We want to start this off by thanking everyone who participated in this playtest! We gained some much needed feedback not only about the performance issues (more on that later) but as well as a lot of the changes we’ve done overall.
We received a great amount of feedback not only from our official feedback form but also from Reddit, Discord and Steam. We’ve been reading through all your comments, messages, survey results, and forum posts. The responses have been insightful to say the least, and each response is helping us further develop BattleBit into a game we all love and enjoy. The official survey has been especially helpful with collecting feedback we may otherwise have missed in the past. We definitely will be looking to run these more in our future open playtests to better understand player needs and wants.
Let’s go through some of the top takeaways from our test and talk about next steps. There’s also a few pain points we want to address regarding your feedback.
We had a great turnout of players, but unfortunately we ran into a massive issue: a memory leak. This impacted not only player performance but your overall experience of what Operation Overhaul is. Many players reported playing with a mere 5-10 frames, some of you saying it felt like a slideshow or PowerPoint even. While the playtest was indeed a huge help in finding this issue and getting your general feedback, we know it was frustrating to play through and it's clear we have more to do.
From the very beginning of this Overhaul journey, as some of you may recall, audio was and has been our primary focus. We introduced a massive amount of new audio to the game from gunshots, gear, vehicles, ambiance and even how sound interacts with you. This led to an overload on people’s RAM and CPU causing the annoying memory leak a lot of you experienced.
We will be doing more focused and dedicated performance tests through Discord with a “Performance Tester” role to help resolve this issue. Anyone can sign up for this by going to our Discord, going to “Channels and Roles” and selecting the Performance Tester role. You can expect a ping whenever we do a test, but be aware that these tests will be at random times with the focus being strictly on performance, not gameplay or otherwise. One server will be open for each test so slots will be limited. BattleBit is designed to run on a wide variety of hardware specs, and we need your help making sure it runs the best that it can.
A majority of our feedback was about the changes we made to TTK. Some said it was too high/long, others described it as sluggish and said they had to lead their shots too much. This whole experience of TTK was unfortunately affected by the performance issue. Even if you yourself weren’t experiencing bad performance, others shooting at you could have been. However, that's not really the whole problem, and we’re still going to be making tweaks.
We set out to improve TTK because what we have in the live build is, well, very fast. Players new and veteran alike sometimes get “1 framed” (or killed in what feels like a single frame) by the enemy and are left wondering “how did I die?” or “how was that even possible?”. We want people to have a reasonable amount of time to react to being shot at without shooting itself feeling sluggish or like you’re slinging foam darts at your target. We'll be doing a pass on all the weapons to ensure their TTK better aligns with these goals.
Another topic was the amount of falling snow on maps. Players reported it being way too much and distracting, making visibility tough and even tougher in helicopters. We’ve gone ahead and reduced the amount of snow to alleviate this issue. We’ll see how this tests of course, and welcome your feedback, but for right now at least this feels like a good level to us.
Lastly, we have the tracers. Players reported and even sent screenshots of what looked like massive amounts of lasers. We believe this was due to the poor FPS players were experiencing which in turn made the game feel like a laser show. Once we have the performance issues squared away, we hope this resolves itself, but we’re going to keep an eye on it after the performance fix to be sure it’s not as excessive as it is now.
These are just some of the things regarding our existing issues and your feedback. Right now we are mostly focused on fixing the performance side of things as well as finding that middle ground for TTK. There are still plenty of other areas we are looking to improve based on the feedback we got from this test such as the ping system, field points and night time gameplay. Until we have a firmer idea of what those are going to look like, we don’t want to go into too much detail about those just yet.
Our current plan is to run those performance playtests with you to help us fix the memory leak and framerate issues. Once that’s sorted, we’ll do our next open playtest like this one to continue tweaking and gathering gameplay feedback. Don’t forget to join the Discord and select the “Performance Tester” role under “Channels and Roles” to get updates on and join in the performance tests. We don’t have any word on when the first performance playtest will be, but stay tuned and watch for pings within that role to stay updated.