As you know, we released a major update in November that included a controllable AI fireteam, 2 campaign missions, 1 new co-op mission, a major visual upgrade, and more than 300 other improvements. And, 60 days ago, we released our 0.4.1 patch that included a bunch of additional improvements.
Well over 100,000 people have played the game since our November release, and thousands of players have sent us really helpful feedback. We’ve devoted these last 60 days to suggestions requested in this feedback, and will continue making these improvements throughout March, after which we’ll release our next big update.
You will definitely notice some very big improvements in how the game plays and looks in our April update. Some of these things include:
- Go! Commands: Players told us they love how quickly they can give orders to their team with Go! commands, but they have a hard time remembering all four commands in the heat of combat. You’ll see a big improvement to our Go! Command controls in this update, and we’re anxious to hear your thoughts!
- Fireteam AI: We’ve improved the Fireteam AI’s use of cover, line-of-fire avoidance, focal point selection, room clearing, navigation, and more.
- Enemy AI: We’re greatly reducing the likelihood enemies will spawn into rooms and yards inappropriately, removed all the ways we think they might be able to walk through walls, overhauled their perception and accuracy to be more realistic, and de-cluttered the environment so they won’t get stuck on stuff as often (and neither will you).
- Performance: We’ve greatly improved performance on mid- and high-end machines. Although you should see improvements on all hardware, the biggest improvements will be found on mid-range and high-end hardware, with more improvements for entry-level hardware coming later.
- Combat: We’ve improved hit accuracy, enemy reactions, enemy wounded behaviors, our health model, VFX, and lots more.
- Networking: We’ve just completed a huge improvement of our network code that provides a much higher fidelity experience in animations, death, vehicles, player movement, and accurately positioning players in the environment. We’ve also greatly reduced issues transferring from lobby to game and implemented simulated proxy smoothing and autonomous proxy moving, which will create less rubber-banding in high-latency games.
- Player Movement: We’re reducing stumbling and wall clipping and fixing a bunch of camera control issues.
- Lighting and Visuals: This update will include the next generation of our ray-traced lighting. Plus, we’re dramatically improving reflections, and replacing many of our first-person assets with better looking models, textures, and animations.
- Animation: We’ve replaced our first-person rig, implemented the first parts of our new locomotion system, improved turn-in-place, wrist twisting, elbow skinning, hand/finger deformation, and Inverse Kinematics. All of this means smoother, more realistic animations for you as a player and also for NPCs. Keep in mind that this is the next of many animation improvements that are on the way.
As you can tell, our focus since November has been on improving the basic player experience. We also have lots of new content coming in the future, as well, but adjusting the basic player experience, like we’ve been doing, causes major changes in difficulty and the mission experience. So, we must stabilize this foundation before we add more content, or we’ll have to keep re-working all the content.
We’ve only released about 40% of the game so far. There’s a -lot- more coming. We’ll update our official roadmap after we see how players respond to the improvements we’re making in the basic player experience.
Thanks,
Peter