Spencer
Hey Hurtworld fam, It’s been another kickass week around the studio as we really start to nail down the final roadmap as we head towards the V2 launch. We’ve had a lot of really good feedback in the forums on what you guys like / think is missing in V2. We’ve also been playing a fair bit around the modded servers and checking out what changes to the meta they bring, and finding some elements that work really well.
With all this discussion and new elements, Tom and I have had our design hats on working to bring the biggest points into the game without disrupting too much of what we already have. In the past we would run with an idea, end up changing 50% of the game and end up with something so different and rushed that we didn’t know what was going on. Our mantra now is to make sure 100% we are only making improvements to the game as we lead up to the V2 launch (that might seem like an obvious thing to do, but while we were doing more crazy experiments we knew some stuff wouldn’t work, for now we’re done with that).
Here are the key elements we’ve been working towards based on feedback and our own discussions:
Farming grind is getting in the way of player interaction
This is a big one that came up a lot in the forums “Farmworld” and we agree that it has a lot of merit. While we don’t think having items that require farm is a bad thing, we need to make sure that we prioritize interaction between players over progression grind. After all, the thing that makes survival games great is the unknown element of the other players in the server. The farm is designed as a proof that you put work into your gear thus giving it value to you and making PVP / raiding more interesting.
Bragging rights / Thrill of the fight for rewards
We definitely lost sight of this a bit, in trying to ensure that every action in game had a tangible reward in the progression. When in reality, things like getting into PVP skirmishes are reward enough in themselves to warrant the risks involved. Take for example raiding: The vast majority of raids that involve C4 end up in a loss of materials given the C4 is so expensive. Rarely will you find more C4 inside the base than you used to get into it.
So why do people raid? This seems pretty obvious when you look at it like that… because its fun as hell, and you can dominate some other crew. In our recent design, this was a missing link in our thinking: That some of the best rewards in the game don’t come in the form of useful loot.
Shortening the grind time to be PVP viable
Something we learned from playing on Hurtfun (4x loot) over the last couple wipes, is the point where you have enough resources to lose in a fight and not care, it opens you up to participating in much more exciting interactions than running around hitting rocks and trying not to get killed. You can go and pick fights, because you won’t have to go back to farming for 2 hours to make up for your losses if it doesn’t go well.
I call this point PVP saturation. The point where you have enough gear to be on reasonably equal footing with others in PVP, and have more insurance money than you will need for a while. In vanilla this takes ages to reach, and a few deaths sets you back a long time making PVP an expensive game to be part of if you don’t always win. We will be working on shortening this time greatly. Firstly by increasing the amber drop rate so that deaths don’t screw you over as much and possibly increasing early farming yield to get you in the PVP game faster.
This doesn’t mean we are abandoning the concept of having to farm for something. Some people like the PVE progression, and some items work well having a high proof of work involved in them, not everything will be cheap, but overall we will be shortening the amount of time to get through the basic gear progression.
Fostering a more meaningful End Game
The reason I’ve always leaned on the side of making the progression require a bit of grind is a fear of players getting to the end of the progression too fast and getting bored. In our current meta that makes sense, endgame isn’t particularly interesting. My new approach to this is not to extend the progression but to fix the fact that the end game lacks any meaningful depth. Raiding is sloppy, and given our 100% focus on tangible loot rewards for all actions, endgame without loot rewards didn’t make sense to me.
I now have faith that if we build endgame systems that encourage player interaction, and balance endgame systems to not punish people with massive farm requirements for participating in PVP that we can create much more frequent and much more interesting PVP situations. These systems won’t reward you with guns or build materials but bragging rights.
We are working on some ideas internally for improving endgame and have some cool stuff cooking but is a bit early to discuss, but the key to this process will be fixing raiding mechanics like construction design and unraidable bases along with fixing raiding tool costs to make raiding feasible. More on the bragging rights systems next week!
TL;DR: Get to end game quicker, make endgame not shit.
TEHSPLATT
This week I’ve been working on replacing the characters hands for the first person and third person models. Currently the hands are very square and feel disconnected from the updated designs. The process involved grabbing some old hands I had made and transplanting them onto the current model and then due to the squareness being baked into the normal map of the original hands I had to re-sculpt them to add in some smoother detail. Unfortunately the first person hands don’t line up with the third person hands so I had to do some tweaking to get everything into the correct position then re-skin them again, also finding an actual clean rig file for our v2 character has been a bit of a difficult task so I’ve made one from the pieces of the main character in the project. Here’s some shots of the updated hands (there’s still a couple UV seams on these older pictures).
Mils
I’ve had a crack at the marketing for the V2 release. This was going well but we decided to get Splatt to work on the expression of the character for the promo images for Steam. This makes far more sense as he’s our character specialist. Also we have a new guy starting work with us soon, he’s a gun at video editing, sound production and other very useful skills. He will probably do the work for the other half of the branding, so for now I will be doing some rework on the resource drill and the blast furnace. These have sorely needed a rework for a while and should come up looking something more along the lines of the Titranium Workbench.
Tom
Hey Hurtworldians,
As those of you who have been following the blog recently would know the fragment overhaul I’d been working on didn’t make it into 0.6.2.0. After reviewing the work so far with Spencer we decided it would be better to delay it rather than push out something we weren’t that happy with just to make the deadline.
Since 0.6.2.0 we’ve been evaluating the state of the game and think we need to make some changes to the core of the game (see Spencer’s section for more info on these) that are going to affect the implementation of fragments so we’ve decided to delay the fragment overhaul until we’ve gotten through these other changes.
Whilst we’ve been designing these new changes I’ve also been working on a range of fixes including improved handling of field of view and resolution settings.
I’ve overhauled the ‘setres’ console command so it will only accept resolutions natively supported by your monitor (these are the same resolutions you can choose between in the options menu), I’ve also updated the field of view setting so it now represents horizontal field of view and made weapons sighted field of view setting a multiplier value rather than an explicit number that ignored your field of view setting (ie. the pistol used to set field of view to 40 but instead it now multiplies the current field of view by 0.6 letting it scale better with your configuration).
I also added some extra third person camera collision detection so hopefully after the next hotfix patch peeking through walls will finally be a thing of the past. If I’m wrong definitely let us know as I’m determined to stop this!
As well as the field of view / resolution fixes, I’ve also got the following fixes going into the next patch:
- Bolt pull guns will now require a bullet rechamber (bolt pull) when equipping before they can be fired (fixes speeding up bolt pull refire by swapping between bolt pull guns)
- Removing default attachments from attachment loot tables
- Fixed a bug in how weather system distance falloff was calculated (weather systems now blend in and out over a longer distance)
- World item physics simulation is now forced off 10 seconds after spawn if the object has not yet come to a rest (improves performance)
- Players are no longer forced back to first person perspective on respawn
- Improved server side vehicle performance
We should be rolling out a hotfix patch with these fixes + some extra debugging options to help discover obscure problems in our item management sometime next week. These changes will not require a wipe so official servers will be staying on the same save.