Hello, Soldiers!

Last Friday we’ve pushed the 0.8 update to the Public Test Environment. It includes the brand new community game mode and a new player HUD. Both those are still being worked on, so this is the perfect time to submit your suggestions and bug reports to our forums!

Breakthrough has been a game mode that our community wanted to have in the game for a long time. It was you, the players, that came to us with a request for a password protected server to test a game mode. You organized the testing, got everyone on the same page, we all got together and played a number of matches, slowly finding problems and strong points of the gameplay. After that, we took what we learned during playtesting and here we are a few months later – with a brand new game mode, directly influenced by the players.

You can read more about the Breakthrough Community Game Mode in one of the previous Weekly Reports.

It’s playable on all current Warzone maps, features a 20 player cap, full strike support and some intense firefights and rushes for the bomb plants. Some of you might see the 20 player cap as low, but it can get pretty insane when all of those 20 players are on a single point. We want to try a larger versions as well, but first we want to see how it plays out with you!

With 0.8 now on the PTE, we’ll be refining the gameplay and HUD elements further, going into future patches. For now, what you can see on your screen is a work in progress.

Finally, there’s also the Napalm Strike we showed a few weeks ago together with Artillery Smoke. We wanted to keep it in a bit longer for performance reasons. It’s still not 100% there, but it’s working well enough to start testing its gameplay viability and usage in the war zone.

If you are not aware of how to join the PTE, you can find it as a separate game in your Steam library named World War 3 PTE.

The full 0.8 Patch Notes are available here!

Last Week at the Office

When it comes to the HUD, the last week at the office was filled with Breakthrough testing and information layer improvements. We’ve added on screen messages about defuses and plants, all the timers and a few additional things to let people know better what is happening around.

We have a few more things we’d like to add, but we’re waiting for you feedback, since there are a few ways we could go about it. We want to show the current contested area on the map better and direct people more into the proper place. Also, the retreat mechanic will get some additional features, like bonuses for defenders if they retreat successfully and for attackers if they stop the retreat.

Movement

One of the questions you might have is about the movement overhaul. Next big milestone on our Roadmap is the Movement Overhaul – this is still the case, but we decided to not wait until it’s 100% done and release the Breakthrough patch in the meantime. Its release is somewhere in-between the milestones. This is why we’ve decided to not put numbers on them knowing we could have something like this happen.

We figured that it’s better to give the players something that’s nearly done right now rather than make you all wait for the movement and bunch it all together. This is mainly why we were able to release 0.8 to the PTE so soon after 0.7 hit Live – it’s only been a little over 2 weeks!

Breakthrough Community Trailer

While we’re working on an internal trailer for Breakthrough, we had an idea, that since it’s a community game mode and a lot of you took your time to help us make it, we want to give you an opportunity to have your gameplay in an official trailer. For now this is not set in stone, nothing is concrete, but this is how we would see it happening:

The trailer would be a montage of cool stuff from the Breakthrough PTE testing – clips of great actions and all that fun things you can do in this game mode. There are way more of you than us at the studio, so there’s a good chance you can record more of the sweet destruction than we do. We would also take stream footage, if the compression won’t abysmal. We’ll tell you more about this in the coming weeks.

We are currently planning to keep 0.8 on the PTE for a few weeks to refine it and make sure there are no big exploits and problems and to release it to the Live servers soon.

See you in the next Weekly Report!