It took us a bit longer, but it was worth it. The best patch World War 3 has gotten is now finalized and will be available on Live servers in a matter of days now. Thanks to the two extra weeks we had, we’ve been able to prepare and deploy 0.6.6 PTE patch on Friday and make sure that all of the most important issues are resolved and we’ve added some cool quality of life features as well. We’d like to share with you what those couple of weeks of work gave us and how we used them.

Most important issues

We’ve noticed a lot of bugs related to the Mobile Spawn Point. Those were related to it being a vehicle that’s not called in, but being spawned before the match and the fact that you can spawn on it without anyone being there. We’ve had some locking up issues, weird out of bounds bugs and some other unwanted behaviours that are fixed now. This has also fixed a bug with spawning that sometimes moved you to the main base instead of the chosen vehicle.

Gameplay

From the gameplay side, we’ve had some changes to weapons, with a balance pass. We’ve also tweaked weapon weight values, so expect some changes in your loadouts (some for the better, some for the worse). All those changes were done according to weapon usage stats and community feedback. Remember: the real balancing will be done when most of the weapons are in the game and we’re nearing the release!

Improvements

We’ve had some vehicle changes as well. We’ve added an option to destroy RCWS optics on Lewiatan and Battle Robot and made it so using the attached repair tool (default: Press 4 next to a vehicle) repairs the base vehicle armor, not additional armor.

There were some changes to markers to make them more visible on the map and jamming an area now removes markers.

We’ve added a quick switch to game settings, to make it possible to switch between them faster. Now you can choose between Best Performance, Balanced and Best Quality presets.

Maps

On the map changes, we’ve fixed some vault spots, rearranged some props so the gameplay is less impacted by the scenery (barriers, boxes etc) and fixed trees on Polyarny catching bullets.

Other changes

Of course, most work went into fixing bugs and making sure the game is as stable and running as fast as possible for now. We’re still nowhere done with optimization (especially on the new maps), but we’ve made some big improvements in the stutter area – there should be minimal freezing and locking up of the game now, making even lower fps feel much better.

We’ve fixed countless bugs, with the most notable being a few crashes (including server crashes), distant explosions not playing, fixed some jamming bugs related to markers, fixed some HUD issues with widgets not updating properly and a lot of other issues that were minor, but annoying.

Optimization

On the vastly important optimization front, we’ve mostly looked at the new levels, as those are the freshest and will probably be the experience most players get playing 0.6 for the first time. In those two weeks, we’ve reduced polygon draw count, optimized some LODs and changed some destroy packs.

Community

Our community also got some changes. We’ve had some updates to channels and rules on our Discord server, and created a special bug hunting group and their efforts are very visible in the reports we got from them. Of course, all bug reports are taken into account and checked as fast as possible, but with this special group we have better reproduction steps and the process is going a bit faster.

We’d like to thank those players that are especially interested in helping us and we hope we can make the game better and better together. We see you in the corner of a map shooting your feet and climbing over stuff 50 times and we are thankful for such an awesome community. That said, everyone that is posting bug reports, keep up the good work and rest assured we’re looking at all the reports and while some bugs might still be there for a long time, we’re aware of them and are prioritizing to make sure we don’t waste time, not because we’re oblivious to what needs to be changed or fixed.

May 8th Outage

We’d also like to clarify what happened on the night and morning of May 8th. We had an outage resulting in the game not being playable for around 20 hours. This happened because of a breach on our server provider’s side. It was quickly fixed, but in the process, some of their services went down, with World War 3 servers being one of them. They got notified and fixed the issue rather quickly (around 2 hours), but some data was lost and the process of recovering took additional time. Sorry for the inconvenience, but rest assured that this issue was fixed and shouldn’t happen again.

0.7

Next week we’re back to the normal weekly schedule of sharing sneak peeks of the upcoming content and features. 0.7 will focus on more bug fixing and performance improvements, but also we’ll try to give our players more to do in World War 3.

Because 0.6 being on PTE for additional time worked very well, 0.7 is also going to go through a similar cycle, so you shouldn’t have to wait long for something fresh to test if you’re into helping us make the game better on top of having fun.

Stay tuned!