I'm back from my lightning trip "home" to Iceland, which consisted of getting to know a lot of people intimately with plastic gloves in security and immigration, then meeting my son and daughter, dad's 60th birthday and then more plastic glove experiences. On the way home, you pervert.
I was hoping Hekla would erupt and ground all flights to extend my vacation a little bit but then thought that might be a little selfish of me. Besides, plastic gloves.
Anywho, onto the important things to make sure you know we're still here fixing, improving and expanding.
First off, new patch is in final testing today. Cross your tentacles as we fire off a candidate build today because it would mean a patch before the weekend. Patch notes are being built and you'll notice balancing, fixes, overall more wargear, fixes, quality of life improvements, fixes and just general improvements. No one big huge thing as that's saved for the monthly updates. Well, with some exceptions.
Which brings me to the October focus of the team, who moved off this fix patch a while ago when it went into stabilization and testing and started work on the next fix patch. That's how we do it here.
We have a focus and we try to achieve as much as we can within those categories. We also have a theme for the big monthly updates but generally, our monthly focus is set based on feedback and the state of the game and what needs fixing. That's why we can't tell you exactly what's happening in November quite yet. The highlights for October, which are not all inclusive, are:
• Store, Supply Crate and Character Progression: More cheap wargear, bundles and even some free stuff for customization. This is inline with our policy of not being pay to win. With the lack and mix of wargear available from these 3 sources, some of them incorrectly set, you can easily get that perception. This also means balancing the contents of the above and what comes out of these 3 respective channels. This work never ends.
• Campaigns: This is the system which works with the World Map and ties everything together. Faction goals. Personal goals. Guild goals. PVE goals. They then tie into the World Wap and you'll see these be added progressively over time. It's probably the feature we cried the most about not being ready at launch but it's first iteration is just around the corner.
• Balancing: Game balancing between factions, weapons and wargear. This never ends, as we continue deploying in every patch more balancing to combat.
• Menu Flow: Inventory screen, store vs loadout flow, etc. making it all more easy, intuitive and clear. While we usually call this "Quality of life" the focus is on the menu flow right now as a part of that.
• Eldar and Orks animation polish: More polish on them. We got those animations late and we're polishing them more along with starting work on uhm ... well, we'll talk about that on Twitch on Friday 2PM EST.
• Update: Performance and optimiziations. As it wasn't entirely clear, fixing includes fixes to performance and optimizations. Usually performance bottlenecks are due to bugs or inefficient systems. This is a very high priority for us at any time. However, until Epic and AMD get fully together and make Unreal Engine 4 run like a dream, we do our own workarounds. We use Unreal Engine 4.12, will update further (4.13 is already out) and the last 3 versions have included work on AMD/ATI. We're on this. LAMF.
And an update to the update on performance and optimizations. Lag can manifest itself anywhere, and regional servers are part of that solution. There are EU servers live right now but it entirely depends on what matches are running there. If you're Eldar and there isn't an open Eldar game, you are put on a US server.
We're working on this as part of our performance improvements. We also have Australia and Singapore coming in, but for it to work properly, there are changes going to happen, to the world map etc. which makes it easier to join a match close to you. At least, that's the plan.
- end updates.
And of course, always fixing. That's it for now from us, as we continue to work towards our dreams. I believe some of them we have in common. We'll see.
Ave, crusaders.
Nathanstillabitjetlagged