ATTENTION GUARDS!
It has now been a little under 6 days since we pushed the big green button and released GUARDS!. In that time we have had nearly 10'000 players and over 1.5 years worth of playtime generated in less than a week. To say that we were not ready for the level of attention that GUARDS! received would be an understatement!
With that level of activity comes a huge amount of feedback. Now that we have left "New and Trending" and things have calmed down, we have been able to review hundreds of individual feedback items across the Steam forums, Discord and reviews and look for patterns.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to give us feedback. When we started making this game, we decided it was important to be as receptive and reactive to feedback as possible. Since launch we have read every piece of feedback, responded appropriately and released 6 updates to address some of the key issues we saw during launch.
In this update, we are going to briefly cover the most common feedback items, the timeline for addressing it and answer some of your questions about the games development.
Most Common Feedback
Looking at the data, we can see 3 issues that account for over a third of all negative comments.
Combat Feel
When we started planning GUARDS! we knew we couldn't compete with Mordhau, Chivalry and Vermintide in terms of combat feel so we set out to try something a little bit different. We were inspired by the fast paced, punitive combat found in games like Hotline Miami and Angerfoot and wanted to make something in that vein.
Obviously combat is a pretty integral part of the game, and we need to be really careful when making changes. We have started reviewing the game to understand what specifically is causing people to become frustrated and how to address it. This is probably the issue where we will spend the most time identifying and implementing improvements.
Timer
This one caught us by surprise. We had no idea that people hated timers this much! To us it helped force the action encouraging players to take risks, cause chaos and generally increase the amount of funny moments that happen in game.
Originally, we had the inverse system, where players would get gold / silver / bronze medals based on how long they took to complete a mission. In retrospect that probably would have been less frustrating. We hear you loud and clear and will make the timer more of a way to show mastery rather than a hammer to punish players who want to take it slow.
Difficulty
This is a 2 part problem. First there is a combination of the mission timer, enemy frequency, enemy composition and combat values like health and damage. That is all fairly straightforward to fix, as it is mainly editing existing values and testing it in all the various party sizes.
Secondly, we suspect that there are too many ways to insta-fail a mission. Spikes, killing a hostage, killing a suspect, breaking too many crates, etc. We will look into ways of letting players make mistakes without them being instantly shown a game over screen.
With all of these changes, it is important that we don’t swing the pendulum too far in the opposite direction and throw out features that people are already enjoying. The goal is to smooth off the rough edges so players are more incentivised to stick with it, rather than instantly rage quit the game.
Why Didn't You Launch Into Early Access ?
We just genuinely didn’t expect the amount of interest in the game that we received. At one point Lirik was streaming GUARDS! and we had hundreds of concurrent players. If we’d have known that in advance we would have definitely opted for an early access launch!
As players we’ve all been burned by early access games that make grand promises and fail to deliver. As developers it was important for us to avoid that trap. Hindsight is 20:20 and we put this squarely in the “good problem to have” category!
When Will You Implement These Changes ?
Addressing the 3 issues above is our highest priority. Our mission is to work with the community to narrow down the cause, implement improvements, test it on a separate branch and have them ready in time for the upcoming Steam FPS fest on April 15th.
Hopefully that answers some of your questions about how we ended up here, what we’ll be working on next and when you will be seeing the next update! Thanks again to everyone who took the time to give us feedback and we look forward to working with you to make GUARDS! the best it can be.
Thanks!
- The GUARDS! Team -