A new year means new UFC 5 updates headed your way. We’ve got new and highly requested fighters entering the roster and legendary Alter Egos making their debuts. Plus, the latest round of adjustments and fixes, including an option to change the color of any rostered fighter’s shorts, fixes to reduce the strike tracking issues, some stamina changes, and the removal of the Negative Grapple Advantage effect on the ground. Read on to learn more about the latest UFC 5 update going live on January 12th.

LAUNCH DATE/TIME AND DOWNTIME

• Jan. 12, 2024 at 10 am PT / Launch Downtime: 15 seconds.

NEW FIGHTERS

• Mayra Bueno Silva (#2 WBW)
• Jailton Almeida (#7 HW)
• Ian Machado Garry (#10 WW)
• Mike Malott (WW)
• Charles Jourdain (FW)

UFC 297 Fight Week Challenges and New Alter Egos

• These will be added on Jan. 16, 2024

MISC. ADDITIONS AND UPDATES

• Added Kamaru Usman to Middleweight
• Added Deiveson Figueiredo to Bantamweight
• Added short color selection to Fighter Select for all rostered fighters (excludes Alter Egos)
• Added new Vanity Rewards

STRIKING

• Reduced stamina recovery between rounds and made it taper off each round.
  • Even at the first interval, the recovery has been reduced. As rounds go on, fighters will recover less and less, whereas before, the recovery stayed flat. In total, this amounts to a reduction of nearly 20%.
• Tuned body strikes, generally shifting them from damage to stamina drain utility.
  • We’ve heard feedback that body strikes now inflict heavy damage and allow for TKOs too easily. Meanwhile, the stamina drain from body strikes felt a bit too low, which hampers the tactical use of body strikes to slow the pace of the fight down and helps discourage relentless attempts at breaking the (high) block. We also considered that the body punches are a bit too risky to throw, the body lead hook is a little overused, and the body jab is a bit underused. The following tuning changes aim to address all these issues:
  • Damage Decreases:
    • Body Straight: -10%
    • Body Lead Hook: -15%
    • Body Rear Hook: -10%
    • Body Lead Upper: -10%
    • Body Rear Upper: -10%
  • Long-Term Stamina Drain Increases:
    • All Body Punches: +22.5%
      • This value is meant to net +10% drain past the damage decrease to most of the body punches, and the intention is that it will be a big net increase in damage for the body jab (Which isn’t getting a damage decrease).
    • All Body Kicks: +10%
  • Vulnerability Decreases:
    • Chin (Upper) Vulnerability of all Body Punches: -15%
    • General Vulnerability (anywhere but Chin) of Body Jab: -33%
• Improved the speed and evasive properties of ducking.
  • This will reduce the occurrences of strikes unnaturally tracking opponents as they’re ducking.
• Assigned proper stances (orthodox/southpaw) to Sergei Pavlovich, Magomed Ankalaev, and Colby Covington.
• Fixed a rare foot planting issue with the Leon Edwards Alter Ego.
  • He could sometimes drag his feet when walking around.
• Fixed a rare unplayable state from cage knockdowns.

GRAPPLING

• Removed the effect of Negative Grapple Advantage in the ground game.
  • Previously, Negative Grapple Advantage would both speed up your opponent's transitions and slow yours down. Now, it will no longer slow you down. This should encourage more activity in the ground game and make it harder for a fighter to hold a position for too long.
• Increased the influence of the Ground Striking attribute on postured Ground and Pound damage, especially for elbows.
  • This constitutes an increase in damage for postured ground and pound and rewards fighters who specialize in it. At a max attribute, the change should lead to a buff of 10% for punches and about 23% for elbows, which are riskier. Time to “Smesh!"
• Decreased the damage of elbows in the tight ground game.
  • The base damage of the tight ground elbows (when not postured up) was reduced to a value only slightly higher than the punches. The influence of the Ground Striking attribute on the damage itself was increased, although the net result is still a decrease in damage. This means the damage from the elbows was decreased in general, especially for fighters with a low attribute.
  • Elbows will retain their bonus to cause and aggravate cuts and swelling, this still makes them more potent than punches, but not by such a wide margin as before. Our intention is for players to use punches more in situations where they want to chase a facial injury to the eye, with hooks; or the nose, with hammer fists. The ground elbows target the forehead (as do the postured-up elbows).
• Fixed a Heads-Up Display (HUD) issue in submissions where the damage icon of the first desperate escape would apply to following desperate escapes and the finish, even if they were of different types and required different icons.
  • For instance, an armbar desperate escape would correctly show an arm icon, but a subsequent heel hook desperate escape would show the same arm icon, instead of properly showing a leg icon. This issue was affecting only the icons on the HUD, not the gameplay functionality.
• Fixed an issue where knees could be caught in the clinch and result in the fighters getting stuck.
• Fixed a rare unplayable state during a clinch grappling exchange.

Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to give us feedback and for reading our blog posts. We stated in last month’s blog post that we are continuing to improve UFC 5 based on your feedback and we want to reinforce our commitment to providing you with future updates and transparency with those updates. Please stay tuned for more updates and more content that is on the way in the coming months, including some highly requested fighters that are being added to the roster in February and March:

FEBRUARY

• Bryce Mitchell (#10 FW)
• Maycee Barber (#7 WFW)
• Joe Pyfer

MARCH

• Sean Brady (#7 WW)
• Jalin Turner (#10 LW)

Additional fighters will be announced at a later date and in case you’re wondering, YES! Thug Nasty will have his camo shorts in the game.

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