Hello everyone,
We were glad to see so many of you tuned in to see the panel and disheartened to hear (only as it ended) that the stream was not working throughout. We were then later informed by show staff the the cause of the technical issue was the recording hardware itself (the camera) and thus no archive footage of the panel exists. We will be doing our best to convey all the information covered via this post.
We started with a short summary of the franchise history and the goals of the game itself for anybody in the crowd who may have been kidnapped by their friends and family and dragged along to come see us. For the purpose of this post we are going to assume you know that much!
Launch Content:
We are shipping a bit later this year with 34+ weapons and 13+ variations of those weapons or ammo options. You will be able to use them across three game types: Supremacy (open ended 64 player territorial control), Territories (Both large and small more linear attack and defence maps), and Skirmish (our close quarters competitive gametype, where both teams have 2 minutes to jockey for position before respawning stops!).
These Modes can be played on these maps:
SU - Song Be, An Lao Valley
TE - Cu Chi, Compound, Firebase, Hill 937, Hue City
SK - Compound, Firebase, Jungle Camp
This also comes along with a stock set of unlockable cosmetic content for player characters, as well as the full game SDK for modders and Steam Workshop support so players have a place to find them (some modders are already in there now helping us beta those!). And of course (which will soon be added into a beta wave) new American and Vietnamese voice overs for battle chatter and the announcer/commander voice.
And let us not forget the three helicopters, the iconic Huey, Cobra and Loach round out or vehicle set for launch.
Updated Engine Tech
Our engine team has been hard at work enhancing the engine with the following items:
- DX 11 - Performance improvements, more jungle, other improvements to follow (possibly post launch)
- 64 bit - Higher memory budget for increased resolution and more textures
- Easy Anti Cheat - Our new anti cheat partner which will supplement Valve Anti Cheat
- WWise - New Audio middleware to create a better sounding game (with less performance hits)
The Beta So Far - Some Details
There have been over 120k applicants and we’ve invited over 15k of them into the beta waves so far (we’ve had 5). Many of them have been very helpful in providing feedback and filling out our beta wave survey. 89% are franchise vets (who we continue to thank for their interest in our games!).
During the beta wave surveys we’ve tracked just about every gameplay system we’ve touched, many of them over multiple beta waves as we’ve either improved the responses or added more detailed questioning to get to the root of players feedback (such as on mantling which we tracked for 3 waves - we expect it to be much better in 6 now!).
Overall player reported enjoyment has been steadily tracking upwards in each wave both in two categories:
- Was this wave an improvement over the last?
- How was your overall enjoyment?
And the next wave (6) starts March 15th with many new keys being sent out (much more than previous waves)!
Forum/Steam/Discord Q & A
We took questions from the floor, but we also had written down several questions over the past week from many of you out there on the internet! Due to amount and detail we are going to split this off into its own separate post.
Audio
Watson Wu, our recording artist we use for many of our current weapon audio projects posted a behind the scenes look at what goes into getting weapon sounds (and we showed it at the panel as well!). If you missed it check it out here:
Click to see video
And the last thing we want to mention is that we are gearing up to send out 15,000 new beta keys tomorrow as we kick off Closed Beta Wave 6. We are still working to compile the changelog and hope to have it up as we go live tomorrow!