Dear Operators,
Lately, I have been conducting a playtest for Black One Blood Brothers’ next major update, which is the migration from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5.6, which I plan to release in early 2026. This closed playtest, conducted with players from the community on Discord, was focused on the performance and stability, as they are key for you to enjoy BOBB even more.. It was also a good way for me to start identifying potential issues and fix them, before the official deployment.
First, we wanted to thank our playtesters for their feedback and efforts. Thanks to them, we had the opportunity to challenge this early version and get some incredibly interesting findings.
Conclusions of the Optimization Playtest
One of our main points is to make sure that the game is accessible to as many PC configurations as possible. Of course, we do realize that we can’t cover everyone perfectly, but the least we can do is try.
I’m glad to announce that I’m satisfied with the overall feedback: most - if not every - configurations could play the game comfortably, including what we affectuously call “potato” computers ;). Although this represents a lot of work - I had to deep dive and finetune every setting in every map and system, to stay true to the spirit of the game and make everything scalable -, players have confirmed that they could see and feel a real difference.
That was one of the biggest challenges for this migration: on the one hand, Unreal Engine is such a huge playground that it’s very tempting to go all-in with the technologies to treat the most powerful machines. But on the other hand, I wanted to make sure that the lighter setups could run Black One Blood Brothers, and run it in the smoothest way possible without sacrificing the experience. After having spent so much time in the game overall optimization, learning that the balance was found between a beautiful yet optimized, with less micro-lags and framerate drops, was extremely motivating.
But it wasn’t just about stress-testing the performances: I’m happy to report that most - if not all - of the reported bugs have been fixed during the playtest.
Next Steps
And it’s far from being done. The next big steps are to add and improve the content that will be available for the official release. Which means to keep including maps, operators, gears, equipment and finetune what has already been migrated. Optimization and bug fixes are still going on, so that the public release is as clean as possible. I want that on the day of release, everyone can enjoy the finest technologies and solid, fully baked content.
The good news is that: this playtest will not be the only one. And of course, it will not be a copy/paste of this one: in addition to the optimization, performance improvements and content, I am currently working on something that will be, from my point of view, a real game changer: vocal command. The idea is for the player to be able to command the squadmates directly through their mic, with simple sentences. If everything goes well… I would love for the next playtesters to try this new features.
The Next Playtest
And that will be the last good news for today: the next playtest is set to be conducted early January. It will be on Discord as well so you might want to join if you aren’t on as it will be the heart of the playtest, debug and feedback. We will let you know closer to the date.
We also wanted to give a huge shout out to Talocan: he’s been working as well on the adaptation of all of his squads to the UE5 engine. You’re a legend! And again, a huge thank you for everyone's participation.
We’ll see you soon!
Helios, out.