Hey Everyone,
For this month’s dev update we wanted to take a moment to reflect on where we are at and where we are going with Days of War.
We have received a lot of requests to expand the playerbase and community via a free weekend or similar promotion, but we don’t think this is a smart move until we have gotten the game to a more acceptable state. There is still a lot of polish to add, optimizations to make, and map content to include to increase the long term appeal of the game. Once we feel confident in our improvements, there are a lot of levers we can pull to bring more people into the game.
We’ve received an enormous amount of feedback from the first 6 weeks of early access and it will take a few months to fully address the issues. We’ve translated this feedback into a few tenets that we are going to stick to as we continue to develop Days of War. Some of these we’ve been repeating for a while now, but we want to make it clear where we are going and what we are going to be doubling down on.
• Maps: We will be focusing on close quarters pub maps designed for 32 players for the next few official maps, with competitive minded maps for 12 players or larger open 64+ maps primarily sourced from the community
• Gameplay: We are going to continue to test different configurations of movement and gunplay, but when we said fast paced, high damage, high recoil - we meant it. We want to encourage less iron sighting, proning, camping, and holding angles, with more peeking and pushing
• Gamemode: A focus on the domination game mode
• Visibility: A focus towards visibility and performance over detail and aesthetics with more color and fewer dark spots
• Modernization: Keep the classic style shooter mentality but add features that give additional reasons to keep playing like progression, cosmetic unlocks, and stats
• Optimization: We will continue to aggressively pursue performance opportunities, knowing that in the short term this may come with temporary issues and regressions for some players
Map Editor Update
Starting this week we have sent out the first batch of invites to closed access to the map editor. We have selected folks who have demonstrated a level of competence with UE4 many of whom have already made progress on maps without our assets.
The purpose of the first batch is to iron out the features and methods in the editor to make sure we provide a smooth experience when we open it up publicly, while also pushing forward the most complete community maps.
If you feel you belong in this first batch, make sure to send us some shots of what you’ve been working on or ideas you want to build.
The next update (1045) will include some changes to recoil, revamped third person sounds, some experiments with death animations/camera to make getting killed less jarring, along with a host of outstanding bug fixes.
We are really excited about the coming months and want to thank you again for all your feedback!
-Driven Arts