Hi everyone!
We want to thank you for an absolutely huge weekend. We had an enormous number of people both jump into the game, and then support the game further by buying a copy! To those new players, we want to say welcome, and to the veterans - we want to say thank you for taking to the front lines to give a guiding hand to newcomers.
Hell Let Loose is very much a work in progress. As a dev team, we love adding content, fixing bugs, overhauling systems and working to bring the game to the highest level of quality that we can. We hope that over the course of our Early Access you’ll see significant steps forward in each of these areas and we’re looking forward to having you join on the journey with us.
Reflections on Omaha Beach and Offensive Mode
We’ve been reading a lot of feedback and feel that Offensive mode has brought a great new set of tactical and strategic challenges, but that it definitely needs to be polished. We collate large amounts of feedback and pair it with meta-data to give us a good picture of win rates and different aspects of how the mode is performing (we’re also playing in there with you!).
We want to share our reflections with you now:
- The initial beach experience needs to be much more fraught and dangerous for the US forces. Currently the first beach sectors are captured very quickly - due to an abundance of US armor and the sheer breadth of the beach itself. This is leading to it being easy to push the beach, as well as silent and generally lacking the iconic atmosphere you expect.
- It is very unsatisfying to push the enemy all the way back to the final sector row and then lose the game as the US forces.
- Driving a tank out of bounds in Offensive mode punishes you far too quickly - causing a loss of armor that could be avoided if the timers were more generous.
- It is frustrating as US forces to not be able to push more than one sector in - in order to take down crucial Garrisons and OPs behind the boundary.
We’ve already implemented tweaks that deal with many of these issues and they’ll be applied the next time we update. We’re using our time in Early Access to really hone in on the key desired experience for both Warfare and Offensive. Tied to these is the resource metagame, role of the Commander and then each role beneath the Commander. As the game develops, you’ll see each role evolve and be fleshed out in functionality and their place on the battlefield.
Later in Early Access we’ll be introducing the Campaign metagame, in which both Offensive mode and Warfare will sit. Before then, it’s crucial that we make sure both game-modes are performing as intended.
General Feedback
- A plethora of bugs, crashes and bad optimisation caused issues for players on lower end machines or specific graphics cards or CPUs. These are all aspects that we’re working hard to fix. Optimisation will be an ongoing thing. Many of our assets are now streamlined and becoming increasingly optimised - but we’ll be doing a large optimisation push for our release from EA.
- The experience/progression bug is incredibly frustrating for obvious reasons. Fortunately, our QA team were able to jump in over the weekend and play a large number of full population games back to back in order to reproduce it. This is near the top of our list for a fix.
- Sound attenuation distances were too low and too quiet. In the push to move to the upgraded audio engine, we’ve redesigned our assets and this was an unfortunate side effect. You’ll see a significant fix for this in the next time we update the game. We’ve also worked specifically on the assets for the M1919 and the MG42. We feel they need improvement and you’ll be able to hear the difference in the next time we update.
Our FPP and TPP animation is possibly our weakest area now - we animations feeling overly stiff and lacking fluidity. We are working extremely hard to bring you our Version 2 animation overhaul. This is made up of three parts:
1. New photoreal hands, including customisation appropriate hands/sleeves (ie. wearing the winter uniform will mean your FPP hands will be gloved and have the winter sleeves).
2. IK-enabled procedural animations. This covers a large number of nuances that go into the character of the gunplay. We now have procedural recoil per calibre, animated stance shifting, animated ADS, animated leaning, endless procedural sprints, the ability to blend multiple animations at once (crouch, reload and sprint) and much, much more. The experience now feels like it sits amongst the very best examples in the FPS market and we’re very excited to show you how that will perform closer to the release date. We feel it will be one of the most significant graphical and experience overhauls in the life of Hell Let Loose. Finally, the last major benefit of this system is that it will make our inclusion of new weapons much faster and of a much more consistent quality.
3. Motion-captured full body TPP animations. These bring a level of realism to the player movement that feels far more fluid than what is currently in the game. In addition to this, the system upgrade means that feet now adjust to the surface, the body bends to match the ground when prone and we’re able to blend many animations all concurrently. We feel that this will finalise the TPP experience. Like the FPP overhaul, this also means that adding new weapons is a very painless affair compared to our current system.
Additional features
There are hundreds of these - from non-verbal comms, radial menus, better handling of solo-tanking, new weapons (flamers and trench guns anyone?), new maps, new weather conditions, new vehicles, new customisation options and all the rest. We’ve got a huge amount of content in the works that we’re very, very excited to show you.
Speaking of content...
Next week we’re proud to bring you a dev briefing on our next map: Sainte-Mère-Église.
Sainte-Mère-Église is the first large-scale urban map to be introduced to Hell Let Loose and features giant urban battles through backyards, town streets and the famous church and church square. Defenders and attackers in Warfare will begin in the countryside and push into the town in the middle of the map for intense street-to-street combat. Initially, we will be offering Offensive mode that position the Germans as the attackers - as they push in to reclaim the recently captured town.
Sainte-Mère-Église will be coming soon in Update 4 with Warfare and Offensive mode, along with a large number of bug fixes, sound fixes, sound upgrades, Offensive mode tweaks and all new features that we’ll unpack in a dev briefing closer to its launch.
See you on the front line!