Hi everyone, I’m Andrew Willans, Game Director on Hood: Outlaws and Legends.
Before diving into today’s topics, I want to first extend a huge thank you to you, the players. Our small Newcastle team has been blown away by the response so far, and we’ve had an amazing time watching your livestreams, discussions and head-popping compilations!
Today marks one week since we opened Hood’s servers, so I thought it a good time to share a quick update of where we’re at, along with some of what we’re actively working on here at Sumo. Next week, we’ll also put out our first Developer Update video, where I’ll go a bit deeper on some of the stuff outlined here, present some fresh stats, and take a look at what we’ve got further down the line!
I’m also happy to say that we’ve identified the issue that could cause long waiting times in the lobby even with the game’s high player counts. It’s being worked on right now, with the fix available soon for all platforms.
We see this launch week as only the beginning of a long, exciting journey! We are listening - every review, feedback and suggestion reaches us in some form or another, and it’s much appreciated. In that spirit, we want to be transparent with the community in taking a look at some interesting stats as they develop, starting today with the current win rates for each Outlaw:
- John - 53.93%
- Marianne - 49.39%
- Robin - 48.05%
- Tooke - 52.80%
As it stands, these are some relatively even win rates for a multiplayer game in its launch week, which we’re happy to see. That said, this is an ongoing process and we are very aware that there is still work to be done. Our team is already working on some promising balance tweaks to get everyone on a more level playing field, which we hope to roll out as soon as possible. We’ll also soon release an update on consoles for the low Aim Sensitivity issue, which we believe may be having a negative impact on ranged Outlaws’ win rates.
While Robin is the most popular pick right now, we’re happy to see that there’s great diversity in team composition. Take a look at the chart below, corresponding to the occurrence of different team compositions:
As you can see, over half of all teams are made up of an even number of ranged and melee Outlaws. It’s currently very rare for a team to choose entirely melee or entirely ranged, with just a 4% total occurrence. It’s great to see that people are still experimenting with different strategies - we’ll be keeping an eye on these composition stats to monitor win rates, along with the individual Outlaw win rates, to inform our balancing decisions.
Once again, a huge thanks to all of you for your passion, support and feedback. We’re dedicated to supporting Hood for the long-term. Just as part of the current season, Litha, we’ll first launch the much-anticipated free new map, Mountain, along with an exciting new game mode a bit later. We’ll also soon provide more info about our first post-launch Outlaw - also free for all players - which will be released as part of the next season.
Stay tuned next week for our first Developer Update video - see you there!
Andy