Here’s an update on our progress with Six Days and insight into what’s coming next.
We believe Six Days is one of very few games in which your success depends on real-world tactics, communication, and teamwork. It is a uniquely authentic and intense experience.
But it’s also a game in which this intensity feels like it’s always “turned up to 11.” Right now, Six Days doesn’t give you enough opportunities to observe and plan before you act.
It’s also a game that can feel overwhelming for players who don’t yet know the right real-world tactics. Watching trained military veterans clear buildings in Six Days is like watching a well-orchestrated ballet. It is both suspenseful and beautiful. But we’re not doing enough to help those who don’t already know these tactics.
Additionally, Six Days can feel clunky and buggy sometimes. This is mostly because we’ve had to devote massive resources towards our Procedural Architecture and AI systems, which are also central to why Six Days is so realistic and intense.
Last month we released a major update that addressed about 60% of the quality improvements we’ve been targeting, and we laid the groundwork for our next big feature set. We’re now focused on four major categories of improvements:
- Quality
- Fireteam AI: We’re addressing the edge cases that can sometimes cause AI to get stuck in the environment, fail to engage nearby enemies, fail to heal you when incapacitated, push you out of position when aiming, or get in your line of fire.
- Stability: We’re fixing the nine most common remaining crashes across a variety of hardware.
- Performance: There are a number of things we’re doing to improve graphics performance right now. Additionally, our team has been optimizing AI and game mechanics by taking deeper advantage of multi-threading on CPUs.
- Movement and Shooting: We’re addressing issues that can cause movement and shooting to feel sluggish and clunky sometimes.
- Pacing
- We’re going to give players more elbow room across each mission to observe situations, and make interesting tactical choices, before the shooting begins. While Six Days is already a very tactical game as you’re clearing houses and engaging enemies, we’re going to make your pre-engagement tactical choices interesting and valuable.
- Mission Flow
- Six Days does not do enough right now to build tactical proficiency in players before they face certain challenges. This is because we’ve taken a purely procedural approach to missions in which any one of a number of tactical challenges can present themselves somewhat randomly. Instead, we’re going to focus each mission on specific tactical challenges and ramp players into tough tactical challenges more gradually.
- Player Progression
- We’re building a class-based progression in which you can allocate Rank Points you earn from your success to upgrade your character’s weapons, equipment, abilities, and cosmetics.
We plan to provide much more detail about all of these things in the coming months.
Release Schedule
You’ll see subsets of quality improvements throughout the next few months, especially related to stability and Fireteam AI.
The Pacing, Mission Flow, Player Progression, and a bunch more of the Quality improvements will take longer. Some of these pieces require us to re-work lower-level systems, and the Pacing, Mission Flow, and Player Progression interact enough with each other that it’s difficult to release them in pieces. We’re targeting Autumn for a big release where all these come together.
So, again, in the meantime you’ll see subsets of stability and quality improvements. Additionally, we’re anxious to keep you posted throughout this time with updates as we make progress on all the other pieces.
I also want to express our appreciation to the 1,000+ people in the Six Days community who provided feedback in the last few weeks through our survey, direct messages, forum posts, etc. Every one of these has been reviewed within our team, and this feedback has been super useful in shaping our priorities.
Thanks,
Peter