Hey everyone,
Welcome to Dev Brief #131!
This week we've got a bumper Dev Brief that proceeds an exciting weekend for Hell Let Loose. Did someone say leaving Early Access?
On top of that Max has stopped by to explain our plans for Hell Let Loose both as we leave Early Access and beyond.
Then, as a couple of cherries on the cake we've got news on our next PTE(s), including a rather special one next week as well as a first look at the overhauled Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont coming to the game as part of Update 10.
Now, there's lots of Dev Brief goodness for you to get through, so let's get stuck in shall we...
Future Game Show - Release Date Announcement
We want to let you know about an exciting announcement taking place during the Future Game Show event this weekend. You may have seen something about this via our social channels already.
THE FUTURE GAME SHOW
Sunday June 13th - 4pm PDT - 7pm EDT - 12am Midnight BST - 1am CEST
Max will announce the date for Hell Let Loose leaving Early Access. And we will tease and show off the 2nd map of the Eastern Front. We know you might have guessed it already...
We are very excited to be participating in this event, we are sure we will be in great company with some amazing people, companies and products that will entail the Future Gameshow.
Be sure to check it out!
Watch live on the day at the following locations:
GamesRadar Twitch
GamesRadar YouTube
A Message From Max - Leaving Early Access and Welcome to the Eastern Front
Hi everybody,
We’re excited to announce that we’ll be leaving Early Access with the launch of Update 10 in the coming weeks and the introduction of the Soviet forces. For us, it represents the solidification of several foundational elements for the game. We know that there will be many questions around us leaving Early Access and what that might mean for the future of the title. Don’t worry - as you’ll discover below this represents the completion of some key infrastructure beneath the hood - including finalising workflows that will enable us to work far more efficiently in the future. You’ll also see that we’ve got huge things planned for the game that we’ll talk through below.
Our Goals During Early Access
Hell Let Loose is an epic journey for both the whole development team and community.
Beginning in 2015 as a hobby, we’ve both expanded and learned so much during the development of Hell Let Loose.
When launching into Early Access, we had several key goals to accomplish during the period:
- We knew that there were several fundamental infrastructure overhauls that we’d need to achieve during the period in order to make sure we were best set up to support the title well beyond our Early Access period. Our animation system required more than 50 handmade animations per item, our texturing systems meant both our vehicles and weapons were so expensive on VRAM usage that they needed to be crushed in quality, and there was a total absence of ballistics in-game - to name just a few significant absences or issues.
- On top of this, we also wanted to build out the core offering of maps, roles and vehicles - and expand and polish Commander abilities.
- Lastly, we also wanted to expand the size of the studio and bring on new team members who could join us in refining and building Hell Let Loose long term.
For us, Update 10 represents the success of these initial goals and our leaving Early Access. All underlying infrastructure in the game has been rewritten for much easier iteration, expansion and optimisation and were used to help us introduce the all-new Soviet forces to the game.
Why leave Early Access?
As developers, we’re aware of every issue within the game - both technical, bug or features that could be polished, changed or refined. We’d be happy to stay in Early Access for several more years, however as part of our original commitment we felt that it’s important to draw a line under what we’d consider to be the “base game”.
As mentioned above, Early Access represented a time for us to implement huge infrastructure overhauls to the underlying code of the game - including entirely reworking our animation, sound effects, ballistics, mapping and texturing pipeline in a way that means our future work is far easier to adapt, optimise and expand.
We are also aware that every player will have their own feeling about what would be considered critical to achieve before leaving Early Access - and that there won’t necessarily be consensus. That said, it’s important to reassure the community as a whole that this is the end of the first foundational stage of our development.
Lastly, leaving Early Access will help us as a studio to continue to work on and support Hell Let Loose well into the future.
When will we leave Early Access?
We will be leaving Early Access with the launch of Update 10. We will be doing a special announcement this Sunday with the exact date as well as first teaser footage of the second unrevealed map and our new Eastern Front trailer.
Are you leaving Early Access because of the console development?
No. Many Early Access games stay in Early Access while also launching on console.
Will you honour Kickstarter Backers pledges?
Yes. We are fully committed to honouring these pledges and will be following up with specific backers. For example, we are currently testing one of the kickstarter uniform rewards in the PTE.
Does this mean the meta or “feature/bug I don’t like” will never be fixed or changed?
No. Hell Let Loose is an enormous game with hundreds of features that all need to coexist and all will continue to be refined or changed as we always have.
New content will continue to shift the meta towards our ultimate vision for the title. For example, the introduction of halftracks will shift the way in which teams stage attacks into enemy territory, while the new armour rework will shift the power of AT from the straight destruction of vehicles to component damage.
Does this mean that updates and work will slow down or end on Hell Let Loose?
No. This simply represents another milestone in our development journey. We will be releasing a roadmap soon to outline what you can expect to see in the future. This roadmap will include large amounts of content underpinned by continued polish, fixes, balancing and optimisations.
The future includes:
- Addition of new Western and Eastern Front maps
- Continued polish on all existing maps
- Addition of new forces and theatres
- Addition of new vehicles eg. halftracks, jeeps, heavy tanks, assault guns, specialist variants etc.
- Addition of new weapons eg. trench guns, flamethrowers, mortars, FG-42 and many more
- Addition of new gadgets and features (night maps, flare guns etc.)
- Expansion of types of deployable emplacements (HMGs, AA guns etc.)
- Expansion and continued balancing of Commander abilities
- Campaign mode to tie public matches together
- Solo and grouped matchmaking
- And much, much more.
Thank You
Fundamentally, World War Two is an enormous conflict, with thousands of different aspects worth exploring. As a development team, we’re fully committed to continuing to work together with the community to build on this core foundation of Hell Let Loose well into the future. We’re very excited to have you on the journey with us!
KURSK PTE #2
We would like to take a moment in this week’s Dev Brief to say a big thank you to all who joined us in yesterday’s PTE, once again we had an amazing turnout of players getting their boots dirty in the upcoming Eastern Front. We had a blast as a team fighting beside you through all the chaos and action.
Due to your profound commitment in providing feedback and bug reports we’re able to move forward with a greater confidence in knowing the changes we need to make. Some of the changes you experienced during the PTE were experimental changes that we wanted to test in a populated environment. Going forward we will continue to make alterations and additions based on your feedback and how we felt they impacted the flow of the game.
We have listened to the community feedback and will be running several more PTE’s over the coming weeks. Also next week we plan to host yet another PTE, only this time we have something very special in mind, something we’re sure you won't want to miss…
If you haven’t played in any of the PTEs before, or wish to receive notifications of upcoming PTEs, please join the official HLL Discord here where you can find all the relevant information:
YES I WANT TO JOIN THE HELL LET LOOSE DISCORD
We are still looking to host additional PTEs leading up to the release of Update 10, so if for any reason you can make this one, don’t worry!
Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont Overhaul
Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont is by far the oldest Hell Let Loose map - being our initial Alpha map and the first one we ever made. As a result, we made several early mistakes in how we set the map up, including laying it out for a diagonal orientation (leading to one of the key locations - the town - being between two strongpoints).
In addition to this, many graphical aspects of the map were extremely low quality due to outdated workflows. As a result, we’re now seeking to unify the quality and look of all our maps - including starting to use uniformly optimised props, buildings and foliage. The idea being that we have far more consolidated points of control, so that we can uniformly improve performance and gameplay across all of our maps.
Included below is the new tactical map for Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont. We’ve kept all the favourite locations, while shifting the orientation and location of the map so that the key road (Rue De La Gare) runs straight down the map and so the town itself features as its own Strong Point. In addition to this, we’ve built out some more rational and exciting Strong Points, with a focus on keeping similar cover density to the original map.
Finally, due to shifting the map, we’ve opened up some ground on the south western edge that is slightly more dramatic in height - allowing for engaging long range vehicle and infantry combat.
More about SMDM
Sainte-Marie-Du-Mont is situated 6 miles (10 km) north of Carentan and some 3 miles (5 km) inland of Utah Beach. Saint-Marie-du-Mont lies at the end of a long causeway linking the beach to higher ground and was therefore a principal objective of paratroopers of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division.
Eglise Notre-Dame is a large stone church set in the middle of the town of Sainte Marie du Mont. This area of town and the church saw heavy fighting between the 101st and the German Wehrmacht. The fighting continued in the church with snipers using the belltower and, later in the day, Germans hiding in the confessional. There are still bullet holes which show the intensity of the battle, inside and outside the stone walls.
We'll be sharing more exciting goodies with you in the coming weeks. We hope you are all as happy and excited as we are with this next Update. Next week we will have a preview of some more new Soviet content.
Onwards to the weekend!
That wraps up this week's bumper Dev Brief! We've got an exciting weekend ahead of us and we hope you'll join us as we announce our full launch from Steam Early Access.
We'll see you on the frontline.