Steam Next Fest Demo and Best-of Developer AMA!

We have a playable demo during the Steam Next Fest from today, February 23rd, up until March 2nd. This comes following a successful Closed Beta period last year and nearly a decade since the previous game, Sudden Strike 4, released in 2017.

Generals, prepare to fall in line and command the forces of two out of the three factions across two specially selected missions, “Attack on Monte Cassino” (Western Allies) and “Defence of Sevastopol” (Soviets) – the final game will also include the ability to play as the Axis forces. These two missions are just a taste of the full game, which will include a massive 25-missions across the three faction campaigns, ranging from icy tundra to the blistering heat of Northern Africa. At launch, the full game will feature 25 missions, multiplayer modes, along with additional balancing, and improvements not present in this demo.

Check out the demo for Sudden Strike 5 now, exclusively on Steam Next Fest until March 2nd. The team at Kalypso will be showcasing the demo live at 4 pm BST on the Kalypso Media YouTube channel, and if you missed the AMA past week, the Q&A from Kite Games is available on the Steam forum.

The full game will launch later this year across PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation®5, and will bring with it more than 300 unique units and even more tactical possibilities.

Best-of Developer AMA

As we held our first ever Developer AMA last week, we have compiled some of our favorite questions for you below:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von @mechadebzilla:

What was your highest high and lowest low during production? Give us a gritty dev war story. (@mechadebzilla from Youtube)

One of the lows was a major construction project right next to our office. The neighboring building was literally being torn apart while we were in full production. The noise was often unbearable, and at one point the vibrations were so strong that the tiling in our kitchen and dining area cracked across the entire space. It felt almost like a real battlefield right in the middle of the team’s lunch break. 🙂

As for the highs, it was seeing Sudden Strike 5 finally come together at scale. Around the vertical slice milestone, we shipped our first missions that not only featured large maps and lots of units, but also offered multiple viable tactical approaches, which is one of the core design pillars of the game.

On top of that, attending Gamescom and showing the game for the first time was really fulfilling for us as a team. Meeting with players and media who had a love for the series and showcasing our new approach really helped validate our hopes for SUS5.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Karma is Toxic:

What is the biggest learning from Sudden Strike 4 to 5? (Karma is Toxic from Steam Forums)

With Sudden Strike 5 we pushed for larger battlefields, bigger maps, more units, and more open-ended missions compared to Sudden Strike 4. Based on our experience, we initially assumed this would be a fairly straightforward evolution. It wasn’t. Increasing the scale while keeping the game playable, readable, and responsive turned out to be the core challenge of the project. It affected almost every aspect of development from mission and level design to unit movement, behavior, visibility, controls, and overall performance. Striking the right balance between scale and playability has been one of the central lessons shaping SUS5.

It especially impacted our approach to mission design. In SUS4 the missions were more heavily scripted, so the experience was by and large the same for every player. But with a wider, more sandbox approach to gameplay, we had to reevaluate how we designed and implemented missions to be fun and engaging while acknowledging that each player would approach the game in different ways with different preferences.

Ursprünglich geschrieben von panzerthings:

Will the campaign missions have a large amount of units and more freedom of approaches to complete the objectives? Sudden Strike 1 & 2 had so little hand holding with just instructions to accomplish as the gamer saw fit. (panzerthings from Steam)

Compared to Sudden Strike 4, which was smaller in scale and more linear in mission structure, Sudden Strike 5 deliberately moves back toward the classic Sudden Strike design philosophy.

Campaign missions feature larger battlefields, more units, and significantly more freedom in how objectives can be completed. In most missions there are multiple viable approaches, and players are given a variety of tools rather than a single “intended” solution. Our approach towards mission design has been to have minimal ‘main’ objectives required to complete the mission, but with a multitude of options for how to approach those goals. At its core, we designed the game around player agency as one of the key shifts from Sudden Strike 4 to Sudden Strike 5, inspired directly by the feel of Sudden Strike and Sudden Strike 2.

Originally posted by The Summer Son:

What new exciting combat or supply mechanics do you have for us? (The Summer Son from Steam)

We strongly felt that SUS4’s strongest aspect was its tactical combat, where positioning and strategic reactions to the enemy was what made its combat so compelling. In that sense, we didn’t want to rework that core experience too much since it would risk breaking the thing that players enjoyed the most.

Instead we tried to approach SUS5 with a more evolutionary approach towards its combat mechanics, adding in deeper layers or improvements that would enhance that overall gameplay experience. One key example in this regard regards unit detection, which ultimately has not changed all that much from SUS4 but has been refined to make it more player-friendly. Now it is more clear when a unit is detected, by whom they were detected and why. Previously it was a frustration to try to be sneaking around for reconnaissance, only to end up in combat suddenly.

Perhaps the biggest combat ‘change’ is the fact that we’ve had to develop an AI system that allows us to implement a reactive enemy. In SUS4 everything was scripted, so it always played out the same way. In SUS5, the AI reacts to the situational context of the battlefield, and that has added a big strategic shift in how the player needs to approach missions.

As an interesting aside, however, we actually did experiment with overhauling the supply mechanics and even had a prototype of a ‘supply line’ mechanic with the idea of having the player manage the flow of supplies to wherever the combat was on-going. Despite the initial interest in the concept, once we had it up and running we found it actually didn’t really work for the kind of game we’re making and decided to ditch it.

You can find more replies like these over in the full AMA thread here!