Hey everyone,
Welcome to Developer Briefing #106!
This week we're using the Dev Brief to give you a preview at an impending patch that, all going well, will be arriving on the frontline next week.
Your feedback and willingness to be open and honest with us about all aspects of the game has been greatly appreciated. The team have worked tireless since U8 launched to not only collate everyone's feedback across all our channels - but take action on it!
I'm going to pass you over to Lead Developer Max now to let you know where we're at, as well as what we're addressing in Patch 14.
A Message From Max - Patch 14 Preview
Hi everyone,
It’s been a huge week for us with the release of Update 8 and we’re really excited to watch how many of the changes have been enjoyed by the community - especially the changes to FX, the soundscape, quality of life, new Hurtgen and many more.
Simultaneously, we’ve spent a lot of time in game with you, as well as reading all of the feedback across all our channels.
While we do test as much as possible during QA and then in the PTE’s, we often miss things due to the sheer size of the game.This is equally frustrating for us as a team, because we’d much prefer to ship an update with very few obvious issues as possible.
All going well, late next week we’ll be releasing a patch that will cover as many of the quickest fixes we’ve been able to accomplish this week (a huge thanks to the production and QA team to get this out the door!). Obviously, more complex issues will take longer to resolve, but we wanted to make sure you knew that many of the issues you were experiencing were unacceptable and we’ve prioritised a fix.
Without further ado:
- Bypass server queue not allowed - bug fixed where it was causing mass disconnects on map change.
- Vote kick threshold raised - will require a much higher % of the team for a vote to succeed. This is one of the most painful features we’ve ever worked on in HLL. Too low and people continually troll by
- kicking people - too high and it’s useless. Ultimately we’re looking at the ability for server owners to enable/disable vote kick and also player reporting and admin logging for U9.
- Vivox/Voip issues, we are watching this closely and have made one or two bug fixes.
- Fix for super grainy/sharp broken AA. While these changes benefitted TAA, they multiplied the effect on other forms of AA. We will be hand implementing these settings to TAA for Update 9.
- Fix fallen burned tree collisions on Hurtgen forest so players can step over them.
- Make all wire fences ignore collision from bullets, tank shells and heavy weapons.
- Changes across the BAR, Thompson, MP40, K98k, Garand, G43, M3 Grease Gun weapons to reduce damage drop off at range, as players landing difficult, accurate shots were punished for their efforts.
- We also increased the shots to kill on extremities for some of these weapons, while returning the STG and BAR to their OHK status. The result is that all of these weapons now play closer to their U7 variants, while still punishing shots that hit the lower legs and feet.
- Fixed: The SFX for exiting ocean water can be heard within 500m. Slightly lowered semi-automatic recoil. It now sits just above half way between the original and the new. We played with this every day since the Update and found that the new recoil was slightly too strong.
- Applied bullet penetration to many irritating materials that we’d missed (wire fences, small wooden posts).
- Fixes for collision occurring on things it shouldn’t (grass on the top of embankments, some reeds, some other foliage, window and door openings on some buildings).
- Fixed a few dozen map bugs reported by QA and the Community.
- Partial fix for grass loading slowly. Much more should now have loaded when you spawn, but there’s still more work we can do here.
- Removed medals from the player nameplate HUD icons, as their scaling often totally broke the visual and was more distracting than useful. We’ll look at implementing this after we revise the idea. The medals are still present in the scoreboard and Barracks.
- Various server crash fixes, and improvements made to address reports of ‘rubber-banding’
Run Speed:
We tweaked the player run speed for U8 in order to watch the resulting flow of combat and the effect it would have on intentional movement across and around the front line - rewarding intentional movement and decreasing the amount of “zig zag” “mosquito” movement.
We’ve often gone back and forth with regard to a stamina system for Hell Let Loose. We’ve frequently decided against it, as the core essence of Hell Let Loose is the emphasis on the courage to push forward bravely and efficiently - knowing that to take any ground requires forward movement. If we start rewarding players for slow or static play (whether by making out-of-stamina players find it harder to aim, or by increasing the aiming stability of stationary, crouched or prone players) we felt that it would fundamentally discourage the core of our attacking gameplay.
Counter to this, we’ve also been aware that our previous run speed was high enough (and our player acceleration matching this), that enemy targets could go from a walk to full sprint incredibly quickly, and that quickly strafing side to side in a gunfight was often advisable.
As such, we wanted to find the best of both worlds - making sure our system didn’t punish forward movement (or reward static play) - while also creating a more realistic time to accelerate and total movement speed.
We are still playing this change and watching the way this affects the metagame.
We also wanted to note that our crouched player run speed is slightly slower than our standing one. However, due to the camera being closer to the ground, there is a perception that it’s faster or as fast as the standing speed.
Finally, we fully acknowledge that this change to player speeds should have been acknowledged in the patch notes. Its absence was not intentional and was a result of the change taking place very early in the dev cycle. We’ll make sure in the future that we work harder so this does not happen again.
In Conclusion
There is still a huge amount more to address from both this Update, let alone what we’ll be doing for Update 9. If we haven’t mentioned a specific issue in this dev brief (metagame, armored issues and gameplay etc.) or addressed it with this patch - it does not mean that we feel it’s acceptable or are totally happy with everything that is unmentioned. Hell Let Loose is in Early Access, and as such will continually be worked on in coordination with community feedback.
We’re very excited to get this patch out and are looking forward to revealing more of what is to come in both Update 9 and 2021. Hell Let Loose is still relatively young in its development and there’s so much more to come. Fortunately, the incredible feedback you give us - as well as the passion you have for Hell Let Loose - gives us enormous amounts of energy to keep polishing, improving and optimising - let alone creating new content.
While continued development and updating a live game is a rollercoaster, we’re looking forward to an even bigger year for Hell Let Loose in 2021.
Onwards to the weekend!
That wraps up this week's Dev Brief and today's update from Max!
As a little reminder, if you haven't grabbed the free 'Winter Warfare Helmet Pack' DLC you grab it for a limited time below:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1205050/Hell_Let_Loose__Winter_Warfare_Helmet_Pack/
Have a great weekend everyone.
We'll see you on the frontline!