Phasmophobia has been working towards smarter ghosts for a while now. Kinetic Games have made regular, incremental changes over on the beta branch for a few months. Now, quite a lot of those changes and bug fixes have all been rolled together and released onto the game’s main early access version. In the realm of ghost AI, Kinetic Games have made a heck of a lot of changes to make angry ghosts much better at tracking you down. They’ll now attempt to follow you around corners instead of wandering off when they lose sight of you. They’ll also now listen for your voice if you’ve got a microphone connected and hunt for your horrified screams. Most terrifying is that they can now open the doors of closets and lockers you might be hiding in, which you can only prevent by holding them shut from the inside. I was personally besieged by that ability on the beta branch and can attest that it makes for some very persistent ghosts. In other difficulty changes, professional level contracts have gotten a bit tougher, as has getting accurate temperature readings. At a professional level, haunted locations automatically begin with the power turned off. Tougher yet, rooms without power now drop to a 5°C temperature. So professional players will now need to run in and get the power turned on before they’ll have much luck locating a ghost with a temperature reader. One extremely handy change is that Phasmophobia now lets you independantly select a map and a difficulty level. You’ll still get a randomly generated selection of locations, but you won’t get stuck choosing between a professional level prison map or an amateur level house. Pick the porridge that’s just right, ghostielocks. Aside from the changes themselves, Kinetic Games also say that “this update now puts the game into a much more stable state which will allow for new content to start being worked on.” They don’t specify which new content might be coming up, but you can find the backlog of ideas on the public Trello board with ideas such as new mansion and apartment building maps or a post-mission stats report. You can read the full list of changes and bug fixes in Phasmophobia’s post.
