Hello Adventurers,
It's been quite a while since our last Developer Face-to-face post. During this time, we built and released Season 4 with a variety of new characters and new mechanics, introduced a new game mode- 'Ashen Eye,' and most importantly, kicked off our first ever 'Amazon Cup,' an online competition held in collaboration with Amazon open to all players. Meanwhile, the team has been hard at work behind the scenes to create new content for the upcoming Season 5. With this issue of Developer Insights, we want to reveal some details about our short-term development plan, upcoming Season 5 content, and some online/offline community events that are currently in the works behind the scenes. Let's jump in.
PART I. Recent improvements
We've worked hard on Season 3 and 4 and have brought in many new features and unique gameplay experiences to Ring of Elysium. However, we understand more than ever that if we don't pay attention to our community's voices, our vision and hard work will be for nothing. Building a better ROE together with our player base has always been one of our core philosophies in Aurora Studio.
While we've always encouraged feedback across all of our social channels, we recently created the S4 Feedback Collection Megathread on Reddit. The goal of this megathread was to gather all of our players' up-to-date feedback to one place so that we can best understand the priorities of our community. As you may have noticed, we've already started to make some adjustments based on the feedback provided from the megathread, here's to name a few:
Audio improvements
- The importance of sound cannot be stressed enough in a battle royale. We believe that more accurate in-game sound effects can greatly enhance your gaming experience, and many community members agree.
- We're happy to announce that we've recently improved our "3D audio spatialization" option to now include indoor reverb and sound propagation effects.
- With 3D audio enabled, players can now experience spatial audio comparable to what would be heard in reality. This feature is currently available for footstep and gunshot sound effects.
- We also noticed there's some existing issues/bugs with the latest 3D audio option's performance, the Aurora Studio Audio team will be continuously working on fixing those issues and improving the overall sound quality of the game, we'll keep y'all updated!
Quality-of-Life changes
- One excellent example of this is the "window opacity" change we made a couple of days ago.
- We found out about this issue by watching our community member- BryaaNz's feedback video on YouTube, he commented that the glass in the buildings around Europa Island was a bit too hard to see through if you're standing outside. We agree that the glass offered a bit of an advantage to players inside of structures looking through it, so we went ahead and made some adjustments to the glass transparency.
- After we put the patch out, we were surprised to see the number of positive comments for this tiny change, we realized that this type of "minor" improvements can make a huge difference when it comes to gameplay, small detail polishments like this really adds up. Therefore, similar QOL improvements are expected to come in the future.
DX12 Client Beta
- Improving DX12 and making it available to as many members of our community as possible continues to be a core focus for us.
- To help our client team figure out how to improve the DX12 Client, please participate in this survey below, you can even win 1000 E-Points if you get lucky!
- https://forms.gle/BaStRbhgzHyiK5hx7
- One point of consistent feedback that we're getting is that players on Windows 7 would also like to have access to DX12, too. This is something that we're working on currently. As soon as we have more info, we'll be sure to let everyone know.
Our short-term development to-do list (based on the feedback collection megathread)
Over 400 players provided their thoughtful and creative suggestions on the megathread, we're truly overwhelmed by your enthusiasm and support. Over the past few weeks, the team went through and read every single suggestion that was provided by our community meticulously, we now have a good understanding on the community's urgencies, and even found some incredibly unique, creative ideas.
Since we have to also work on developing the Season 5 content at the same time, which occupies a huge amount of workload for our devs, we will not be able to implement all of the ideas posted by the community at once, some will come before others. Easier-to-implement features/adjustments will come before ones that take some more time, such as the Death Cam system, which was the #1 requested feature from our player base. Below are a few of the changes that we're planning on making in the near future. After we're finished with the list below, we'll provide more details on the changes that are harder to implement, stay tuned.
- Audio
- Continuous improvements to the 3D Audio Spatialization option
- Challenges
- More variety, less "same challenge type with different numbers required."
- Pirate ship and underwater chests seem out of place
- Will be removed in S5 as they are inconsistent with current season themes
- Buffing the glider
- The glider will have better and more realistic interaction with objects around the map
- Break through windows while gliding
- Inventory management while gliding
- Ability to draw and fire SMGs sooner while gliding
- The glider will have better and more realistic interaction with objects around the map
- Quick-mark system
- Adding individual keybind slots for the 4 commands
- Pings can be colored based on teammates' colors
- QOL
- Display healing item UI (similar to what we see in spectator mode)
- Make a difference between teammates and enemies more noticeable when aiming down sights (dynamic UI transparency)
- Teammates' death icon will disappear faster
- Teammates will be spawned next to their team if they do not choose their own spawn point
- UI improvements when discarding items (buttons and slider adjustments)
- Provide option to select loading screens and lobby music randomly
- Speed up the character landing recover animation
- Short-distance falling will no longer interrupt healing
- Optimize the issue of "getting stuck by tiny objects around the map and have to jump through them."
- Gunplay/weapon balance
- Shotguns buffs (such as R870 and Origin-12)
- Improve reliability/consistency
- DMRs buffs
- SRs buffs
- Base damage increase
- TAC-50 will be added to the airdrops
- Higher-resolution scope textures
- Shotguns buffs (such as R870 and Origin-12)
- BMX/character movement improvements
- Optimizing the issue of "getting stuck by tiny objects."
- Spectating
- Allow spectating in Squad mode after the entire squad is eliminated
PART II. Adventurer Season 5 first-reveal
Innovation is our goal. Our target is to make a more complex and multidimensional battleground, and create more possibilities for strategies. For the upcoming season, we're literally going to be reinventing the "wheels" for the battle royale genre- the central theme of Season 5 will be "Battlecars," a vehicle modification system to allow players to upgrade vehicles into not only a transportation tool, but a vehicular war machine.
We have also made some terrain/building changes that impacts gameplay on the Europa Island map. Let's check them out below!
Adventurer Characters
Like previous seasons, there will be three brand-new characters released in Season 5. The Season 4 Pinnacle Challenge has already begun, and the ultimate reward is a FREE Season 5 Adventurers Pass! Make sure you take advantage of these challenges to set yourself up for success at the start of Season 5.
Battlecars (Modified Vehicles)
Despite being highlighted in our previous Face-to-face and S4 promotion videos, Modified Vehicles have still not yet been released, that is because we wanted to put out a fully-fleshed-out system instead of rushing it. We believe that this feature will significantly change the meta, and wanted to make careful adjustments on the vehicles modifications so that they wouldn't break the balance of the game. We now see the adjustments are in a good place and are ready to be released! There will be 6 modifiable cars in total. Each modification has been designed for different situations our players may face in each game. Things are gearing up in Season 5, and we can't wait to see how our community takes these new additions and incorporate them into their gameplay.
(concept artwork, does not represent actual quality on release)
Bring 'em back to life!
The tiniest mistake can often cost you, and your teammate's life in a game round, and you often end up sitting on the “bench”, watching your friends having fun while waiting for the next game. We want to make gameplay a little more forgiving while still staying true to our fast-paced gameplay. We'd like to introduce respawn points, a system where alive players can use to revive their eliminated teammates. There will be a couple of respawn points scattered across the map, but it wouldn't be easy to revive your fallen friends. Respawn device locations will be fixed on the map, and each point can be only used once per match. If you want to save your buddies, you're going to have to fight your way through the enemy to be the first one there.
(concept artwork, does not represent actual quality on release)
RPG INCOMING!!!
No, we are not talking about Role-Playing Games, we're talking about the portable, anti-tank, rocket-propelled grenade launcher that makes your target and everything around it blow up! As we mentioned above, we want to avoid making Battlecars too overpowered, and one good countermeasure for vehicles would be the RPG. We will be releasing this weapon alongside vehicle modifications in Season 5, so fire up that engine and dust off your explosive handbooks, it's gonna be a wild ride.
(concept artwork, does not represent actual quality on release)
New landmarks & building types on Europa Island
Thanks to all of the tourists coming to Europa island recently, businesses and residents have flourished! Hospitals, bars, aircraft bases, and mansions will be popping up around Europa Island. The residential areas have also been renovated with walls being redone and new furniture being added to residents' homes. But... please do try to respect the new properties by not painting the wall with bullet holes, okay?
(concept artwork, does not represent actual quality on release)
III. Online/offline events
We’re going to Gamescom!
We're excited to announce that Ring of Elysium will be having its exclusive booth at Gamescom Cologne 2019 this August 20-24, more info on that will be released soon, stay tuned!
(concept design, does not represent actual quality of booth on site)
Amazon Cup
The Amazon Cup regional championship is also firing up on August 10&11 for EU and NA! The finals will be held with the participation of Shroud and Forsen being each respective region's "final boss." Make sure you tune in on the official broadcast to see who will be crowned champions!
-Aurora Studio