We want to write this open letter to our followers, fans and the most recent customers of Post Scriptum to update on the current situation of the project and address concerns about the game’s launch.
We apologize beforehand for the honest mistake (and we can't sincerely stress this enough) that the outdated information on our Steam page has caused some customers to feel mislead. Despite being such a small team, we had imposed upon ourselves a rigorous schedule up until release which, inevitably lead to some unfortunate errors. Some minor, but also others quite serious like the current case.
In response to this we aim to rectify the situation as soon as possible and update information accordingly across all of our social media. We have also discussed internally about taking big strides to improving communication with our player base. We have realized through your feedback that the consistency and regularity of our communication isn’t good enough.
We understand that those who have already purchased the game may feel cheated by this situation. As our apology to every single one of you, we will be asking Valve to open up refunds for the game to any customer regardless of hours played for the next week. (Until Friday 17th)
We are also aware of the complaints regarding what the full release version would be and that was mainly caused by the outdated information of our Steam page. We understand, once again, that you may feel mislead by this. A major part had to do once again with - which seems obvious now - poor management of our social media and propagation of information. While we have always been clear in every statement we have made in our official Discord and Facebook, we relied on the Roadmap announcement that was released to the player base prior to the Beta release. We took that as general knowledge that customers would absorb, however this was not the case and it should have been on our Steam page. It clearly states in the announcement what would be the order of things to come and therefore relay the appropriate information that the game won’t have all of the listed content at the set release date. In retrospect, we also didn’t communicate properly as we did initially believe that the main bulk of the content would be released in the full version and then the US faction (and all that comes with it along with Sandbox game mode) sometime after. Our view of the full release version is what effectively was launched yesterday. There is a disconnection of information between what we know and what we transpired to outside of the team, but once again, we didn’t present that well enough and only we are to blame.
The rest of the negative feedback that we have read is about overall performance and section cohesion. While we can’t offer a miracle instantaneous solution for the first, we will continue to make progress in that regard and it’s a matter that will require patience.
As far as the latter goes...it requires a new chapter of disclosure to better clarify not only what changes may happen to the spawning system but as well as of other features to come.
Moving Forward
This is not in order of delivery
For all the tough parts above, we’re still planning to move full steam ahead with continuing development of the game and we’d like to encourage everyone to stick along with us for the ride. We believe there is a lot of good stuff to come and we’ll elaborate on that herein with a roadmap we’re updating and releasing.
First of all, we’d like to step up our game when it comes to communication, in addition to the discord, twitter and livestream engagement we already have, we’re going to start making sure we take things to the next level with regularly scheduled live roundtables.
To address the issue of section cohesion and as a whole make teamwork more accessible, we are currently developing a new feature currently dubbed the “Regroup Call”. The basic idea is that there will be a new soldier class carrying a radio, and when the Section Leader is within a close range of this radio, he can issue a regroup call. This then turns the SL into a spawn point for the next 60 seconds that members of his Section can spawn on. In addition to this, Commanders will only be able to call in airstrikes when standing near a radio operator. There are certain things that will need to be fleshed out, like for example the spawn being disabled if the SL runs into an objective radius, but we plan to work out the kinks with testing.
Beyond that gameplay change, we’ll be making sure we’re continually making improvements to the replayability of the game. In the very short term we can expect new layers for Doorwerth, in addition to the new 8*8km city map Arnhem, which we will begin releasing in incremental 8x2km pieces shortly.
Beyond that we’ll have the American Airborne faction releasing in the coming months, along with 3 new maps, Grave, Veghel and Velmolen. The Environments team has also been putting a lot of work into improving the visuals of our maps, including ground shaders, foliage and lighting.
A new game mode “Armored” will focus heavily on tank combat. There will also be some other game modes coming that are currently being pitched internally. Our plan is for our community to always have a different gameplay experience every time they play.
Lastly, we will provide to the community with the SDK allowing you to map and mod Post Scriptum. The SDK will come in the future once the game is in a more stable state and the above issues are fixed.
Overall we apologize to all of our paying customers that many of the things above were not made clear in the past, but we hope we can rebuild confidence moving forward by continuing to pour our hearts into the development of the game, and by consistently improving the experience we are building.
Sincerely,
Romain “BreizhoO” Ferchat,
Studio Director for Periscope Games.
And the entire Periscope Games team.
PS: Enjoy a few screenshots from our upcoming Arnhem map
