Hi Hurtworldians,
For week 3 of our experimental builds series we are focusing on integrating phase one of the new blueprint / research / fabrication system into the survival progression.
We're really excited to start rolling out these changes, as this is really the meat and potatoes of what we've been working on over the last few months. Content is still very rough around the edges, but its definitely starting to take shape.
These systems fundamentally change the way you gain loot. Removing most of the monolythic list of gear and equipment recipes from the workbench, instead giving you constant randomly rolled loot drops from things in the world.
Instead of spending all you have on a single item that can be lost in an instant, we shift some of that value to machines inside your base. Most of the cost of an item is consumed when "Researching" a blueprint you've found, which then gives you the ability to product multiple copies of the researched item for a low cost.
The Loot Hunt
Very rarely will 2 pieces of gear be identical. When hunting in the world, you will find lots of hardcases that contain blueprints. Sifting through these to find the optimal gear before deciding on which item to invest the research costs in is critical, and super addictive.
Better Balanced Full Loot
Killing people and not getting their gear sucks. Getting killed and losing that item you spent days working towards sucks more. Our hope is that the research / fabrication system avoids both these situations.
With durability, no item lasts forever. But with the ability to re-craft a limited amount of your damaged or lost items for a small cost, we can put an upper cap on how much you risk / lose when out in the world.
On the other hand, robbing a player for their gear nets you... all their gear. No more running around with 0 infamy with immunity. Despite the gear only lasting as long as its durability holds out, if you manage to take down a player with much stronger gear than you, it will give you a massive boost in progression in both PVE and PVP. The only downside is that once the gear is broken / lost you can't recraft it until you steal another set or invest in the research costs yourself.
Research Raiding
Your research might be safe if you get killed in the world, but it still lives in your base. Successfully raid a base, with it you can take their fabrication machines and research investment. More reason to make sure those airlocks are air tight.
Diemensland V2
We decided to bring Diemensland into ItemV2 this week so we could spend more time on the progression and mechanics. We did however give it a decent rework to keep things interesting, lots of new stuff to explore!
This is also a good chance to do some more performance testing, as generally the graphical load of Diemensland hasn't changed from the master branch, it allows us to isolate perf losses from ItemV2 that aren't map specific. Please let us know on the forums how your performance compares to the master branch in Diemensland.
Other Experiments
A major point of conflict since our first closed alpha has been bunnyhopping. You either love it or hate it. I put it in intentionally as a big fanboy of the Q3 engine and CS Surf / BHop maps. I love how it adds a very high skill cieling to PVP.
That said, we've been doing a lot of work on taking our gunplay to the next level. I am starting to feel that maybe the insane agility that our character controller has is limiting what we can do as a shooter. In this experimental build I have disabled bunny hopping and slightly reduced the jump height.
This is by no means a permanent thing, as we are toying with the formula a lot, I feel its a good place to see how things feel without it. Either way its trivial to add a console setting for it in the long run. But like all console settings, we need to balance the game towards a standard config.
Happy hunting.