Hell Let Loose is an indie title that was given the opportunity to grow, thanks to you, a community of passionate players.
We’re keen to acknowledge that it has not been an easy period for the game and community - with poor communication around recent changes, the premature discontinuation of PTEs, and what was a less-than-ideal trailer.
Initially, the 2023 roadmap set out to offer an ambitious plan to increase content delivery on a linear and predictable timescale - one year of the war for each game calendar year - while inviting more like-minded players to experience Hell Let Loose. However, we’ve stepped back and thought carefully about the way we introduce these new features - ensuring we are deepening the existing experience - as opposed to potentially splitting the player base and diluting it.
We have spent the last several weeks in many discussions, revisiting plans and reshaping them with the aim of preserving the core aspects of Hell Let Loose, while also looking to drastically shift the way in which we have been communicating, so that we’re able to work with you on new features long before release.
We know many of you are excited to see the introduction of new maps and additional forces, and this remains in our plan, however, we know that we must focus our efforts and priorities on addressing your feedback first.
What’s Changing?
Our Focus & The Delivery of More Frequent Patches
For the remainder of 2023, we will be focusing on attempting to address some of the issues that have been raised by the community. In doing so, our efforts to deliver the original 2023 roadmap will instead change focus to a slower speed of content delivery - bringing you more 100-player Warfare and Offensive maps, alongside existing planned cosmetic DLC, as we continue to work on resolving as many bugs as possible, and begin the planning for a longer-term future of Hell Let Loose alongside the community.
With this shift in focus, we will now be working towards delivering more patches, rather than major content updates - beginning with Patches 14.2 and 14.3.
Player Locomotion Speed & Dive to Prone (Patch 14.2)
Starting with an open PTE, we will be looking for your feedback as we begin the process of removing the running and sprinting speed increase, including the acceleration speeds, as well as the dive to prone functionality.
We are aiming for the PTE to take place on the 20th of July, to test the removal of these recent changes and assess any potential broader impact, before the adjustments can be confirmed for Patch 14.2 - a patch that will introduce this adjustment, to be released once a successful PTE has been carried out.
We understand that there are members of the Hell Let Loose community who will be disappointed with the decision to remove the increase in speed, however, recent fixes intended to reduce the impact of these changes haven’t been as successful as we had hoped. This led to further investigations to be carried out to understand the deeper components of Hell Let Loose, including vehicles, and how these currently affect our ability to make balancing tweaks, without impacting the wider game.
Brécourt Map
With our roadmap adjustment, the new Objective game mode will be moved back in the current timeline. While we recognize the excitement around the option for a shorter game mode, we are taking some time to look at how this can be implemented, so that we can continue to focus on delivering more fixes, as well as better understand how we release this game mode in the future and will communicate clearly when we’re confident of a way forward.
We will be organizing PTEs for players to test this new mode and provide much-appreciated feedback before it returns to our release schedule in the future.
The British Forces
We know that many of you, after years of being promised, have felt the initial introduction to the British forces to be underwhelming. We want to build upon these forces and are committed to reworking and expanding them, including introducing more historically accurate weapons and uniforms, such as desert uniforms for both the British and German forces, as well as making updates to the existing loadouts.
However, the limitations and inadvertent impact that tweaking certain features or firearms, like the Bren gun, would cause, is something we need to address on a wider scale; reworking and rebalancing some items from the ground up. While we don’t have a full timeline for this work right now, we are aiming to further tackle weapon sway, bolt handle animations, and weapon fire rate, as well as ensuring all British firearms are correctly zeroed, for Patch 14.3.
A PTE will be held in advance of Patch 14.3 that will allow you to submit feedback that we can action, prior to release.
What else will arrive in Patch 14.3?
Basic Training Environment
One of the key mantras in our aim to introduce new players to Hell Let Loose is to use a variety of methods to help them learn the fundamentals of the game - not to change the fundamentals of the game to suit a new player.
Taking inspiration from Churchill’s War Room, this new scene - accessible from the main menu - is one of our first steps in our aim to provide a smoother onboarding experience. It will give players the opportunity to explore a reworked Field Manual, as well as tune into basic video tutorials to help get to grips with some of the gameplay complexities, before accessing the Practice Range.
Practice Range
We know that the community has long asked for a Practice Range, and the first iteration will be arriving in Patch 14.3.
To begin with, the Practice Range will offer a basic, solo experience on the US forces and introduce a new environment for players to test out weapons and vehicles, without needing to be in a live game. Many of you will know that each Update can radically shift aspects of the game, and we will be updating the Practice Range to reflect this, while also including other forces as we continue development.
Complete with a range of targets, including scarecrows, sandbags, bullseye targets, and barrels - we’ll be dedicating a future Developer Briefing to diving deeper into the Practice Range, but for now, here’s a sneak peek.
In-game Store
We fully understand that your trust in us is rightfully not where it should be. The in-game store was developed as part of an effort to round out the DLC aspect of the game and make it a more accessible experience to purchase DLC on all platforms.
The in-game store was supposed to sit alongside a large amount of content - content that is now undergoing changes as part of our re-prioritization. We have had several internal discussions about whether we can pull this out of the release cadence and have come to the conclusion that it will cause rolling production issues and potentially delay further changes due to the way it is set up - necessitating us to release it. However, we want to offer some additional information to clarify any concerns the community has.
The store will
never:- offer any pay-to-win items
- offer non-historical cosmetics that break immersion (i.e. pink camouflage)
We also want to assure the community that no resource has been diverted from bug-fixing for the implementation of this feature.
Bug Fixing
With the moving back of our Brécourt map and Objective game mode, Patch 14.3 will predominantly focus on bug fixing, aiming to tackle a range of bugs and issues, including:
- In-game Stutter
- Panther Reload Speed
- Sherman Firefly Frontal Damage
- British Gun Sights
- British Weapon Sway
- British Weapon Fire Rate
- British Weapon Bolt Animation
- Correctly Zero British Weapons
- Doubled Explosion VFX
- Ultra Widescreen Support
- Servers Missing from Server Browser
- [Xbox] Missing Weapon Audio
What makes some of the issues so difficult to tackle?
When we are able to reproduce a bug, we can apply that knowledge to submit a fix.
However, some bugs are seemingly isolated to live builds, occurring only once an update has been released. We are looking to approach testing differently, with the aim to reduce instances of certain bugs occurring.
While there is a chance that some of these bugs may continue to evade us, we hope that renewed efforts across future updates will see more success. We are planning to use PTEs with a new build process, alongside additional logging, to hunt down some of the more elusive issues, including the loadout bug.
Loadout Bug
Around since the dawn of time, the loadout bug has never achieved a solid reproduction.
This particular bug causes players to spawn with an incorrect loadout, and makes it very difficult or impossible to fix by switching back to a desired loadout, unless the game is restarted.
In live builds, extended idle periods seem to increase the chances of the bug occurring.
With this knowledge, and the use of the game analytics, alongside a change in the build process for an upcoming PTE session, we are hoping to better understand how this issue occurs, so that we can attempt to tackle it or determine the way in which loadout progression works in future development.
Grenade Bug
Players who experience this bug will see the grenade-throwing animation played, but will not actually throw the grenade, which we understand can cause a great deal of confusion.
We can see that the issue occurs more frequently with higher network latency, and understand that the bug can be avoided by ensuring that the whole animation of the throw plays.
Our investigations into the issue have since confirmed a successful reproduction, and we will be submitting a potential fix for players to test in our upcoming PTE session for Patch 14.2.
Balancing Fixes
Balancing the Axis forces has remained a topic of discussion for some time, and investigations into varying balancing requests are ongoing. However, when working on Update 14, we discovered that German soldiers had marginally faster acceleration, compared to that of the other forces, meaning the time taken to reach the maximum speed for both sprinting and running would be quicker.
When tuning the player acceleration for the last patch for Update 14, we ensured that all forces had equal acceleration, fixing this imbalance. As the player speeds and accelerations are now being re-adjusted, we will ensure that player acceleration is kept consistent between the forces to ensure the forces are balanced.
Console Server Browsing
While we do plan to bring further parity between platforms, this is going to take time.
Hell Let Loose, as it currently exists on console, does not have the necessary foundations to support server browsing. When the original conversion of Hell Let Loose to console was done, it was set up with the intention of supporting cross-play between console platforms only. As a result of this decision, an entirely separate set of infrastructure was created to support online play in a way that would meet console platform holder requirements.
The servers for both platforms are completely different, and use different providers. The code that powers the game is not the same as the code responsible for logging into the servers and platform services, or sending invites and friend requests.
We fully recognize the lift in experience that being able to select a familiar server brings to Hell Let Loose, and will continue to investigate other methods of preference selection that can support matchmaking on console in the meantime.
New Maps & DLC In 2023
While bug fixing is going to be our primary focus for the remainder of 2023, we are looking to also release desert uniforms for the British and German forces, while continuing to deliver 100-player maps, as well as DLC. To ensure these can remain our focus, we plan to revisit some aspects, such as the base winter uniforms and address feedback around them, next year.
Summer Warfare DLC
The Summer Warfare DLC will be back in store tomorrow, on the 13th of July, and will be available for free for both console and PC players for a limited time only.
Night Map Variant of Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont
A night map variant of Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont that has previously been worked on will be coming in a future release after Patch 14.3, allowing players to experience the D-Day engagement between the US and German forces that occurred in the early hours of the 6th of June, 1944.
Reddit AMA & War Correspondent Podcast
Join us on the 19th of July for a Reddit AMA session where we will address some of your questions, and aim to later go into further detail about the still yet-to-be-announced new content and cosmetic DLC that will be coming later this year, in a podcast with War Correspondents,
RazBora and
The Fresh Baked Goods, which we’ll announce soon!
When will Patch 14.3 be released?
The confirmed release of Patch 14.3 will be announced in a future developer briefing, while we continue to verify our preparations for the remainder of the year, and plan ahead for a PTE.
How will the new PTEs work?
We want to make sure that your feedback can be brought on board at an earlier stage of development, and in order to do this, are spending time rearranging our release schedules so that we can factor in more PTEs.
Planned upcoming PTEs will include:
Patch 14.2 PTE - Targeted for Thursday, 20th of JulyWhile testing the re-adjustment of the recent player locomotion changes, and confirming the grenade bug fix, we will also be activating logging in an attempt to capture further data around the Loadout bug. Information for this first PTE will be shared in advance on the Official Hell Let Loose Discord, alongside details of how we intend to collect data as well as your feedback.
Patch 14.3 PTEA PTE for the planned bug fixing will be announced closer to release.
This PTE will aim to test fixes to the British weapons, as well as the other items aiming to be resolved for this update.
Night Map Variant of Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont PTEStay tuned to find out when you’ll be able to jump into an early PTE session for the next map planned to be released.
What can you expect from future Dev Briefs?
We’re now looking to have Developer Briefings go live earlier in the week, and will continue to aim to post two briefs a month. As we gear up towards Patch 14.3, we’ll be taking a closer look at what will be coming in the update and share our progress on bug fixing.
PC Server Performance Testing & Fixing
Rubber-banding
We are continuing to investigate server performance, and as part of those investigations, have been running a test across certain PC servers that aims to understand whether a change made to server command lines has been able to reduce instances of rubber-banding, particularly when operating vehicles.
The initial results of the test have been positive, and all GPortal Servers will now be running an updated command line, and we will look to begin rolling this change out to other providers soon. We will continue to investigate other potential issues impacting performance.
Stuttering
Our continued investigations have also identified the potential cause of increased stuttering in-game; a process called “world origin rebasing” that has been present within the game for a long time, was recently altered to happen more frequently. We believe this may be inadvertently creating increased stutter.
Games with a large open world can sometimes cause the math to break down due to something called "floating point error" - as you move away from the world origin.
This can cause many issues, and most notably, visual glitches.
Hell Let Loose currently uses world origin rebasing so that when you are a certain distance away from the origin of the world, it will move everything in the world so that you are closer to the origin, ensuring that the math remains stable, and you don't see visual glitches.
Prior to the release of Update 14, we noticed that these visual glitches were occurring on some of the British weapons when moving away from the world origin. This was due to the combination of the models and the animations being used for some of the weapons.
To prevent this, we reduced the distance you would need to move before actioning the world origin rebase process. This fixed the visual issues that we were observing on those weapons.
However, we have since discovered that, at times, the process of doing a world origin rebase can be particularly expensive, causing the game to freeze for a moment. This is not a new issue, however, it will be seen much more frequently now as rebasing will happen more frequently as you move around the world.
We are continuing to investigate potential resolutions, and are looking into ways of reducing the performance hit of doing a rebase. We must also consider whether it would be possible to fix the initial issues that the rebase aims to resolve, in a different way entirely, as it is possible rebasing may be the root cause of many bugs over the years.
Game Analytics
With the recent increase in performance issues, the new game analytics have been raised by some members of the community as a potential cause. We can confirm this is not the case, as the new game analytics are logged only once a match has ended and therefore offers no performance impact while a match is in progress.
We know some server owners have also experimented with disabling a bAnalyticsEnabled flag on their servers. This flag is not in relation to the new analytics. It is instead for analytics that were present in the game some time ago. Those analytics did indeed cause issues in the game and were disabled, however, the code was not completely removed. It is possible that the remaining code could have a performance impact. Therefore, we will completely remove all of this legacy code for Patch 14.3.
A Message From The Studio
Thank you, for continuing to support Hell Let Loose.
We know this dev brief is a long one, so we won’t keep you any longer - but we hope it has made our intentions clear - we want to work with you on building a Hell Let Loose that you enjoy, and aim to resolve as many issues as we can.
As always, we will make sure to keep you up to date with our progress, and will be looking forward to seeing you on the frontline!
