Hello Councillors,
Following the official announcement of the Beta delay (
https://mmh7.ubi.com/en/blog/post/view/beta-situation-update), the development team would like to share some insights regarding the issues we encountered on Monday with the build.
First and foremost we are obviously quite disappointed and frustrated right now. We had a good feeling last week to be able to deploy and release the version and we were quite eager to start the first beta phase. We failed to deliver the beta version on time, even though we tried until the very last moment on Monday. We felt that the least we can do is share the reasons of this with you all.Here are the issues which stopped us from releasing the version:
We are still working on so called “out-of-sync” issues in the multiplayer mode. We were confident that we had fixed these, but as a matter of fact one remaining issue is enough to mess up a multiplayer match. Right now we are aware of one issue which causes a desync: If a player levels up and chooses his skill while it is not his turn we have a sync issue and the game doesn´t recover from it. For now we do not know if we have additional out-of-sync moments in the current build but fixing this one is a priority as we need this fix for the long-term stability of multiplayer games.
We currently have two different notes about performance drops. We assume for now that it is caused by the GUI. We significantly loose performance after a certain time of playing. Usually we would expect that a save-load would fix this but this particular issue is actually not fixed by a simple save-load and therefore we definitely have something strange going on in the GUI code which we have to fix.
A last minute issue is related to the save game behavior. The current version eventually crashes on saving the game if the save game file exceeds a certain size. It does not happen on the smaller of the two maps but it happens frequently on the bigger map. For the moment, the magic number seems to be “5.5 MB” – and as soon as a save exceeds this size the save games seem to become corrupt, ultimately leading to a crash. Even though it is possible to play without saving this is obviously not acceptable and again it´s a fix we have to implement as soon as possible. Especially considering that we have way bigger maps for the full release, it´s something that rather needs to be tackled right now.
When we received confirmation of those issues on Monday, we discussed what would be the best way to deal with it and from the team´s perspective our preference was to postpone until we could fix these these issues or significantly improve them. This was a tough decision but we are confident it was for the best.
We are currently estimating 2 to 3 days to implement the fixes for previously mentioned major issues. After that we have to go through the testing process once again before we can deploy and release the build. In a nutshell as soon as we deliver a build, we transfer it to the testing team who will check if they can approve a build for release or if we have to reiterate.
This process takes some additional time, so to be on a somewhat realistic timing we prefer to assume “next week” for the release. Of course we will as soon as we can confirm a date and won’t reduce the length of this Beta.
In any case, we are deeply sorry and frustrated that we could not stick to our initial timing. We have focused a lot on the core game features and core gameplay lately and underestimated technical topics which had a bigger impact than we expected. Nevertheless, on the positive side we are actually glad that quality assurance found them and they were a great help reproducing these issues which makes fixing easier. Long story short, we are now working hard to deliver a new build as soon as these are fixed and start the release process once more.
We already made some great improvements regarding save issues for instance which we consider also as crucial. Indeed, we know that unfortunately we might not be able to reduce desync risks to 0% for the Beta (since it will also be linked to your internet connection stability etc.). However, even if you are disconnected, it is mandatory for us that you can directly reload the save and start playing again.
Rest assured we are more committed than ever to provide you the best experience with both MMH7 Beta and the final game. We will keep you informed about our progress and share more insights as soon as possible.
Thanks for your understanding and we all hope you accept our apologies!
The Development Team