Hello, Soldiers!

We hope you’ve had as fun of a week as we did. Last week saw us going back to work on 0.7 after the Free Weekend battles.This week’s Report is focused on the 0.7 update we’re getting ready for PTE testing right now. We wanted to let you know what to expect and how to help us with the testing so the next update is even better than 0.6.

Before we get to the meat of this week’s Report, there are two news items we’d like to share with you. First, World War 3 is still 40% off for the rest of the Steam Summer Sale, so make sure to grab it before it ends on the 9th of July. We’ve just reached Mostly Positive reviews, so it seems that the Free Weekend and our hard work paid off.

Second, we’re looking for content creators to take part in a contest. The rules are simple: create an awesome video: gameplay, fragmovie, tips & tricks or funny montage about World War 3. The most creative videos will win World War 3 Special Edition* sets or Steam keys! You can submit only one video per creator. Send you submission to contests@worldwar3.com before Friday, July 19th.

* Special Edition is a unique collection of World War 3 gadgets: T-shirt, dog-tag, WW3 Steam key, poster, WW3 badge, “Sprzymierzeni z GROM” sew-on badge and a metal pin with our logo packed into a solid Helikon Tex backpack.

As we wrote in last week’s Report, we’ve had a lot of feedback and data collected, and this week we’ve taken some of it to make big strides in making the game better. Starting on Monday, we had a small, but important update hit the Public Test Environment servers. Thanks to community tests, we can now report that those fixes worked and we’ve been able to remove most stuttering issues we had come up during the increased server stress. Performance is going to improve with 0.7 noticeably, especially in regard to sudden frame drops.

The main part of this update is the new engine version we’ll be using for the foreseeable future. Right now we’re on 4.19, which was released over a year ago, on March 14th, 2018. This means that on one hand it’s been tested well, but on the other hand, we’re missing some cool new features Epic Games added to Unreal Engine. The biggest of those features is Replication Graph, which will alleviate some of the CPU stress on the servers increasing their stability and lowering overall latency – it should be a noticeable improvement over 4.19. There’s also some animation optimizations and backend improvements. You can read up on all of that on Unreal Engine website.

Work on 4.21 integration is progressing well, we’re on schedule and it seems that the work is nearing completion. The most important thing for us is, however, to keep the game stable and find as many crashes and other issues before we release the patch to Live servers. This is most likely not the last time we’re updating the engine either.

Changing the engine version is not everything we’ve got planned for 0.7, though. We’ll be introducing first iteration if the brand new challenge system. At first it will be limited in its function, but it will be expanded and improved over time. For now, expect daily challenges and rewards for doing them.

There’s a lot more to come with 0.7, from the new squad manager, that will let us make the party system more robust in the future and fix some spawning issues, new vehicle HUDs and other HUD improvements down to attachment rebalance and more information for new players on how to play well.

On top of those changes, you can expect new content as usual, some balancing changes, loads of bug fixes and other improvements in sound, interface and so on.

So when is it coming out? We can’t tell you yet, unfortunately. It will first hit PTE servers and will stay there until it’s ready for Live. We think the PTE update will come fairly soon, but as usual – no dates on that, just keep an eye on our social media and forums for the freshest information. This strategy has worked exceptionally well for 0.6 and we intend on sticking with this way of updating the game – this way our players get higher quality updates that minimize problems and let more people have more fun in the game – and that’s how it should be.