The best topic for a first Dev Blog post is obviously our upcoming Community Update #3 that will go live on Thursday, November 2nd! Before we continue let me add that a huge part of it is directly inspired by the Community Ideas you shared with us on Pilgrim Outpost.
I want to use this opportunity to thank all of you who participated – you really delivered, submitting more than 10 000 cool ideas, pieces of feedback and inspirations! The first round is officially locked and loaded, with lots of cool stuff already getting put in the game – some in this and the rest in the following updates!
So… how about we take a closer look at some of the cool stuff that we've implemented first? For starters, you were very clear about the need for adjustments when it comes to inventory & resources management – and this is where dismantling of gear and weapon mods comes into play. Below you can see what the change looks like in the game menu.
Both of those actions can be performed on the fly, so whenever you’re missing some crafting resources you can dismantle a mod or an unused gear piece hoping they’ll drop what you need.
Another feature that you asked for the most is the possibility to repair weapons. Well, by popular demand, it’s coming! We’ve added this option to our Craft Masters, responding to your feedback that these NPCs should offer more services. How does it look in the game? See for yourself!
As always we’re very interested in your opinion, so let us know what you think about the balance of weapon repair costs – you can leave your comments on Reddit as soon as you try it out.
Another area on which we focused is our lighting tech. We received a lot of reports mentioning that the bloom effect was too harsh. Another batch of feedback referenced some of our color gradings setups – e.g. stating that you like the feel of the “Darker Nights'' color grading but don’t really find the same atmosphere in "Gritty "or" Harran Sunset”. We updated the lighting parameters trying to solve most of those problems and we also added three new options to the Advanced Graphic settings that give you ability to additionally tweak such effects as Glow, Light Streaks & Lens Flare.
Below you can see what the change looks like in the game menu.
One more cool thing that we’re really excited about is finishers! They work for Biters, Virals, and most Humans, and to perform them you need to lower the enemy stamina. We are adding a bunch of those finishers in this update – 7 different types, depending on the weapon held by the Player in their hands – but the plan is that we’ll add even more over time. That means, as soon as our mo-cap team and animators make them just the right amount of gory and brutal.
Below you can see a screenshot presenting work in progress of the knuckle dusters finisher, dubbed by the Animation Team as "Jaw Destruction".
They say working on them is a lot of fun, I say… they enjoy it slightly too much. If you’re interested in the topic let us know! I’ll try to convince our animation director Dawid Lubryka, main finishers animator Eduardo Calderin and some of our audio and VFX guys to talk more about the feature in the next dev blog. Here's a behind the scenes look at a mo-cap session of one that's coming further down the line.
The update is getting released in a matter of hours, and I don’t really want to spoil everything about it, so I’ll just reveal that we paid attention to our end game players, introducing a few small balance tweaks to legend levels. You can expect bigger LP gains from some of the sources – e.g. encounters, challenges, quests and open world activities, we’ve lowered penalties for dying on selected difficulty levels, and changed some of the buffs that Legend Levels give you. We don’t want to stop here – the next update after this one will also bring some additional improvements to this end game system.
Gosh, I’d really like to spoil it all to you, but the update will go live very, very soon, and you’ll get to see all the features and surprises for yourselves. Please remember that this Community Update is just the first as we're planning to have a couple more dropping in the upcoming months, delivering everything that you could find on our recently published Sneak Peek.
And getting back to your ideas showing up in the game – we’ll talk about that some more in the next post. With the second round of Community Ideas about to start, I definitely want to tell you how it works on the dev side and explain how we pick the ideas, what we can and can’t do from the technical point of view, why some of them take longer to implement, all that “dev stuff”.
At the end of the post let me just say that it’s really cool to be able to talk to you and get my thoughts together in this format – but let me know what you think!
