Hey Everyone,
June is going to be an exciting month for Days of War.
Next week we will be releasing a large update with a new map and some major game changes. Alongside this major update we will be doing a free weekend promotion, so everyone can come see the progress we’ve made over the last few months since our launch date.
Free Weekend: June 15th
From June 15th-18th we will be having a free weekend, meaning anyone can try the game for free during this period. This means there will be a lot of new faces so we encourage our veteran players to help show people the ropes.
New Map: Amalfi
Our new map takes place on the famous Amalfi coast of Italy where the US Army Rangers invaded in September of 1943.
We are very excited for this new map as it is the product of all our learnings from the last several months on the technical, art, and design fronts. We’ve increased the frames per second, improved visibility and lighting quality, and used a more traditional domination layout that we feel suits our core gameplay much better than some of our recent maps.
We will be offering an exclusive preview of the new map to some select folks this weekend. Stay tuned for another announcement tomorrow to learn how to participate.
New Lighting
We’ve taken our new lighting methods from Amalfi and applied them to all our old maps. We are utilizing the new tonemapper and HDR features from UE4.15 which allow for more realistic contrast and colors especially in the shadows.
Some of the changes are subtle, some more drastic, originals are on top, revised versions on bottom.
We've aimed to improve both the look of our lighting but also the visibility of our characters in dark places. We are using a new experimental lighting method which will appear in the next build.
New Animations
As promised, we’ve rebuilt all the animations from scratch. The new animations are more than just a surface update, as they dictate how the player models move about the world they have an impact on the gameplay as well.
We’ve taken care to improve the blending and transitions of the player movements, reducing issues like feet sliding and improving posture and predictability when changing directions.
We’ve also matched all our 3rd person animations to closer reflect what’s going on in first person, so you have a better sense of exactly what your enemy is doing.
Lastly we've implemented procedural hit animations and improved bullet wound decals on players.
New MG42
We’ve got a brand new MG42 which you can preview below (note: we've fixed the tracers since it was taken):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_verBDmU0yk
In addition to the updates above that will be coming in the next week we have a whole host of things in the pipeline, including 3 new maps that are in progress, VOIP 2.0, the public release of the map editor, and more. We will be providing more detail in updates here as well as in our early access roadmap in the near future.
See you all in game soon
Driven Arts