Hey everyone,
Welcome to Developer Briefing #79!
This week marks Hell Let Loose's first anniversary since it launched into Steam Early Access. Time has been flying by and so much has changed since we first clashed on the frontline of Hurtgen Forest.
To mark the occasion Lead Developer Max has stopped by to put together his thoughts and thanks to you, our community. Max has also taken the opportunity to look back at exactly how Hell Let Loose has grown and developed over the last six months, whilst also looking ahead to what the future holds.
Oh and we're totally revealing some new helmets for the German forces...
One Year in Review - A Year in Early Access
Hi everyone,
We’re excited today to mark exactly 364 days since Hell Let Loose launched into Early Access on Steam on June 6th, 2019. It’s been an enormous and exciting journey so far, and it’s felt like the year has flown by. Indeed - if Hell Let Loose launched with the Allied invasion force on D-Day, then we’ve been fighting in-game nearly a month past the German surrender! During this time we’ve had huge amounts of fun watching as you - the community - deliver us excellent feedback in order to help us continue crafting the best experience we can.
It’s hard to believe that the initial Early Access build featured only one tank per team, no leaning or vaulting, one gamemode and only three maps (Sainte Marie Du Mont, Hurtgen Forest and Foy). With more than 5000 submissions to our version control, and not a single day without one (including the weekends!), we greatly enjoy our work.
Below we’ve included an image that breaks down the largest additions or changes to the game. That said, for the best idea, the notes for each patch and update truly detail the full scope of the changes. For those of you who have not played for a couple of months, you’ll be returning to a very different game. For those of you who haven’t played since release - it may as well be an entirely new game altogether!
Thank YOU!
We want to say a huge thank you to the community - not only to those of you who have just joined recently, but particularly to the very first backers of our crowdfunding campaign - all the way back in 2017. Without your initial support, Hell Let Loose would not have got off the ground.
Over the coming months we’ll be making good on any final rewards promised to each Backer tier.
Because of the continued success of Hell Let Loose, we’ve been enormously proud to build the team up to better support the title in every department. Our small team of 7 at the launch of Early Access has now transformed into 15 - enabling us to overhaul fundamental aspects of the game in our ever present push to deliver the best experience possible.
The Future
If you’ve followed the development of the game so far, you’ll know that we enjoy dropping as much content as humanly possible - alongside large scale bug fixes and systems overhauls. The future for Hell Let Loose is incredibly bright, and our initial plan to support the title across new theaters.
We’ll be releasing huge amounts of information over the coming weeks about what our roadmap to leaving Early Access looks like - and we’ll also hint to the future beyond it. Please be assured that this is still the early stages of the development of Hell Let Loose. There is so much more for us to do - including new fx, sounds, environments, maps, customisation options, weapons, Commander abilities, optimisation and many other things.
Every step we take will be taken as it always has done, side by side with the community. Your thoughts, suggestions and feedback have been integral to Hell Let Loose's development and will continue to do so.
Our current goal right now is to integrate many of the new optimisation and mapping techniques that we’ve refined into all current maps. We have a good idea of what our 1.0 map list looks like and so we’re excited to make sure that each map is just as performant and fun to play as all the others. Once we release Update 7, we’ll be pushing forward to finalise a version of the game that we feel reflects a successful 1.0 launch, before we move on to more new features, content and lots more.
While so much has happened in a year, we expect the gap between version quality and total breadth of content to be even more significant this time next year. Some of the largest quality overhauls that you’ll experience are yet to come!
From myself and all of the team, thank you.
New German Helmets
That wraps up Max's message!
So, at the start of the brief we mentioned new German helmets that are on the way - let's take a look at a few that you'll be getting your heads on in the near future:
Thank you for an amazing first year.
We'll see you on the frontline!
