It’s been one day into Early Access and we are already learning a lot from your feedback. The team is very excited about some upcoming changes that we want to communicate to you.
So what’s coming for Days of War?
Here are the issues we've gathered from feedback that we are prioritizing for fixes.
Optimization
Right now our focus is on increasing the efficiency of the game with higher player counts. Average FPS seems to be about 60 for most players on a full server, and we want this to be over 100 for a mid range PC and 144+ for high end machines.
The biggest effect on framerate is the number of players in the server at once, due to the cost of player animations. For this reason on a full server your video settings won’t have a major impact on your framerate. Over the coming weeks we'll be rewriting our animation code/logic to address this.
If you are not happy with your framerate on a 32 player server, we’d recommend playing on smaller servers for the moment. Part of the reason we do our 100 player battle events is to help optimize the game for more players, be it 16, 32, 64 or 100.
Visibility
Our goals with the visibility have a few dimensions
Adjust lighting to be more consistent, some areas now are too dark, some are too bright
Severely reduce fog and dust to allow better visibility over distance
Increase contrast between player model and environment
Reduce the appearance of “film grain”
We are going to be making changes to the lighting, fog, ambient occlusion and other post process settings to increase visibility in these areas with the first fixes coming tonight.
Kill/Death Feedback
We want it to be easier to tell when you’ve gotten a kill / assist and where you are being shot from.
This covers a few elements from sound to UI/HUD, and we’ve gotten plenty of good suggestions from the community which we will begin testing.
New Content
Aside from the bug fixing, optimizing and performance updates, we have made a roadmap with our future plans. Here below an overview, to give you an impression of the current state of the game and what is scheduled for the upcoming months
Days of War is now available on Early Access. Along with this major milestone we have an exciting announcement:
100 Player Battle Events!
We love tight competitive gameplay more than anyone, but World War 2 was defined by its massive battles and invasions, and we want to bring that experience to Days of War with 100 player combat.
The first 100 Player Battle Event will take place from Feb 3rd - 5th, where we will have 100 players storming Omaha beach. To participate all you need to do is look for one the official Driven Arts servers that weekend.
These 100 player battles will initially be offered as planned events so we can fine-tune the details and performance. Once all is going well, we will be raising the server cap from 32 to 100 so you can host your own as well.
To celebrate the event, we're giving away 100 copies of the game, follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more info on how to enter.
Come join the fight!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/454350
Release Date and EA Roadmap
Mark your calendars.
Days of War will be coming to Early Access on January 26th.
As we move into Early Access we want to share with you some of the planned additions to the game. Below we have outlined our high level roadmap for the coming months.
Early Access Roadmap
First things first, we want to remind everyone that Days of War is still in development. Anything in the game now is subject to change and most of it will be changing. This includes art, animations, sound, FX, maps, etc. We will adjust the priority of changes based on what we hear from you, so please continue to give us your feedback.
Maps
We are announcing our next 2 official maps, one in the sun, one in the snow. Names are placeholder.
dow_italy
Gamemode: Domination
The first is a map from the D-Day invasion of Italy and takes place on the hilly Italian coastline. We've introduced a bit of verticality with this map but kept the layout fairly traditional.
dow_foy
Gamemode: Detonation
This map is based on the Siege of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium in late 1944, as shown in Band of Brothers. Allies spawn in the forest in foxholes and must assault the town. Axis must defend three objectives, a tank, a flak88 and a howitzer that are all capable of shelling the Allies.
Other Maps
We will be adding at least 2 more official maps before final release (bringing the total to 8).
We have had many great suggestions for map ideas since we began, and have created an official thread over on the forums to solicit more ideas in a consolidated place. If you have previously suggested a map idea on the forums or elsewhere, feel free to post it there again. We may put some ideas up to vote. Ideas can be simply concepts/settings, abstract layouts drawn in MS paint, or both!
Map Editor
After we hit Early Access we want to get the map editor out ASAP. We know there's a lot of untapped creativity out there ready to be unleashed. Building maps in UE4 is already pretty simple but we want to do everything possible to make the process pain free. We’ve looked at how other games (both UE4 and others) treat modding and map making and we’re cherry picking the best attributes for our editor.
We've also begun work on Steam Workshop integration which will act as the hub for all custom maps.
Sound
Sounds will be one of the most important areas of improvement over the coming months. Sound in an online FPS is a complex beast and we will continue to improve our sounds until our full release.
Weapon fire polish - We want to add more pop to our weapon sounds and improve the overall feeling of satisfaction when firing.
Spacialization and Occlusion - Because our sounds exist in 3D space there are many quirks we need to polish to make sure the sound attenuation is natural.
Shot and Hit feedback - We want to improve the feedback of scoring hits/kills on other players and vice versa. A preliminary version of this should be making its way into the game soon for testing.
Voiceover - We aim to have a basic version of American and German voice commands soon after EA launch.
Ambience - up until now a lot of our maps have been dead silent, we are adding subtle ambient noises to make it feel more like a war, though you will be able to disable these noises should you wish.
VOIP - Unfortunately our game engine does not currently have native support for VOIP, we will be working with third party providers to get VOIP in DoW as soon as we can.
Animations
In the Animation arena we’ve established a robust locomotion system but the animation asset quality is no where near final and a lot of updates are planned after the EA launch for an 'Animation V2' update.
We want to improve our core locomotion and also make weapon actions more detailed with the goal of making it easy to spot what a specific class on the battlefield is doing.
We also plan to improve the posture and rigging of our players to look more natural when moving.
Characters
One major area of priority for us right now is player visibility. We want to make it easier to pick people out on our maps, especially at distance. We plan to start by tweaking the character models themselves as well as textures and lighting in key areas of our maps.
New Factions
We've finished the initial character models and most of the first batch of weapons.
British
Lee-Enfield No 4
Sten Mk II
Bren LMG
Lee-Enfield No 4 Sniper
Lewis .303 Mk. I Model 1915
PIAT
Webley Mk IV
Mills Bomb
The British and Russian factions will be added during the early access period, though we have yet to finalize which maps we will be launching the new factions with so we welcome suggestions!
Stability and Optimization
Bugs are bad, and FPS are good.
The stability and performance of our game is paramount to our success and we will not stop until we’ve squashed every annoyance and eked out every bit of performance we can from our engine. This includes tedious efforts like completely rewriting all the code for our weapon system (currently in process), and experimenting with making tweaks to the core engine to tailor optimizations to our game.
Progression and Stat Tracking Systems
We're finishing work on our backend frameworks for stat tracking and progression. We are going to start with a basic version and iterate from there based on what we learn.
Version 1 will include a basic Round End screen with summary stats and an xp progression system. Version 2 will have persistent global stats and a cosmetic unlock system.
We want to reiterate our promise to you that any progression system we make will be purely cosmetic and able to be turned off for competition.
Competitive Mode / Matchmaking
Having played organized 6v6 scrimmage matches during the course of testing, we know competitive play is a blast and a completely different experience from 16v16. We want to make it easier to get a 6v6 pickup game and play under a competitive ruleset.
Making a matchmaking system is a significant effort, but we've always kept it in mind. Realistically we see the competitive side of DoW evolving over time in 3 main stages
1. Create a pre-configured 6v6 mode for server admins
2. Create a matchmaking system for players or groups to find 6v6 matches
3. Implement a CSGO style competitive ranking system to facilitate more even matches
We are putting a link to this roadmap in the game client so that players can easily access our development schedule and provide feedback to shape what our priorities should be.
Giveaway Winners
WINNERS ANNOUNCED
7Davis
Andreas Petersson
Art 💢
Artorias
Brady Fritz Hayward
Brian Wright
Caio Mariani
Christopher D Caruso
DK'
DubPhobia | YouTube
Federico Beaumont Fantozzi
George
Gouda
iWaxxy
James Christain Reynolds
Jared Doty
Johnny Laz
kentijn
koma
Márcio Alves Barroso
Nathan R. Ferreira
Rob Reckless6
Sebastian Gawel
sHaKeNbAkE
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Winners will be contacted via Social media for delivery of their key.
Thanks to over 1,200 people who participated, we've reached almost 300k people on social media! Keep an eye out for more giveaways coming up to launch.
Early Access Key Giveaway
To celebrate the launch of the Steam Page we are going to be giving away 25 copies of the game.
To enter the giveaway, all you need to do is share Days of War Steam page on social media using this link: http://daysofwar.nouncy.com/store-launch
