Feedback & Moving Forward
Hello everyone. Today I want to talk to you about the steps we are taking as we approach our second closed beta weekend. For those who may not be fully up to date or just joining us, our first beta weekend ended and we took feedback (a survey completed by over 600 players) from all those who participated. In the meantime we have continued to work on the core elements of the game as well as dissect that feedback and turn it into actionable tasks, some of which has been incorporated into what will be our next upcoming Closed Beta weekend.
You can read about that initial feedback here (http://forums.tripwireinteractive.co...d-beta-round-1) in Alan’s post. So let’s talk about a few more of these and what is next. And before you ask for ALL the detail, we’ll be doing more, with published change-lists and other info as we go.
Weapons
On the weapon front, we’re starting to use a bunch of stats, so we can check out the way hits and damage are working out. We’re amending the sway mechanics and amounts in general, plus addressing comments made on individual weapons, For instance, reducing/smoothing the recoil on the AK models, sanity-checking the damage on the shotties at range, throwing distance on grenades, as well as recoil on the Flamethrower and machine guns. Plus a bunch of other stuff, obviously. We’re aiming to have a new take on the damage amounts in place too.
Mantling/Deployment
We’re going to be working on this all the way through the beta phase, obviously. Two main parts to that - looking for areas in code that are bugged, plus looking across the maps and art for areas that cause problems. We’ll document those issues for the benefit of future community mappers, as well.
Performance Improvements
We also believe we’ve identified the cause of the performance drops we were seeing in the territory map Hue City during the Alpha and believe that we have that issue addressed (but we’ll need the next beta wave to be fully confident about it). Keep in mind this isn’t a fix for all noted performance issues, and overall this will be an ongoing step to keep improving as we move through the beta waves.
New Invites and next round of beta
Look out for invites to the next wave to begin going out soon! Those who have already participated in the beta will retain access and many new keys will be sent out into the wild. With the volume of feedback from the first wave, it may take us another week or so - we want to get to the point where there are enough significant changes completed, rather than a whole bunch of changes/updates “in progress”.
A few more things
We are continuing to bring our audio online and replace many of the placeholders currently used in game. This will not be completed by the next beta but the next pass of audio will be in play. Our goal is to bring all the audio to a base level that fits together before we start picking it apart looking for specific areas of improvement. By the time the next beta starts we believe we will have the base weapons pass complete along with commander abilities (with the caveat that not all weapon sounds will be done such as tails and certain modifiers based on firing location).
We also have integrated the tool we use with Killing Floor 2 called BugSplat. This will allow us to better track crashes users may be having such as understanding the volume and frequency of the crash, specific users it may be affecting and with luck pointers in the right direction of why.