Greetings!
It's time for us to once again sit down and check in with the development progress and see where we are in terms of our plans with the ongoing Unreal Engine upgrade, our new Ardennes map and a small devblog from our Third-Party Developers at Mercury Arts.
Status Report from the team about Unreal Engine 4.27
Let's kick off this devblog with a status report on where the team are currently with the upgrade to Unreal Engine version 4.27 which is a major undertaking for the team.
If you have been following our news over the past few weeks you will certainly have noticed the frequency of playtests have increased and this is also indicative of where we are in terms of progress. Our work with upgrading Post Scriptum from Unreal Engine 4.21 to 4.27 is near completion and we have made significant progress in terms of getting it all ready for release with only minor issues and polishing remaining before release.
In addition, we have recently launched our Public Playtest application which will facilitate future playtesting with our community as well as separating the game from the testing environment, going forward you can expect more regular testing and involvement with our community with regard to upcoming content and feedback to this content.
We expect to be making an announcement regarding the release date for the engine upgrade very soon, so keep your eyes out on our news page for that. We understand that some players may feel frustrated with the lack of content as of recently, and we certainly did not anticipate the development time for the upgrade to be as long as it is, but that doesn't mean we have not made any progress towards future content.
Public Playtest Friday, May 13th @ 11:30 AM Pacific | 2:30 PM Eastern | 6:30 PM UTC
The public playtest will run on a special Public Testing application in your library titled Post Scriptum - Public Testing, so make sure to download this ahead of time, you will not need to use any special branches for this, just make sure to download the application and we will make the update available for you when we are closer to the start time.
NOTE: If you do not see the server yet, the server has not yet been started, or you need to restart Steam, to ensure you have the correct update.
So with that, let's go take a look at a new map that will join Post Scriptum this year.
Development update on the "Ardennes" map
As outlined on our roadmap, we have been working on a new armoured focused map similar to the Proving Grounds map with the overall theme set around the Ardennes region, which was infamous for being considered impenetrable by armoured vehicles.
This map offers a great opportunity to play with a more wide variety of foliage and denser woodlands for tanks to play in and around. With the centerpiece of the map being a small rural town for those wishing to engage in close quarter tank combat or as a good way to escape and disappear from sight.
While Ardennes is an armoured focused map it is also optimized as a map that can be played with infantry, in particular as a "seeding" map which refers to a low population map that is better suited for a server that is not yet running at full capacity.
This map is not meant to feature as a part of any particular chapter, but rather to work as padding for our already large list of maps, going forward we will look at the possibility to return to our previous chapters to pad out more content in existing maps as well as new maps and you can be certain that we will keep you updated should these plans move ahead.
And I am sure many of you are keen to hear more about Chapter 4 and the upcoming content, and you can be certain we will cover Chapter 4 more extensively very soon.
Third-Party devblog from Mercury Arts
Now it's time for us to give the word to our Third-Party partner Mercury Arts who is responsible for the development of their "Chapter Mercury" community content. So with that I give the word to Katz the Project Lead at Mercury Arts.
An update on Chapter Mercury
Before we begin this update I would like to thank the whole community for all the support they have given the Mercury Arts team following the successful release of “Maleme”. Seeing our first map being played on repeat over the release weekend and then subsequently in the rotations of many servers has been humbling for us and we are extremely grateful to all those who facilitated this.
Moving forward from “Maleme”, our team has spent the last few months hard at work on the next phases of our roadmap. Significant progress has been made here in the production of several new factions and the creation of our next map “Rethymno” and we want to share that with you.
Firstly we will start with the surprise addition to our roadmap, the 5. Gebirgs Division faction. This unit was assigned in actuality to reinforce the Fallschirmjäger on Crete following the initial landings. As such we have decided to incorporate the 5. Gebirgs Division on the Axis defensive layers of “Maleme”, taking over the duty from the Gruppe West faction. This means that in future you can expect to see the Gebirgsjäger on “Maleme Offensive 02, 04 and 06” and we expect this update to drop shortly after we have amended “Maleme” to accommodate the upcoming official engine upgrade.
In addition to the coming 5. Gebirgs faction, we have also made huge strides in the creation of our new Greek faction, the 5th Cretan Division. With weapons having been supplied from a wide variety of sources to the remnants of the Greek army in Crete, we have been able to include French, British, Italian and even German weaponry in their order of battle. This means that various existing weapons in game, alongside five new unique weapons from our development will arm the faction, offering a unique gameplay experience. When complete, we will be including this faction on various layers across both “Maleme” and “Rethymno” to represent the role Greek forces played on both battlefields.
Finally I’d like to give you an update on our second map “Rethymno”. Here again progress has been swift, with the map “Geo” nearing completion, ready for gameplay layers to soon be built and tested this summer. “Rethymno” is a large and beautiful map, spanning approximately 4km x 4km, it will be one of the larger maps in the game and offer many new and unique gameplay environments both above and below ground for players to experience fighting in. Whether it’s fighting over rolling hills, assaulting underground mines or paradropping into Arkadi Monastery, “Rethymno” will offer something different for everyone. At the link below you will find a preview of the map. We hope you like what you see.
Please do continue to support us on our Discord Server and on our YouTube channel, where you can keep track of all our future updates.
Sincerely,
Periscope Games
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Roadmap 2021 / 2022
