Attention Officers,
Welcome to our 83rd Ready or Not Development Briefing, February 28th, 2025!
After years we’ve homed in on the current state of difficulty for Ready or Not, meanwhile every player is subject to their own personal preference on how it could be. Now it’s ready for a refresh. Read on below to discover how we’re approaching the in-development new difficulty mode system, with ‘Casual’, ‘Standard’, and ‘Hard’; and how we’re taking in measurable player feedback to help inform future development.
We loved to see your reception to our last dev briefing where we dove deep into our design philosophy for the Home Invasion levels and Ready or Not as a whole. Especially from people in our modding community or pursuing game development! For those of you interested in our level design process—the second half of this dev briefing breaks down our “Leviathan” mission from Dark Waters with the help of one of our Level Designers, Tisa!
Note: These development briefings serve to keep you in the loop about parts of our ongoing support for Ready or Not, however the briefings do not encompass everything that we’re working on at a given moment. Please keep in mind that the content in our development briefings may still be a work in progress and subject to change.
New Difficulty Modes
Our game’s level of difficulty is now in a more mature state, with our playerbase growing and players' skill level ever increasing. We find ourselves in a spot where it suits us to refine the standard difficulty experience and offer options for officers to either ease themselves in or challenge themselves further.
Introducing our in-development new difficulty system with the modes of 'Casual', 'Standard', and 'Hard'.
This is a largely mission-by-mission fine-tuned process considering a vast range of values affecting Civilians, Suspects, and SWAT officers. The system is still evolving and preparing for our internal testing phase; therefore, some details may change and we will also not outline all of the potential values being considered.
More details will be provided when these modes eventually release with changelogs!
Note that in order to unlock certain achievements you may be required to play on a specific difficulty mode, for example meaning you may have to play ‘Standard’ or ‘Hard’ to unlock them.
- ‘Casual’: Provides an ‘easier’ or ‘more casual’ introductory difficulty for players who are new to the game and less familiar with the genre
- ‘Standard’: The standard experience for officers, aiming to offer a rewarding and diligent challenge. This mode will be a slightly refined version of the current game difficulty.
- ‘Hard’: Provides a more challenging difficulty compared to ‘Standard’, heavily emphasizes coordinated team-play and masterful decision making.
In a general sense, the difficulty modes will modify values like reaction time, likelihood of surrender, accuracy while moving, accuracy at distance, and much more. For suspects specifically, changes to their threat level (stimulus tracking, reaction times, values that might affect the Suspect's "time to kill" the player) as well as a number of other modifiers to things like traps, stuns, rules of engagement, and squad behavior are all options.
Since these difficulty values are able to be set on a global as well as a mission-by-mission basis, it allows us to tailor the difficulty to the context of each mission.
For example, we have the ability to adjust the maximum suspects in a level, but we may avoid increasing the number for levels that require a specific number of suspects for level-specific story or gameplay reasons— shifting to other ways to modify the difficulty for that mission instead.
AI Community Sentiment Survey Completion
Thank you all for adding your thoughts to the recent AI sentiment survey, we received over 13,000 responses during the days that it was open! The data has been exported into internal documentation and shared across our relevant departments, accompanied by graphs and analysis commentaries for us to use as a valuable detailed resource going forward.
The survey data complements the existing feedback received across our other social platforms, such as in our Discord.
Improved Player Telemetry
We are adding metrics to help us better understand broad playerbase activity (telemetry), such as how many people are playing on a given DLC, what game version, and measuring player retention. This will help us measure the effectiveness of our development efforts.
In the process no personalized identifying information is collected, with all info anonymized and unable to be reverse-engineered— just as before this telemetry, we do not collect any personally identifiable info in the first place.
Level Design Deep-Dive on “Leviathan”
Continuing with our series of level design deep-dives, today we’re showing off behind the scenes on Leviathan. This breakdown is courtesy of our level design team member, Tisa!
Capturing the Experience
With the development of the “Leviathan“ mission, we wanted to offer a scenario that was a major departure from our usual missions while still centering Ready or Not gameplay DNA at the core. In particular, we wanted to immerse the player in a cold, wet, dark, steel-like environment, with giant ocean waves crashing in on them-- far away from the familiar safety of the coast.
Leviathan Narrative Background
Rig HeavyWell A-101 is the first rig granted permission to drill in the highly lucrative heavy oil reserve off the Los Suenos coast. The battle for drilling licenses, the construction of the rig, and its work have been contentious subjects in Los Suenos since the first applications were made.
The UPF, an eco-terrorism organization, has assaulted the rig and taken the workers hostage. They are aggressive and firing without hesitation. Some crew are injured, others are dead. Several groups of hostages have been corralled in various parts of the rig.
The LSPD SWAT has been called to the rig, which is under their jurisdiction, since an amendment to the Adjacent State Rule of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.
Background Research
Once we knew what the level was going to be, we started doing research and gathering references from all sorts of off-shore oil rigs, from smallest to the biggest.
To ground the environment and the purpose of each room as much as possible, we researched the specific machinery and tools that would be utilized on offshore oil rigs.
(Images below: Examples of types of oil rig machinery)
The oil rig portrayed in Leviathan is not any specific oil rig layout but rather the combination of all interesting rooms we found on different oil rigs.
(Images below: Examples of styles of rooms in oil rigs that ended up being considered as inspiration for Leviathan)
Out of the different sizes of real world oil rigs, the one that became Leviathan is the smallest type, believe it or not!
(Images below: Sizes and construction apparatuses of offshore oil rigs, and an example of the size of oil rig used in RoN)
Level Layout
Since the Rig is constructed in a way that the main drill tower is located in the center, and we wanted to have at least 2 floors on the Rig, I decided the level layout should be a good old fashion ‘arena’ style layout.
With the main landmark being in the center I could construct all rooms and passages circling around that landmark which will automatically create all the desired loops for our AI to move, run and flank at their best possible capacity which will create the desired gameplay for this level.
The landmark in the center also helps our players have a guide and not get lost or disoriented.
With this being a multi floor level I wanted at least 3 staircases connecting the floors for gameplay variety and to avoid any potential bottle neck in gameplay.
We also knew we wanted to introduce our new helicopter system so having plenty of outside open space for helicopter to spot and report suspects was also one of the considerations we needed to accomodate.
(Images below: Rig top-down level design layout)
Player Starting Points
For this level we planned to have 3 different starting points on 3 different heights of the level, giving players a unique approach each time they want to play this mission.
The first starting point is the Helipad; even from the loading screen players will see they are riding in the helicopter which will blend nicely with where they start from.
At first glance the landing zone is quite exposed, but we took great care into crafting the level to ensure players will never be shot in the spawn zone. Players spawn in the North-East side on the level on the highest point having access to both upper and bottom floor.
(Image below: Helipad starting point, with the blockout version on one half)
The second starting point is the Bridge.
Players start on a heavily shaking bridge connecting the big rig to it’s small addon. From here players get spawned in the middle and have access to upper and bottom floor on the North-West side of the level.
(Image below: Bridge starting point, with a mini photo of the blockout version in the corner)
The third starting point is the Boat Landing.
In loading screen players can see they are arriving by boat that blends into this starting point. For this starting point we wanted to leave players with a quick horrifying scene of workers hanging from the lowest floor of the oil rig to quickly alarm the players that these suspects mean business. From this spawn point players have access to the South-West lower floors that has a left/right options to choose from.
(Images below: Boat Landing starting point, with one image containing a mini photo of the blockout version in the corner)
General Gameplay Intro
Gameplay on this map is very CQB oriented despite its size, with some areas of longer lines of sight. This is also the first time we introduced our Helicopter system which gives the players a camera view from the sky. The heli reports any suspects/civis it spots walking around outside on the level and shines a searchlight on them to aid in closing in on spotted locations.
Threats
Since the level is built as an Arena type threats in this level can be anywhere.
With this in mind, we took great care in making sure our main objective is a room filled with tied up civilians and a couple of suspects guarding them, making those rooms quite challenging to clear without harming any civilians.
(Image below: Before/after of one of the hostage rooms)
Aside from carefully planning entries and checking fire for civilians, the level is also filled with high pressure pipes that will obscure your line of sight when shot.
Other environmental considerations include the drops of rain on the player’s vision, and visual sway effects that intensify when the player is closer to the edges of the oil rig.
(Image below: A shot high-pressure pipe emitting vapor)
Mission Objectives
The objectives for this level are as follows:
- Bring Order to Chaos.
- Rescue all of the Civilians.
- Stop the Livestream.
- Shut down Rig Drill.
The main objective of the mission is to Terminate the UPF livestream, located somewhere on the Rig. Each playthrough the location of the main objective is randomly selected. The livestream area is also populated with tied up Rig workers that have been taken hostage.
A hidden objective is to prevent the main drill from overheating. Players can stumble upon this objective when in the drill room, which emits a loud yet (hopefully) not annoying siren throughout the level until he manages to shut the drill down.
Interactables
Interactables (in-level game elements that change in response to the player’s interactions) were important for breathing life into this level.
To start, we added a reportable dead body of a worker to each player spawn area. This is so players can see that unlike the home invasion in our Lawmaker mission where the UPF faction is present, the UPF in Leviathan has grown more extreme in their actions.
Furthermore, we added worker voice lines for inaccessible areas behind the barricaded staircase in the crew quarters. These workers react with a range of voicelines when they hear gunfire.
Meanwhile, In the control room we have a radio which players can use to communicate with COAST to inform them that Rig has been taken over by UPF terrorists, and LSPD SWAT is on board.
Last but not least, a hidden keycard that unlocks one of the computers in the fire control room suggests that there may have been an insider working with the UPF terrorists.
All of these interactable were designed to immerse the players into the story and give the level that “Ready or Not” environmental depth we all love.
Conclusion
New ways to challenge yourself are on the way in the future, and so is development better informed by your current feedback. Combined with improved telemetry, we are solidifying the foundation we have to continue supporting Ready or Not.
Now that you have a refreshed perspective on Leviathan, it’s a great time to dive back in (combined with the ongoing Steam sale on our DLC if you, or a lobby host, don’t have the Dark Waters DLC already!)
This concludes our 83rd development briefing, thank you for joining us. Be sure to fall in next time for more development news!
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