CBT Results Are In: Here's What's Next

Survivors,

The Closed Beta gave us the largest pile of player feedback in the game's history.

We've now finished working through the survey responses, videos, streams, Discord, and Steam comments, and as promised, we want to share the results with the people who created them: you.

Whether you fought your first zombie this beta or you've been breaking our builds since Pre-Alpha, we thank you. A test at this scale tells us things no internal playtest ever could, and every one of these numbers exists because you took the time to answer honestly.

A special shout-out goes to our Core Group testers. The candid, detailed feedback you gave us between tests drove many of the changes that made these Closed Beta results possible — thank you for helping us get here.

•    67,000+ players took part in the Closed Beta!

•    30% of the players were from the USA, 11% from Germany, and 7% from the UK—home of Birmingham!

•    1,412 peak concurrent players without co-op!

•    Sign-ups came from all seven continents. Yes, that includes Antarctica!

•    2,698 survey responses were completed. 2,345 by first-timers, 353 from veterans of earlier tests!

•    99% of respondents wanted to be invited back!

On top of that, an enormous amount of YouTube and Twitch coverage brought the game to audiences far beyond our own channels ever could. We've collected some of our favorite videos and streams at the end of this post. They deserve your views.

Do Players See Our Vision and Like It?

Every survey we run asks you to grade the game from 0 to 10 across the same set of categories, which lets us track progress test over test. When we asked how much fun the game is overall, we leaped to our highest score yet.

It wasn't just fun. When asked whether “Medieval Zombie Survival Simulator with Physics” describes the game you actually played, you gave us an 8.61 with 57% of you rating it a 9 or 10. And after playing, 70% of you said your expectations for the game went up, while only 4% said they dropped. The vision and the game are speaking the same language.

Our testers — returning and new — both saw high potential in the game, scoring it 8.6. And across nearly every gameplay category, returning testers rated the game higher than first-timers. We understand this to mean that all the changes and improvements we’ve made with player feedback have made an impact and we’re headed in the right direction.

Here's how the key categories have tracked across all five tests:

Combat and survival remain at the bottom of the table, and we're not going to spin that. Combat did post its best score to date, but both systems clearly still have the furthest to go, and your feedback tells us exactly where.

Our presentation categories — UI, controls, animations — all improved. But just like combat and survival, your feedback made clear there's still more work to do.

Your Feedback

Beyond the scores, we pored over the open-text responses. When we asked what content you hope to see in the final product, here's how your requests broke down:

Co-op was the single biggest request. Base building, save system, key binding rounded out your biggest wishes.

Apart from new content requests, we received a lot of feedback on improvements you'd like to see.

Many felt combat was repetitive — often due to the limited animation of always swinging the weapon in one direction. Hunger/thirst imbalance (stamina was mentioned separately, but less often) was a top complaint back in our Core Test, and while we saw far fewer complaints about it this time, it's still one of the most cited issues. Inventory management also came up a lot, with many of you describing it as chaotic and in need of a rework.

Where We Go From Here

Based on all the feedback we received, we held a series of meetings to re-organize our development roadmap. The long and short of it is: we are planning to address most of the requests we have received for the Early Access release, except for some very specific feedback that doesn’t fit with the game’s core  design philosophy.

For the near future, our next test build will focus on implementing the save system and co-op. Combat, physics, survival features, and control improvements will all be worked on throughout the development milestones, and we will run frequent tests to ensure the improvements hold up.

We will have key rebinding, and general UI/UX improvement by Early Access at the latest.

Combat impact, hunger/thirst tuning, and depth work on the survival systems will continue as we work on new features.

Now, about base building. Our initial vision did not include wholly new constructions — just fortifications of existing dwellings. There is an active debate within the studio about how far we should take this feature, so stay tuned.

Besides the above top requests, we are working on many other features for Early Access launch, such as:

·        Character customization

·        New characters

·        More weapons

·        New zombies

·        More cooking recipes

·        Expanded farming and livestock

·        Backpack system

·        Trap building

·        Controller support

·        And more

We have a lot we want to add to Birmingham to make it the best survival sandbox possible, and we will give it our best to ready everything by Early Access. We will continue to share what we are working on via dev logs and dev update videos.

Thanks again for testing an unfinished game and telling us the unvarnished truth about it. That honesty is the most valuable resource a dev team can have.

Until the next test,

-ODS Team

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Creator Coverage

Our thanks to all the creators, big and small, who played our Closed Beta. It was extremely helpful for us to watch how you play and how you feel about the experience on our screens.

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