Hello, Soldiers!

This week we wanted to let you know how things are going and what the current development tasks are going on. It can be pretty obvious for us involved with the game on a daily basis, but it’s easy to forget not everyone spends 50 hours a week working on World War 3, so letting you know what we’re doing from time to time is a good thing.

0.8 Testing

0.8 has been in public testing for a while and the newest gamemode, Breakthrough, has gotten a fair share of feedback. We’re very happy to see that people love the game mode in general, but also see some problems worth addressing. We agree with this wholeheartedly and we’ve started fixing some things.

For starters, the plant/defuse visibility will be increased, so you really know when they happen. Secondly, as we wrote last week, the Retreat mechanic is now fleshed out further: the attacking team won’t be able to rush the next objective until the retreat is finished. We will rebalance the points that attackers and defenders get, move some stations around and fix some bugs that make Breakthrough a bit less enjoyable.

You can catch up on the BRE feedback in this topic and throw your two cents in – we encourage you to do so! The overall 0.8 feedback topic is here.

Some of those changes are already done or are being done, so keep training on PTE so you can help new players once 0.8 hits Live. Yes, help. Not crush.

Vehicle armor poll

Our design team asked the players about the current armor system. The main idea behind this is to know what makes sense for the players and what is still not explained well enough. Because the time for balancing is coming soon, we want to be prepared and know what our players want and need, so we can make better decisions, so log in and let us know where you stand!

https://forum.worldwar3.com/index.php?/topic/10826-poll-vehicle-armors-system/

HUD Improvements

We’re also working on the new HUD a lot, with changes to the strike bar on the bottom, some icon redesigns and implementing feedback we got on it from you. It seems to be a big hit in general, with a few points of contention, which we’re addressing.

Optimization

On the optimization front, we’re starting to move more and more resources into making the game smoother as we’re nearing the 1.0 slowly. This will ramp up greatly before release and we’re expecting big changes in the last patch or two. Right now we’re optimizing the loading order of things (especially levels) and moving more and more things to be loaded asynchronously (or “on-the-fly”), so the freezing related to loading assets when playing (streaming, player or vehicle customization etc.) should be reduced. It requires some changes to the item database, so there’s no ETA, but we’re constantly working on optimizing the game and making it work better.

Movement system

We’re currently still in the process of merging the movement system into the newest version of the game. It will take some time, because since we started working on it, the game changed a lot and we have to make sure we’re not breaking anything and the system works as intended once merged together. It’s more of a tedious and repetitive work, so it takes some time. It’s getting close, and we can’t stress how excited we all are to show it to you. Remember – we can’t wait as much as you do!

Other work

The other work is progressing as always: more vehicles, more attachments, more weapons, more maps, the new UI is progressing nicely – we’re also working on a firing range in tandem. There’s some cool things coming to the player progression, constant bug fixing and so on – there’s a lot of cool stuff coming to World War 3 in the coming weeks and months.

We won an award!

We’ve also received another award for our game – this time from a polish magazine. The award took a bit to get here, but it finally arrived and now we can present it to you. World War 3 is the Best Polish Game, as voted during the IThardware for Gamers 2019 plebiscite! Thank you for the recognition – the coming year will be even more exciting!

Next Week

As we wrote in last week’s report, we’ll be creating a community trailer for Breakthrough game mode. Keep recording, make sure you’re ready when we open the submissions up!

One more small thing: November 11th is a national holiday in Poland, so the Weekly Report will be late by about 24 hours, so don’t be alarmed, when the report is not out on Monday.

See you then and thanks for reading!