Happy Anniversary
Verdun is celebrating its three year anniversary today! The game has seen new squads, new maps, new game modes and much more over the years. We’d like to give a big thank you to everyone who has played and supported our little (or not so little anymore!) World War One FPS. People were skeptical about an indie company making a multiplayer shooter... we’re glad we went for it anyway! Whether you’ve been with us from the early days or picked up the game recently, thank you!
Pictures are worth a thousand words, so here’s one old screenshot Verdun as it used to be, with more below...
Quite a difference, no?
Before Steam
This three year anniversary only counts the years since we launched on Early Access in 2015, following a Greenlight campaign (remember Greenlight?), when Verdun actually has an even longer history. Take a look at this GIF from 2013, when Verdun was a fun side project for a few college students. Back then it was a WW1 deathmatch shooter which you could play in your browser!
This is why you should always aim ;)
We also gave a sizable interview back then which included quite a comparison between the alpha and the release version.
You can see we’ve been busy over the last few years, but what’s coming next? The recent Verdun Survey was setup with exactly that thought in mind.
Survey Results
We had an amazing 760 responses to our Verdun Survey, so a big thank you to everyone who took the time to fill it out! There’s a lot of data to work with and we want to make sure to make wise decisions. That said, we can already see some interesting details jump out at us.
78% of respondents enjoyed Verdun a lot, and 46% said they enjoyed the game more compared to when they first bought it. This is a nice morale booster for us on the dev team!Most of you thought there was a good variety in maps and squads… but many of you also said that you would still like more maps and squads.The Frontlines game mode was the most popular by far, with 650+ agreeing that they played it often.More than 350 of you were concerned about the number of players in the game, and lots of you were interested in the possibility of some ‘artificial’ opposition for Frontlines..The technical issues people were most concerned with were performance and player numbers. We’re continuing to work on these issues of course, but without reports on our bug support website describing bugs in more detail it can be hard for us to identify bugs by ourselves.
Do you recognize this map?
500+ liked educational content in our social posts, and little more than 50% were most interested in development & update news. This is great because we have lots more of both things to share!A huge 66% of you are interested in the community run historical battles, but haven’t had a chance to try one yet. 14% have played and enjoyed one, so congratulations to the Verdun X64 group, you’re doing great stuff!48% of you feel that Verdun players are being properly considered in decisions about the WW1 Game Series, and 43% only said somewhat, so we can improve here - hopefully the survey was a good start.Majorities of 600+ said that it was good for the games to be part of a series and for different games to be able to have different mechanics to reflect how the war was fought across different fronts. This is useful information for us ;)There have been a lot of questions about what’s in the future for Verdun, and the results from the survey have given us the information we need to draw up an outline for a new roadmap going forward.
Roadmap
Here are our immediate action points based on the analysis we’ve done so far:
Continue to focus on bug fixes and improving performance. Making reports and voting on our bug support website is hugely helpful here - it’s hard to prioritize if we don’t know how widespread a bug is or what the exact issue is.
New sounds. As well as making the overall soundscape better, we know there are certain specific sound effects that you would like to see replaced.
UI improvements. Although we’ve had to delay the release of the new UI, we know that making sure it is polished is better than rushing it out.
Looking into implementing bots for Frontlines. Although there’s some controversy over how exactly bots should be implemented into multiplayer matches, there’s a clear consensus that would like to see at least some bots added to Frontlines when populations are low. This would of course also allow private matches fully filled with bots.What we’ve described above isn’t the definitive list of planned content, but we believe that these are the key points for now. We’ve been amazed and humbled by the number of people who have played and enjoyed Verdun since all the way back in 2015 - and we hope to meet you all on the fields of Verdun in another 3 years.