We’ve decided to push out one last alpha! Welcome to Alpha 0.9 starting on Wednesday January 17th at 18:00 GMT. We’ll be using 4 Competitive Maps; Derailed, Coastal, Manorhouse_V2 and Liberation! In the Arcade you’ll be able to play all those maps and ‘Battery’.
Alpha 0.8 was the big update in alpha that saw us immensely improve Battalion. This update is more about testing and stabilisation for beta, where we’ll be testing the game on a larger scale and attempting to max out our servers with thousands of people playing.
Alpha 0.9 will be running tonight, Wednesday January 17th starting at 18:00 GMT
We’ve been at the studio working very late into the night from early in the morning for a long time now, but it’s meant we can do things like this and test the alpha one more time.
Introduction to Alpha 0.9
Changelist
Fixes & Technical Improvements
+ Improvement: Minor Improvements to Hitboxes, improved accuracy of hitboxes to character model
+ Improvement: Interpolation improvements to netcode
~ Fix: Fire button while holding shift now functions correctly
~ Fix: Two players choosing the same card from team stack will no longer result in one player spawning without a weapon
~ Fix: Players won’t disappear beneath floor when prone glitching
~ Improvement: You can now bind jump to scroll wheel
~ Fix: Hold prone/crouch now functions correctly. Not interfered by other key ‘holds’
~ Fix/Improvement: ‘Battery’ map performance issues rectified. Players should receive great performance on Battery
~ Fix/Improvement: Matchmaking changes, players should have considerably less issues finding a game this alpha
~ Fix: Some of Coastal’s lighting errors have been fixed, but not all
Gameplay Tweaks
+ New Kar98k Sound
+ New Kar98s Sound
+ New Trenchgun Sound
+ New Springfield Sound
+ New background ambience with focus on not distracting from gameplay
~ Derailed lighting improvements focusing on brightness and vision
~ Derailed cinema overhaul and redesign
~ Coastal glitch spot fixes and collision improvements
~ Coastal visual improvements/color changes
~ Coastal design improvements
New Kar98k Sound
Being one of the most exciting and skilful weapons in the game. We needed to give it the makeover it deserves, the kar98k hereby referred to as the ‘boomstick’ will echo throughout the map. We can’t wait to see the epic fragmovies that are born from this weapon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSCIMCtoqnE&feature=youtu.be
New Kar98s Sound
A sniper, needs to sound like a sniper. Despite technically being the same weapon as the kar98k, we needed to give the sniper more of a boom so that players anywhere in the map can identify the weapon that’s being used. This has been a goal for us for many months, make weapons easier to distinguish through audio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUdAJDngqs4
New Trenchgun Sound
Everybody loves a punchy shotgun feeling. We decided that the shotgun needed to sound more powerful. It’s arguably one of the best guns in the game as players still struggle to understand how they should be using it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISSK3_hyFbg
Derailed cinema updates and lighting improvements
Derailed has had a lot of attention over the last few weeks. It’s one of the more strat based, team focused maps we have. Which makes it a little difficult to play in alpha until a meta has developed. We’ve given it even more improvements including a visibility pass with nice bright lighting. As well as giving the Germans more options to defend the cinema from AND we’ve made the whole cinema much more readable than before. Let us know what you think!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBomGJWs6Hs&feature=youtu.be
Coastal Update
Coastal is currently playing very well, it’s the most open map we have, but we felt that it needed a bit more visual identity and we wanted to make it feel like more of a seaside town. So we’ve thrown out some of the grey and gone with some nice colourful seafront buildings! We’ve also added a new route to rotate between bombsites and we’ve added a new entrance to B Bombsite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRY-UAqp__Q&feature=youtu.be
There’s a lot of updates here and we’ll have another update for ‘What to expect in beta’ tomorrow.
Twitch Q&A with Studio Lead Joe “Brammertron” Brammer
Tomorrow our Studio Lead will be running a 1 hour livestream from 20:30 until 21:30 GMT at www.twitch.tv/Brammertron
He’ll be giving away some codes for beta and answering as many questions as possible about the future of Battalion 1944.