Hey everyone,
Welcome to Developer Briefing #50! This week we’re taking the time to give you a state of the union of development on Hell Let Loose, as well as update our Roadmap.
The New Roadmap
The Next Steps - Max, Lead Developer
As developers, we feel that absolute honesty is always the best way to go about communicating the positives and negatives of game development.
We’ve been fortunate to discover and fix the three most significant issues plaguing the game, in addition to many other fixes (including stopping the Germans from waiting right on the beach in Omaha) and feature implementations - Unless there are any surprise issues these will go live in a patch next week.
In regards to Update 4, our initial plan was to release it (containing Sainte-Mère-Église) at the end of October, but concerns around optimisation lead us to push it back - with an adjusted release date of the 28th of November, which has since been pushed back to December, for reasons we'll explain in this post.
This delay also fitted well with our urgent push to discover and reproduce several significant issues that players have been experiencing, namely: experience accumulation bugs, server crashes and server queuing malfunctions.
The way our team works is that we’re able to work on many different aspects of the game at once. This includes mapping. While Sainte-Mère-Église was delayed, this did not knock on and cause issues on our other maps under development. It also did not hinder any other progress across the title - we’re actually in the unusual position where we’re now having content pile up ready for testing - a situation that means we’ll be figuring out how best to QA it as fast as possible.
A note on our development process
Our philosophy during Early Access is that all aspects of the game are truly “in development”. It means that as we push forward and create new techniques and systems, we plan ways to go back and address legacy issues in older maps. To that end, by the time we leave Early Access we’ll have polished and upgraded all maps available to a consistent quality and optimisation level across the board. To that end, many players will know that our earliest maps are the ones that need the most work.
The historical battle of Foy was iconically a Christmas conflict, and we’re excited to take to the field this Christmas in the snow.
Foy - Updated & Offensive Mode!
In adjusting the lighting and weather on Foy for the new Offensive mode implementation, we discovered that Foy lacked large amounts of cover at longer ranges.
Looking at this, we took it as an opportunity to refresh the map across the board - introducing new mapping techniques, buildings, props and materials, as well as fixing aspects of gameplay that we’d experienced while fighting across it on Warfare.
This is the first of the “legacy upgrades” we seek to do, and we’re excited especially to revisit both Hurtgen and Sainte-Marie-du-Mont in the same way, as well as fix and upgrade visual aspects to all other current maps.
So when can you expect the new map?
In December, we’ll be releasing Update 4. It will contain both Sainte-Mère-Église Warfare and German Offensive mode, and a large overhaul of Foy with the introduction of German Offensive Mode. We’ll also be implementing fixes, features and optimisations.
A word from Team17
It’s been an incredibly exciting time here at Team17 over the last few weeks as we have outgrown our old office and have moved into a brand new building on the other side of town a few days ago! Obviously moving 170+ members of staff as well all of the kit that go with them across sites has been a huge undertaking and that has sadly resulted in a few teething problems which has contributed to the moving of the SME update.
We sincerely apologise for this, but rest assured, we do not intend on moving again for the foreseeable future! As a result we’re confident that this will prove to be a one off, we are back up and running at full capacity again and busy working through the immense amount of content that Black Matter are producing.
We hope you enjoy fighting across Sainte-Mère-Église and exploring the updated Foy map in December when these drop. From a publisher’s point of view, Black Matter have been incredible to work with across the development of Hell Let Loose. Watching the game take shape and develop driven by the feedback from the community has been incredibly exciting and we are thrilled to be part of the journey with them.
So, thanks to you, the community for sticking with us and providing all of the feedback that you do, and the Max and the Black Matter team, keep up the great work!
T17
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See you on the frontline!