All of us enjoying Broken Arrow, developers included, sometimes want to watch a match again: whether to review our own mistakes, put together some highlights, or check if an opponent was playing fair. However, due to limitations in the project's infrastructure, implementing a replay system simply wasn't possible at first.
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The same applied to single-player content. For much the same reasons, one very important feature had long been missing from the campaign and scenarios: the ability to save your progress.
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Over the past year, we've done a huge amount of work to lay the technical groundwork for adding both systems. And now, we're finally ready to walk you through how replays and saves will work.
Previously, we covered community-made resources that allowed players to view statistics from completed matches. Soon, similar functionality will also be available directly in the game, under the Match History tab.
Alongside a list of your own matches, you'll also be able to search for almost any match played by other players. All you'll need is the nickname of one of the players or the FightID itself.
Once you've found the one you're looking for, you can either open its results screen or download the replay from the server and start watching it straight away. All downloaded replays are stored locally in your game client folder and can be accessed in the second tab, Replays. For reference, the files themselves are quite small, taking up no more than a couple of megabytes.
Each replay will take some time to process on the server before it becomes available in Match History. Once it's ready, you'll have one month to download it before the file is deleted from the server. In the future, we may even make replays available on the server indefinitely.
When watching a replay, you'll see the familiar Observer Mode UI, now with one important addition — a battle timeline. Using the timeline markers, you can quickly jump to a specific moment or go back to an earlier point. You'll also be able to adjust playback speed and pause the replay.
In future iterations, we plan to introduce another interesting feature — the ability to watch a game from a specific player's perspective, with their cursor visible. We're also continuing work on the overview panel shown in our previous devblog, which will provide more detailed match monitoring.
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Saves in the Campaign and Scenarios
And this useful addition won't be limited to multiplayer — it'll also be available in single-player modes. We're introducing a save system for both the campaign and scenarios.
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No more having to spend another 70 minutes gathering fuel every time you play through Self-Service, or hiding your last unit in the woods at the crossroads in Operation Cold Harbor. What's more, you won't even have to save manually, as the autosave feature will be enabled by default. Loading a save will restore not only your progress, but also all previously issued orders and the previous states of your units. There are also additional settings that allow you to manage save file limits. |
One more thing worth mentioning: we've recently started putting replays to use as a fully-fledged tool for detecting cheaters. In particular, we've used them to review a series of real matches from the live version, selected based on your reports. As a result, the first players caught cheating have already received bans thanks to evidence uncovered through replay reviews.
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As of this devblog, work on the new features is still in full swing, and we currently expect replays to arrive first, in one of the upcoming updates sometime this November, while saves are planned to be added before the end of the year.
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We'll see you again very soon, Commanders! - Steel Balalaika Studio