Hello chasers! OUTBRK RELEASED ! Huge newsletter to come, tighten your seatbelt, we're dropping a lot of infos about what we did to prepare the launch, how the launch went, and how we reacted to the feedback and issues.
PREPARING FOR LAUNCH
During June alone, we:
- Integrated 8 new weather scenarios.
- Rigged all commercial buildings and small props for destruction.
- Created a massive technical optimisation solution of map assets management to increase performance when driving.
- Massive town polish pass on all southern cities (Saint John, Fort City, Bridgetown, Southbay, Eagle Cliff)
- Updated world map and minimap assets.
- Added tornado sirens in all towns.
- Fixed an issue on lower end PCs with terrains sometimes not loading correctly and leaving big holes in the map.
- Fixed an issue requiring players to restart their game client between matches to join another match.
- Integrated a system to prevent players not getting the same scenario too often in a row.
- Integrated new loading screen digital art.
- HUUUUUGE Day 1 patch following Closed Beta Testing https://steamcommunity.com/app/1107320/eventcomments/4411920671410569399/
LAUNCHING OUTBRK
It’s 2am on June 28, we’re fixing critical bugs that were found during closed beta, we’re moving servers from the testing environment to the live environment and realized our servers still had a hard limit on them that would have prevented MOST players to connect and we sent our request to increase that limit just in time, we’re rendering the final version of the gameplay trailer, we’re all super tired of the crazy last few weeks of pre-release crunch to get everything sorted to be ready to press the big LAUNCH button on steam at 10am EDT.
We released the gameplay trailer ! Watch it here :
https://youtu.be/VG1Lh6HJqi8?si=dfIbD13DloEJ5Tn7
Then we pressed launch, and then… SERVER ISSUES! YIKES. FPS ISSUES! YIKES.
We posted this announcement as fast as possible https://steamcommunity.com/app/1107320/eventcomments/4411920671412424104/
Here is what happened:
SERVER STUFF
- Servers took some time to warm up and scale so it took time to identify the real issues that were preventing the players from joining.
- We had different issues on NA and EU, further complicating our investigating process.
- Once we identified the actual issues with matchmaking we got to work on hotfixes.
FPS STUFF
- We are well aware about the fps issues with our new cloud technology and we are working on it, that being said, we released the game with the “fantastic” graphic preset by default for everybody so that really hurts the player’s experience with the game when they first launched it.
- We failed to explain what we’re trying to do with our cloud technology to the average gamer, people see the average look of the game, which is very indie we know, and compare the performance with AAA titles. All our weather is a completely unique technology made for OUTBRK and it’s something that has never been done before. We’re rendering real weather data accurately, this is absolutely out of scope for any video game usually. The technology is brand new, we made it work for OUTBRK at the very end of the development cycle, right before we launched Early Access, there is a lot of work remaining still, for the people that follow our Trello work board, it’s everything under the Backlog - Catalyst section.
- Part of this same point, we have some settings to mitigate some of the cloud fps issues in the graphical settings, such as Cloud Downsampling, but this is not really understood by players since it’s not a setting usually found in games. People think they have to play on low with a high end computer to run the game, when in fact they just have to up their Cloud Downsampling a tiny bit.
The game launched to MOSTLY NEGATIVE (aouch) reviews on steam, understandably so, we got to work non stop all day to get hotfixes ready as fast as possible.
It’s now June 28 at 23h45, we’re absolutely dead tired, we just want to catch some sleep and get back to work, but we forced ourselves to celebrate the launch of OUTBRK on release day even if it didn’t feel like a victory lap, otherwise we would never have.
OUR REACTION TO THE FEEDBACK
- Let’s not kid ourselves, launching a multiplayer game is hard as hell. If AAA games have server issues at launch, we expected something would go wrong too, no matter how much we would prepare to some extent. However, being in the driver seat is another experience entirely. Having to work on critical bug fixes at the same time as we have to answer to the community is an incredible amount of pressure. Huuuuge shout out to our moderation team on Discord and Steam and our lead tester WalkOverYou that handled the bug reports coming in MASS, gave swift answers to the people getting stuck, and gave workarounds to players. Really an incredible support team that did a fantastic job under the huge amount of pressure that is release day.
- We did our best to keep our cool and focus on what we do best, fix bugs. We went in “war room mode” tackled urgent issues, got a first patch out addressing critical issues, and behold, it worked! We released PATCH 0.1.571 and servers stabilized dramatically and new players now have much better FPS getting in the game.
Full patch notes here : https://steamcommunity.com/app/1107320/eventcomments/4411920838128198787/
NEXT STEPS
We’re currently actively working on a new series of bug fixes and improvements for a new hotfix patch that should release shortly. We have a LOT of work ahead of us, but we already started working on important post launch features such as the party system, more weather scenarios, and critical continuous FPS improvements.
That's all for this development update ! Thanks for all your support, consider leaving a review on the steam store to reach more potential future chasers ! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1107320/OUTBRK/
Till next time,
-The OUTBRK Team