Thank you for a nostalgia filled beta weekend! Despite beta bugs, our players were gracious, understanding, and supportive of Battalion's bright future!
Battalion 1944 is coming to Early Access on February 1st 2018 at 17:00 GMT we hope to see you all there day one!
If you enjoyed beta and buy the game on day 1, please leave us a review and help get Battalion to the front of Steam!
Beta Overview
Overall the beta was a huge success! We were able to test match making with large numbers and expose the issues. Our opinion is bugs are a good thing, because it means we can fix them. We cant fix things we can’t see. There were definitely issues, but we’d like to remind everyone that this is an early access game and to remember ANY game at release, not just early access games. As far as Battalion’s stability goes, it was very good for an early access game. We’re now committed to preparing for our first major update: The Stability Update. You can read more about our roadmap here: www.battaliongame.com
We saw some incredible fragmovies over the weekend, and we’ll be regularly sharing some of our favourites in our Steam Updates. Along with weekly highlights from HattonGames!
Beta Highlights
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sdOY0OUNEo
Brammertron’s favourite; Elwzoy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8GPdBZ4uO4
And finally, congratulations to “DRUNKKZ3” for being the highest competitively ranked player on Sunday, when we tested our elo rankings. He played an impressive 25 games in just a few hours!
Now it’s time for some updates and changes we’ve made based on the feedback from beta players.
UPDATES
M1 Carbine – Ironsight Update
As usual, we debated this change internally before we even reached beta. We wanted to see how the players felt about the M1 Carbine before we went ahead and made changes. Players often said they found the default classes powerful with a high skill ceiling however, the ironsight on the M1 Carbine was regularly commented on as being invasive and ‘in the way’. It wasn’t a lot of work to make that change so this will be in for Early Access
Coastal – Lamppost Jump Balance
We all love a good jump spot, so we didn’t want to remove this one that players found. However, we did want to make it more fair. We’ve removed the first tree, so that players are not shooting through a tree. We’ve also removed the railings from the top of the arch, making the player in the jump spot much more visible than before. The route you take to get on top of the lamppost is the same, but now you’ll be more exposed and visible than you were before. Do you think this is a good compromise?
Wartide – Future plans and Intentions
We’re very aware that Wartide is needs tweaking. Our biggest issue with Wartide is that it is a negatively progressing system meaning; you are always losing cards instead of a positively progressing system like Counter Strike where you are constantly being rewarded. You are not the first to identify these issues; luckily, we anticipated balancing issues back in November and began work on designing improvements to the mode. Yesterday on the Monday following the beta we made the decision to pursue our improvements. Whilst we aren’t prepared to disclose what they are yet, we are happy to say that it is a big rework of Wartide, but the core value of team shared economy and physical pickups will remain in the mode. However, there are many juicy details we will be holding back until our first major update…
It’s important to mention that we NEED people playing the mode in its current state so that we can gather the data and balance what we currently have. The additions will come in due time, however we need to make sure we see the positives and negatives of the existing system playout, before we make any large changes, the same way any major studio would. Rest assured, the devs are on it.
We saw a huge amount of people play the game over the weekend. First and foremost, we’d like to apologize for underestimating how many people would want to play the game. Battalion is a lot bigger than we’d expected, which is an AWESOME problem to have! But we’d like to explain some of the matchmaking issues below and how we intend to fix them, just to keep the community in the loop!
Issues; be aware that most studios don’t acknowledge issues publicly. We’re doing this to let you know that we are making improvements and keep the community in the loop. We ask you remain patient with us as we work towards improving the game
Players not accepting matches
25% of the time, when a player alt-tabs back into Battalion during an accept period, the accept button will not show. Resulting in players not being able to hit accept. We are working to fix this
Not enough servers
We have two types of servers, that Bulkhead and Square Enix Collective pay for. Bare Metal & Cloud based servers. The bare metal servers are literally sitting there, ready to go. However cloud based servers have to be requested from our server provider ‘Multiplay’. These cloud based servers can take sometimes up to 10 minutes to allocate! (Usually 3-6 minutes) However, during beta we saw issues meaning they weren’t correctly being allocated. Not only have we fixed this, we have also improved the way we allocate servers and we have also ordered more bare metal servers, so that players won’t have to wait to be assigned servers, EXCEPT during peak times. Once the game settles, we'll be able to predict exactly how many servers we'll need during peak times.
Server locations
Currently, our match making does not detect the best location for all players in the match. It picks a server and that is it. This is something we are working on, but it takes time and we wanted to get the game in players hands before we continue work on improving server detection. Currently our EU Servers will be based in Luxembourg, a central location for Europe. While the US will have one location in in West, Central, and East. We’re also adding servers in new regions, this will be announced soon. Server locations will be improved and is only a temporary measure as we roll out Battalion improvements over the next few months.
So thank you for continuing to support us, we're actively working on improving all aspects of the game, yes. Including animations!
See you on February 1st!