Dev Briefing
Hey all,
Welcome to Developer Briefing 75!
This week Lead Developer Max is back to give you a heads up on what the team have been doing since Update 6 - Assault on Hill 400 launched on April 30th.
As we’ve always said, your feedback matters and is important to us, so lets hand over to Max now and get stuck in:
A word from Max - Community feedback in action & what’s next!
Hi all,
We’re thrilled with the reception to Update 6!
Update 6 was easily the most technically difficult update we’ve ever done - with the ballistics overhaul (including hit detection rebuild) and engine upgrade wrapped together.
Team Reflections
The team have been playing the Update as much as possible since release - each department noting down significant fixes, tweaks or changes across the board. Animations and sound not included - we’re very happy with how far along many aspects of the game are coming along.
Sound
The bulk of the sound overhaul is coming with U7 and will focus largely on firearms and explosions.
Animations
We’ll be showing this off in the coming weeks with a huge overhaul and something that truly changes the entire feel of the game. We went back to the drawing board and brought on several talented animators to rebuild our pipeline. We’ve spent many days in a mocap studio to rework our TPP animations, while all our new FPP animations are entirely procedural.
You can see a sneak peak of what’s coming below.
The gloves are on!HUD/UI
We’re on the right track, but some aspects of the UI can be made more intuitive, cleaned up or expanded. Some very old elements also still are present in the game that need to be tidied up and unified with the new components. We’re also thinking about quick quality of life changes we can make to drastically increase the experience with low technical or artistic risk.
Metagame
As the Community are also feeding back, the ninja Garrison meta and redeploy meta are both ugly crutches from our previous implementation of the spawn building meta. We’re going to be addressing these in the coming updates before we leave Early Access, as features we’ll be implementing will directly address these.
For example, we’ll be implementing a much more fleshed out Supply and Ammunition metagame that will remove the need for infantry to “redeploy” (We see you, Support players). Alongside this we’ll also be overhauling the way supplies are placed, as well as introducing logistics vehicles. We’ll also be revising the way Garrisons look, and the way they’re taken down. Nearly every aspect of this gameplay loop will be revised, with the end goal being a far more intentional push/parry/block style of gameplay that relies on clever use of tactics to penetrate the front line, instead of the usual Recon ninja units.
Level Design
The general rule we’ve found with Hell Let Loose is that you really never can have too much cover. It’s important to have some longer range and open spaces, but if that continues for more than 100m or so it tends to make gameplay quite tedious (special shoutout to the horrible push from Bizory-Foy Road to West Bend!). Not only are we overhauling our maps artistically, but a large amount of thought is going into creating natural opportunities for Garrison and OP placement. Hill 400 and the Utah overhaul represent a new style of mapping for us - using specific internal techniques to achieve higher quality visuals and a fast way to build out higher cover areas.
Please be aware, we’ll be bringing all current maps to the same quality level for the time we release from Early Access. This will necessitate the total remaking of Hurtgen Forest and Saint-Marie-Du-Mont. We will retain the layouts, but will be increasing the visuals and general flow and cover density on both maps.
Roles
The Commander is now feeling much more fleshed out as a role - with increased ability to influence the battlefield and add greater variation to the strategy used to win each game. We’ll continue to expand the functionality there and the way roles interrelate. This will include overhauls to the much-maligned Engineer role and Support role, as well as changes to every other role to give them a unique application (including many new loadouts, new weapons and new “gadgets”).
Vehicles
Our vehicle handling and armor systems will be revisited in a larger update later this year. While it’s functioning, it can be tightened up and made smoother and more reliable. We’ll be doing this alongside the community feedback we’ve received.
Recon
We’re going to look at making Recon marks appear only to leadership roles, as well as the player who placed them. We’re also looking at increasing legibility on the map in order to make this more obvious. We’ll also be tweaking the way Recon vehicles work to increase their effectiveness in surveillance.
Optimisations
We’re going to be turning full attention to this over the coming months. We know that there are many, many areas for us to improve across the whole title and we’re very excited to attack this as a team.
Crashes & Punching Bag Servers
We’ve discovered that the majority of the crashes are caused by a single issue - which we’re currently in the process of debugging for a fix ASAP. This is a huge finding, as fixing this issue will clean up more than 90% of server crashes . Honestly speaking, we predicted far more critical issues than what have occurred - simply due to the incredible amount of fundamental code that has been re-written. We’ll be patching the game the moment we fix these key issues.
To help with finding server and client side crashes we have set up two Punching Bag servers. We are asking the community to please fill these servers from now and throughout the weekend when you can, and please break these for us!
Server Names:
Punching Bag Server - Europe
Punching Bag Server - US East
Thank you.
That wraps up this week’s Developer Briefing! Thanks for taking the time to stop by and give it a read on your way to Hill 400!
See you on the frontline.
