now Trenches. So we were surprised when the analytics after Locked & Loaded showed it was the least played map in the pool. Visually, it was also behind our newer maps.
So we gave it a full visual rework, without changing much of its layout. Our goal is to bring every map in Bodycam up to that level, and Public Pool is the first step. We hope you'll give it another shot.

• TK-9. The first machine pistol you can run as a secondary weapon. It was planned for Locked & Loaded, but we couldn't finish it in time. It's ready now.

• Crossbow. Until now, you could only get it at the end of the Village secret. After another pass, it's now in the loadout. A tough weapon to play in multiplayer, but a very satisfying one.

There aren't many attachments for these two weapons yet. We plan to add more.

This update also brings plenty of polish and fixes across the game: weapons and combat, optics, lighting and weather, audio, settings and performance. They're not always the most visible changes, but they're what lets us keep stabilizing the game. Everything is in the full changelist below.

We know this is the topic many of you are waiting for. The party system lets you form a squad, queue together, stay on the same team, and follow your party leader from the lobby into matches.
It is not part of 0.9.
We wanted to bring it with Locked & Loaded. A few weeks before that release, we realized it wouldn't be ready. Grouping up and launching Quick Play or the Server Browser could find a match with free slots, but without a reservation system, other squads could find the same match and try to join at the same moment. Our tests confirmed it: squads kept getting split, forcing everyone to leave, regroup and try again. That's why we limited Quick Play and the Server Browser to solo queue. It's a workaround, we know it's frustrating, and it stays in place for 0.9.
In the meantime, here's how to play with friends:

• Open the Custom tab and create your own game with the players in your lobby. Solo players can still join and fill the remaining slots.

• For Zombies, a co-op mode for up to 4 players, create a Zombies game directly and play together.

We know this flow isn't user friendly. We read it from you every day, and we sincerely apologize.
When we announced the release date, we told you we had hit technical blockers. Here is the full picture.
Mid-year, we restructured our tech department, with new people, new technical leadership and dedicated tech teams. At the same time, we were reworking the whole online multiplayer layer of the game. We chose to build it on an external provider's technology, which looked like the right fit for our long-term ambitions: a match reservation system, proper competitive matchmaking based on rating and stats, and in the longer run, options like dedicated servers, something we're studying.
As we integrated it, we started to realize around Locked & Loaded, and confirmed during 0.9 development, that this technology didn't fit our needs. It wasn't robust enough, and finishing the integration would have meant fighting it for months, adding technical debt instead of making our codebase simpler and more scalable.
So we stopped. Our mistake was realizing it this late. We are now building our own solution, using Epic Online Services (EOS) along with custom tech our engineers are developing, and we'll start testing it as soon as we can.
We're the first to be disappointed that we couldn't deliver it yet. It is our number one priority, and we'll do everything we can to bring it to you in the coming months. We can't commit to a date today, but we'll keep you posted.

That's where we're at. We hope you enjoy The Dead & Damned, and we'll be watching closely in the next few days. See you in the trenches.
The Reissad Studio Team

A brand new co-op Zombies mode for up to 4 players, built on the Trenches map.

• Timed survival mission: hold out for 10 minutes, with the game timer on screen.

• Radio announcer callouts at the start, then at 5, 2 and 1 minute remaining.

• A dedicated zombie roster for Trenches, with its own models, clothing and helmets, including gas-mask zombies with muffled screams and voices.

• Weapon crates and loadout crates spread across the map, randomly placed each match.

• Jump and vault enabled in Zombies on Trenches.

• Dedicated night atmosphere: heavy rain, lightning, fog, reworked lighting and post-process, a lit church and a bell loop.

Both Zombies maps return with a quality pass on lighting, materials, audio and the issues you reported, mostly around spawns and zombie behavior.

New and improved

• Lighting rework with volumetric fog, new post-process and lantern lights that now cast shadows.

• Material and detail pass across the map: rocks, ground, wooden beams, snow.

• Ambient sounds and reverbs restored across the map.

• New special wave: sprinters only, with the church bell ringing non-stop.

• Crows reworked: better attack feel and sounds, your operator now shields their face when attacked, and crows can now be killed.

Fixed

• Two misleading dead-end paths near the cemetery.

• Wrong footstep sounds on dirt and for other players.

• Crow wing sounds audible across the whole map.

New and improved

• Lighting overhaul and new post-process.

• Material unification pass.

• New ambience and reverb pass, plus power-off sounds.

• New zombie heads and clothing.

• The special wave now comes every 5 waves instead of 6, with all generators shutting down, an alarm, red emergency lights and sprinters only.

• From wave 2, a few sprinters can now show up in regular waves.

• Generators show when they are available again.

• Two possible loadout crate spots added.

• Optimization pass for Zombies on Asylum.

Fixed

• Players spawning inside weapon crates.

• Walking on broken tiles being too loud.

• Elevator audio spatialization.

Weapon boxes

• Standard weapon boxes now drop weapons with random attachments, from the same attachment system as the loadout.

• Basic attachments are part of the pool, so most box weapons come with a flashlight.

• New Loadout box, with its own look: it gives you the primary and secondary weapons of your equipped loadout.

• Interaction prompts now show on weapon boxes and the gramophone.

Zombies

• New and reworked zombie models, skinning, clothing and helmets.

• Zombie health no longer scales with waves. Base health is lower, with per-limb damage multipliers and a reworked head hitbox.

• New speed mix: many slow zombies early, fewer over time, and a few slow ones until the end.

• Sprinters can now be killed in one shot with any weapon.

• Zombie collisions reworked, and zombie attacks detect hits more reliably.

• Zombies now use the ragdoll system.

• Zombies no longer despawn as soon as their target becomes unreachable.

• Reworked zombie voices and footsteps, with less overlapping audio.

• More blood decals, and a dedicated sound when a bullet hits a zombie.

Combat feedback

• Getting hit by a zombie now plays a grunt, foley and a camera shake.

• No more camera shake when zombies hit doors.

Player flow

• Zombies matches now earn Reissad Points.

• Spectator HUD with a "respawning next wave" indicator.

• Current wave shown in the tablet scoreboard.

• Interaction prompts can now display text, such as "No Power".

• End-round and wave sounds now follow the SFX volume slider.

Fixed

• Zombies sometimes spawning right behind or in front of players.

• Zombies getting blocked by corpses.

A full visual rework to match the quality bar of the newer maps, plus a small layout tweak.

• New main entrance and themed sculpted entrances: shark, whale, squid and wave.

• New pool floors: tiled rooms, new tile textures, clusters of destroyed tiles with real 3D broken tiles.

• Large-scale ivy pass, with modeled ivy instead of flat cut-outs.

• New wall assets and reworked corridors.

• New ocean-themed set dressing: sea star, wave wall, octopus, shark.

• New showers area.

• New sounds for walking on broken and intact tiles.

• Material and ray tracing optimization.

• Easy Anti-Cheat is live from day one with v0.9, integrated into PC peer-to-peer multiplayer matches.

• This is a first step: more anti-cheat features will follow in future updates.

• New room with a pit stop cafe area, built around two circuits.

• Drone race designed with the TRYP FPV team, with official-style gates and checkpoints.

• RC Car dirt track with checkpoints and slalom sections.

• Lap timing on both circuits: TV screens show your current and previous times, and you can run as many laps as you want.

• Session leaderboard in the room, showing the best drone and RC Car race times of your current lobby. Times reset with each new lobby.

• Gadget cooldown removed in the Lobby, so you can redeploy freely.

Drones

• FPV radio controller and joystick support, developed with TRYP FPV.

• Acro mode top speed lowered from about 300 km/h to 150 km/h, with added aerodynamic drag.

• Acro physics no longer depend on frame rate.

• Fixed a drone pilot appearing invisible to players who joined mid-match.

RC Cars

• Driving model rebuilt: new suspension, grip and friction, a drift system, a better handbrake and a reworked jump.

• Air control: rotate the car mid-air.

• Camera follows steering and locks in the air, with a new field of view on both models and camera shake.

• Collision box reworked.

• New driving sounds by surface, and wall impact sounds.

• The RC Car now lands properly on the ground when deployed.

• RC Car shells now carry a flashlight.

Both gadgets

• Fixed cooldowns stacking when swapping loadouts.

Crossbow (Tenpoint Stealth)

• Now available in the loadout, with attachment support. Until now it was only found at the end of the Village secret.

• Reworked reload and aim animations, updated physics, reduced arrow drop, improved multiplayer sync.

TK-9

• New machine pistol, usable as a secondary weapon.

• Full weapon set: fire, reload and inspect animations, magazine checks showing full or empty, audio, effects and ballistics.

• Flashlight on a side mount by default.

Loadout

• You can now have 7 loadouts, up from 5.

• New side-mount slot for flashlights, so barrels and attachments no longer block the light.

• The Rivington now always keeps a barrel equipped.

• Fixed the "Phollowpoint" typo, now "Hollow Point".

• Fixed the orientation of the Falco optic.

• Fixed odd camera placements when previewing gadgets.

• Reduced the icon zoom on hover.

• .45 ammo no longer offered on the Glock.

• Fixed missing gameplay effects on some M4 stock skins.

These changes apply to every mode unless stated otherwise.

• Reduced hip-fire spread on every weapon, so you are more precise when firing from the hip.

• Bullet penetration rebalanced by surface, with less penetration through fabric and concrete.

• Fixed a damage multiplier on the clavicle bone, so damage is more consistent when shooting at the upper body.

• Larger blood decals on surfaces behind hit targets.

• Fixed blood pool.

• Cleaner metal impacts: spark decal and dust puff removed, metal impact effect reworked.

• Fixed the flashlight input breaking after swapping between weapons with flashlights.

• Fixed the G67 grenade using the wrong item setup in the loadout.

Optics

• New setting: magnified scope quality.

• Scope image resolution now scales with your screen resolution and with how much of the screen the scope covers.

• On-screen markers (players, Hardpoint and bomb zones, interactions) now display correctly through magnified scopes.

• Less jitter in scope views, and film grain no longer applied inside scopes.

Lighting and rendering

• Highlight gamma adjusted globally to reduce blown-out highlights.

• Flashlights no longer light up volumetric fog, and the flashlight glow is reworked.

• Muzzle flash lighting adjusted.

• Flashlights and muzzle flashes now light nearby rain and particles.

• Fixed excessive shadow updates on Russian Building, improving performance.

• Light cleanup on WornHouse.

Weather

• Rain particles now react to light, with new surface shading.

• Fixed lightning strikes stopping during matches.

• Removed an unneeded wind fog effect.

• New rain audio with light, medium and heavy intensities, and rain hitting the ground.

• New thunder system with close, distant and far layers, delayed by your distance to the strike, and a bodycam-style distortion.

• Weather mix pass.

• Paintball: ambient sound sources are no longer easy to pinpoint.

• Gamma setting maximum lowered from 4.0 to 3.0.

• New magnified scope quality setting (see Optics).

• Quick Play now remembers your mode and map selection between sessions and tabs.

• Global CPU optimization pass.

• Materials and textures optimized across the game.

• Heavy meshes reduced across several maps.

• Optimization passes on Village (volumetric fog cost), Asylum and Public Pool.

• Fixed a crash related to FSR Frame Generation.