After this past weekend's preview of Amalfi, we are more excited than ever about the future for Days of War!
In the last week we have made some directional adjustments to DoW’s gameplay and tested our new map. In this post we want to explain some of our learnings and rationale behind the direction of the game.
When we set out to make Days of War we had a very ambitious goal of pulling influence from our favorite classic WW2 shooters (DoD, CoD, MOHAA, ET). Our hope was that we could pull the best aspects from each of these shooters to make a game that everyone can enjoy. We took influence from DoD's recoil and flag capture, CoDs ADS and fluidity, MOHAAs cinematic battles, and ET's classes and objective based multiplayer.
Detailing what has worked and what hasn’t would be a much longer post, so today we want to focus on two aspects we feel are in direct conflict with each other, recoil and ADS.
About ADS
We love the penalty of high recoil in games like DoD/CS that require you to control your gun as you fire. It creates a high skill ceiling that is rewarding to master. Going forward we want to continue to devote attention to make sure our recoil is fun to master and less random.
We also like games with ADS and feel it is practically a standard feature for a modern shooter. We’ve had ADS since day 1 in Alpha and have seen several iterations of it while we tried to hybridize high recoil and ADS.
We had versions that were closer to CoD style ADS which slowed the game down too much by encouraging people to sit and hold, and we had superficial versions which were effectively only a zoom in.
But we never got to a place we were totally happy with, and we think that having ADS created confusion about what our game was. There are many games, both realistic and arcade that rely heavily on the ADS mechanic, the most notable being the upcoming CoD WW2.
As a small studio, we need to offer something unique and think we are better positioned if we focus on recoil being the area we add depth to the game instead of ADS. We personally enjoy this style more and think the continued popularity of CSGO is a good indicator that this can still have appeal today.
We should note this doesn't prevent us from offering a simple zoom only ADS for all weapons as a custom server setting sometime after release of the game. But we are going to establish our core gameplay without it.
The Identity of the game
We’ve learned a ton from Early Access, via a lot of trial, error and experimentation but this past weekend we got an awesome glimpse of the game that Days of War can be!
We made these gameplay changes in advance of previewing Amalfi because we feel the identity of our game is mainly defined by the movement, gunplay, and map/art design.
Our most recent gameplay changes combined with our new map are the closest we have come to the game we want to deliver. We need to continue to add more maps in this style, refine and balance the gameplay in this new direction, and polish tons of other things, but in a few months this game is going to look and feel VERY different, and we believe that is a great thing and worth the wait.
Free Weekend and New Map
We announced last week that we would hold a free weekend for Days of War and we got a lot feedback from players who believe a free weekend would be too premature. After playing this past weekend and seeing how close we are to a much more fun game, we’ve decided we wholeheartedly agree.
We are going to postpone the free weekend and wait until we have more content that reflects the identity of the game and will present Days of War in a much stronger light.
The release of Amalfi is still TBD, but if you want to check it out we recommend watching this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv2XKC4VLdw
We've got a busy couple months ahead of us but we cannot wait to deliver on this vision for the game.
-Driven Arts