Gameplay, Physics, and Quality-of-Life Update

Hello PBA superstars!

Thank you all for the great feedback. We take your insights and ideas to heart, and they guide our focuses for how to improve the game.

Our aim with this update is to bring you a smoother and more polished gameplay experience based directly on your suggestions. You can read the full update notes below, but the key differences you’ll notice are:

- Improved physics consistency

- New gameplay settings for more player control

- General quality-of-life improvements to make the game even more fun for all players

As we continue to work on more updates and improvements, we want to hear from you! If you haven’t already joined our Discord community, we would love to have you there:

https://discord.gg/pba

A huge thank you as well to everyone who has left us a review! It’s thanks to your support that we get to continue improving and updating the game. If you haven’t left one already, it would mean a lot to our team!

Update Notes

New Oil Patterns:

• Added "2025 USBC Masters", "2025 U.S. Open (#4)", "Full Oil", and "No Oil" oil patterns.
• The "Full Oil" and "No Oil" patterns are not in the pool for random selection (for Oil Pattern Roulette or when selecting random pattern).

Tenpin Bowling Improvements:

• Adjusted the tuning of pin action to be more realistic. Pin bounciness has been reduced to prevent unrealistically bouncy pins, but kickplate action has been increased to make for more realistic messenger pins.
• A new "Pin Action" setting has been added to the Gameplay Settings. "Simulation" (default) is the new tuning; "Arcade" is the old tuning for those that enjoyed the extra bounciness on the pins. Note that online play will always use "Simulation" pin action.
• Reduced pin action when bowling a straight throw (no hook or with a plastic ball) for a strike attempt.
• Developer's Note: We have heard feedback that throwing the ball straight for strike attempts was resulting in strikes too consistently. Our original intent was for this to be balanced by the difficulty of getting a Perfect/Perfect release, but that is much easier on lower difficulties, and is still possible for skilled players on higher difficulties. With this new tuning change, bowling straight should still be able to get a decent score (180-200), but not the extremely high scores it was capable of before.
• Adjusted the bowling logic of Pete Weber, Andrew Anderson, and François Lavoie to more closely match their real bowling styles. Also improved Pete Weber's shot animations to more closely match his style.
• Made further adjustments to "Simulation" pin action; in particular, single pins hit by the ball should now bounce off the ball less dramatically.
• Adjusted the bowling logic Parker Bohn III uses to more closely match his real bowling style.
• Added the option to swap to "Gradual" oil pattern breakdown in gameplay settings.
• "Normal" oil pattern breakdown will always be used for online play.

Career Mode Updates:

• Added a confirmation popup to brand sponsor select to avoid accidental selection.
• Changed the U.S. Open event to use the new "2025 U.S. Open (#4)" oil pattern.
• Changed the USBC Masters event to use the new "2025 USBC Masters" oil pattern.
• Added the ability to delete an existing career save from the "Load Career" UI.
• More Customization/Apparel:
• Added several new hair/beard styles.
• Added bowling gloves and bowling tape as accessory options.
• One color option for each is unlocked by default; others are available for purchase throughout the career.
• Added "Blue and White Hoodie" (Tier 6), "Black Relaxed Jeans" (Tier 8), and "Boat Shoes" (Tier 7)

Misc Improvements/New Features:

• Changed the difficulty of release mechanics (stick release alignment on timing) on Hall-of-Fame difficulty to be the same as on Pro difficulty.
• Developer's Note: We want to make sure that Hall-of-Fame is a real challenge for even the game's best players, but we agree with feedback that the increased difficulty from the release mechanics was more of a frustrating difficulty than a fun difficulty. With these changes, Hall-of-Fame should still be very challenging due to the increased skill of your opponents but without the frustrating difficulty from touchy release mechanics.
• Improved texture streaming to avoid blurry textures when they are first loaded in (especially pro and custom bowler clothing, ball textures, and venue logos).
• Added a backup save system to avoid save files getting corrupted by the game getting force-closed during an auto-save.
• Unfortunately, if your save file has already been corrupted this fix may be unable to recover your saved data, but if your game was consistently crashing due to a corrupted save it should now be fixed.
• Reduced how dramatically the AI would improve its performance when it is currently below its target score.
• Developer's Note: The purpose of this system is to make the AI score more consistently close to its target score; if they are underperforming they will get better, and if they are overperforming they will get worse. However, in extreme cases this would cause the AI to get too good and strike out at the end. This would be to match their target score, but it is frustrating to see for the player, so we decided to make this effect less pronounced. When overperforming, they will get worse at the same rate as before.
• All Daily Objectives will get refreshed each new day (previously only empty slots were filled by new objectives).
• Improved the quality of rewards for the first set of Daily Objectives that a player gets.
• Simulated Stepladder matches will now properly simulate a winner rather than always having the higher seed win, and the scores for previous matches are now visible in the stepladder UI.
• Made several changes to improve menu performance throughout the game. In particular, the event map, ball shop, and ball collection menus should all be much less laggy.
• Improved pinfall detection logic to prevent situations where a pin was about to fall over as the game cuts away but ends up not getting counted as down.
• Added a new gameplay options setting to hide the strike track.
• Added various help tips to the loading screen.
• (PC Only) Added an option to cap FPS to 90. This is now the default (default previously was uncapped).

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug where the "Hall-of-Fame unlocked" popup would show even if you were already on Hall-of-Fame difficulty.
• Fixed a typo in the PBA Qualifier unlocked narrative ("Beome" -> "Become").
• Fixed a typo in the ball collection display ("ReactiveResin" -> "Reactive Resin").
• Fixed a bug where the "win spare pickup challenge events" daily objective would not complete if the event was won in a tiebreaker.
• Fixed a bug where the commentators would use lines for other pros when bowling against Packy Hanrahan.
• (Steam Only) Fixed a bug where the game settings would not properly get synchronized for cloud settings.
• The amateur Hannah Stewart has moved and her hometown is no longer "29". We hope you enjoy the new town, Hannah!
• Fixed a bug where all AI opponents in the Tier 1 Sweepers Night event would always bowl 180 on Hall-of-Fame difficulty.
• Fixed a typo on the Southern region regional map ("Colmbia" -> "Columbia").
• Fixed several Roto Grip balls that were incorrectly categorized as under the Storm brand.
• Fixed a bug where Bill O'Neill would occasionally go invisible. InivisiBill is no more!
• (Candlepin/Duckpin Only) fixed some invisible lane geometry that could cause the ball to fly off unexpectedly.
• Fixed a bug where the Motiv Primal Rage had extra finger holes.
• Fixed several reaction animations where the bowler would clip through the floor.
• (Keyboard only) Fixed a bug where navigating the ball shop tiers with the keyboard would also focus a ball.