Regarding The Ongoing EA Release
Hey Everyone,
We've paused our launch plans in their tracks as of a couple of days ago, based on the feedback we were seeing from the early stages of rolling keys out to supporters. There was some delay in getting our community representative updated, but we have since pulled the posts talking about the release of the game down from social media outside of this one. Our current release build certainly has problems, and we don’t want to shy away from them or promote the game in-light of how severe these issues are.
Why did we do this?
It's simple, we don't feel comfortable pushing and promoting the game with it having some key issues that have been absolutely ruining the experience for people that are trying to play the game for what it is. We have put together an action plan on addressing these issues and we will be stepping through that before promoting our release.
The Plan
For those that are unaware, the build that we initially sent for review is not the build that was eventually released. For the sake of transparency, we’ve moved this build to a public beta-branch that everyone has access to called “release-staging”, despite the poorer UX and some of the bugs affecting this version, people have been reporting this build running 20-30FPS better than the current default build.
This is based on a two week old build, but there are even older ones with far better performance. We have our staff combing through the builds that were done in August to identify where things fell off. In the future, we will be automating the process of gathering performance data to prevent this from ever happening again. Once we have addressed the issues with performance and gameplay, we will be resuming with the final leg of our launch plan.
Performance Issues
Even our game-development workstations are struggling to get acceptable frames on the default branch and I have a 3090 in it. We all know how utterly unacceptable this is. We all want this game to succeed, but we feel that it would be more harmful to not acknowledge where we are and what needs to be fixed before we proceed.
Multiplayer isn't great, obviously. We've noticed and heard of the CPU/performance issues.
Under certain (currently unknown) circumstances, the infected flat out don't work. We're experimenting and figuring this out--this is another reason to comb through previous iterations of the game.
As you've noticed, using items, and containers are extremely slow, as well as any interactions. This will get fixed very soon.
In single player, there is less performance issues than multiplayer, but nonetheless it needs to be fixed.
The issues above are things that are not acceptable for us to continue promoting the game with; and are the highest priority so we can get you playing.
We will also be moving all of the live testing channels and information to the public facing side of the Steam forums and the Discord as shortly after this post goes live.
Addressing Gameplay Issues
We anticipate we can get these performance issues resolved via a few patches over the next couple of days, however we do not think that addressing just these performance issues is sufficient for us to continue pushing forward with the launch as there are key aspects of the game that need to be addressed gameplay wise.
The Zombies
We have heard a lot of feedback that the Zombies, even when working correctly, are not Enough of A Threat and that they are too slow and too easily exploited. We’ll be doing the following to address this:
We'll be making them 50% faster, as this will stop-gap it until we get them moving quicker, with a more fluid/realistic animation set--which is what the system is designed around already.
We will be tuning the attraction metrics the infected use so they feel less cheap when approaching the player, and to add more of a sense of responsiveness to actions such as pressing the horn on a vehicle, etc.
We have already replaced LOD 0 of the infected variants with a higher poly representation, this shouldn't really impact performance, we used a low poly LOD initially due to the fact that we were having performance related issues to the skin cache being disabled. This should result in far less N64 zombies being present up close. They won’t be metahumans yet, but it feels like a breathe of fresh air to not see low poly infected everywhere.
Infected that were frozen in place when exiting the tutorial midway through has been fixed on the latest automatic-nightly, which will be pushed to release once we clean up a few issues related to disabling some overlap checks on the infected proxies.
Gunplay Issues
The weaponry is lackluster right now. This is one of the most painful pieces of feedback, probably because of how true it is.
There have been a lot of regressions and tweaks made to the gunplay, we’ve already made some changes to restore more of the feel to the weapons that was present before.
We’ll also be tweaking the ADS mechanics so that aiming down sights is no longer broken, eliminating any weird sways that were introduced. We have also put some work into restoring the audio that was previously present on the weapons.
Here’s the additional plans in place for the weapons:
We will be addressing any outstanding animation issues with the weapons, as well as hopefully re-enabling the jamming mechanic.
We will be meticiulously reviewing all of the sounds for the weapons and bringing things over from 0.6 as needed to make sure that they have parity. Part of this has been done
We will be projecting the size and position of the weapons on-screen as they were in 0.6.
We will be fixing issues related to aiming down sights and moving your weapon around, as they weren't feeling great.
Movement Issues
Here’s some stuff we’d like to address with regards to the experience as it relates to movement.
Ladders are too slow, it feels like you’re climbing through molasses.
Swimming is often buggy, the player entering and exiting the swimming state at often jarring times, with the animations playing at the incorrect time. At the bare minimum we would like swimming to be more viable and have the bare minimum in terms of polish, we’ll be looking at how the code for 0.6 handled this as reference.
Jobs Are Practically Inaccessible
This is a major point of disappointment from our side, as there is actually a large amount of jobs you can technically do in the game but they’re not very accessible and even if you make progress, it is reset upon your characters permanent death or by the game crashing.
Most jobs in the game are assigned by NPCs in dominion, which is quite a hike from where players are currently spawning. Performance related issues and even difficulties finding the NPCs upon arriving in Dominion.
When you have a job, nothing in the game tells you where to go. When you encounter one of the downed drones in the game, or crashed helicopters that auto-assigns a job, there is nothing telling you where to go next, this is a huge problem gameplay wise.
Jobs are currently not saving due to a bug but the system does support saving/loading a job that is in any given stage.
Crashes
We believe we have identified the source of the notorious crashing a lot of our users were experienced, this issue was made worse by having certain hardware configurations.
Next Steps After All Of This Is Out Of The Way
It's no secret that this time is very stressful for us, and you right now. The team has cut and pasted themselves into the fabric of the game and have immense emotional connections to it. Moving forward, we will be rising above that; focusing on the development and not defending the work we do, but rather letting it show for itself.
All of our staff just really want people to know that we are working diligently to rectify the state of the game and we are taking your feedback very seriously. Sometimes the feedback that cuts the deepest and hurts the most is because there is a lot of truth behind that feedback.
We highlighted these plans in the community Discord server a few days ago, and appreciate the amazing response and opportunity to make things right. We post this not as an attempt to garner sympathy, but to extend an olive branch back to the community that continues to humbly offer us their trust by giving us the opportunity of a lifetime.
We are not giving in to the calls telling us the game is dead, or that it is over. We are here to make this succeed, and to you, the people.
