ATTENTION GUARDS!
Thank you to everyone who took the time to give us feedback on the forums, discord and in the reviews. Honestly, we were not prepared for the level of interest! Largely, the reception has been really positive but we did notice a few trends starting to appear that we have been working hard to address.
First - a bit of context!
Since our release on Friday we have had over 9000 players. Even if we assume each player has played for just 30 minutes, that still equates to over 2 years playtime for a single person playing 8 hours a day, Monday to Friday.
That is alot of playtesting in a short period of time! And, without a doubt, the most common trend so far has been difficulty. This was a bit of a surprise to us, as we didn't really hear that the game was too difficult during our demo phase. So to address that we have made the following changes:
- You can now increase or decrease the time limit for a mission
- You can now toggle friendly fire on / off
- Tuned the number of required mission objectives based on player count (i.e. less players means less to do in the time limit)
- Tuned the number of enemy reinforcements based on player count (fewer players means fewer enemies)
Hopefully this should make the game experience much more manageable and less frustrating now that the time pressure is off.
In addition to the difficulty improvements, we have also been making daily bug fixes and improvements. The 2 most critical being:
- Fix for huge Gold rewards for clients in Extract missions
- Fix for some players crashing on loading District 2: Outskirts (due to a lighting issue on the level)
Along with the following:
- Updated server messages - no longer just "connection lost". Will now articulate the reason ( kicked from session or host quit)
- Fix Invert Y being default on first play
- Fix an issue where users could not equip unlockable capes
- Fix an issue with Kingpin achievement unlock
- Fix for an issue with shields not guarding correctly
- Added region to server browser
- Removed a debug that was causing issues
- Enabling host to set max player count
- Crossbow bolt removed after 10s in a players head (so no more being blinded by enemies stuck to your face)
- Translation issues and fixes in collaborations with the community.
We still have a large list of improvements, issues and feature requests to work through but we consider some of the most critical issues addressed enough to give us a bit of breathing room.
Our plan is to take a bit of time, review the rest of the feedback and figure out how best to implement it in one, slightly bigger and more meaningful update later on in the month.
As always - thanks for all your support and appreciate you taking the time to tell us what is working and what isn't. Keep it coming, and look forward to seeing you on patrol!
- The GUARDS! Team -
