Greetings Nomads
It’s been 24 hours since the launch of the Season 6 test and we are so glad to see many returning and new players enjoying what we’ve done with the game. We wanted to take some time to go over everything we’ve learned so far and what we’re doing going forward to keep improving throughout this test.
Canyon Tiles
As many of you already know, we’ve released Canyon tiles a day earlier than we anticipated. This is largely due to the feedback we’ve been receiving from you in the community and we want you to know we’re listening. Hopefully this will show you we’re willing to make changes to the original plan when we see a better path forward for your enjoyment of the game.
We want to keep the cradle tile in the game to some capacity as it’s a great starting point for players. Often in previous seasons we noticed you would just deathspawn off the tile completely and never visit it again. Further, it gives players the opportunity to fight each other and use the “stone age” tier of technology along with the firefly, spider and dinghy which a lot of players enjoy using. We may look into other measures to keep players sticking around, but for now we’ve learned that 24 hours is likely enough time to enjoy the cradle and be ready to move on to the next level.
Xbox
We’ve had a lot of feedback from our console players particularly about the starting point for the game and lack of tutorial. During our long-awaited certification process we had to disable the intro animation for xbox players to prevent them from crashing. This stopped the tutorial quest line from triggering and so a lot of players had a lot of trouble gaining the early levels. We’ve already made some changes to reimplement this and we’re awaiting certification for that update. With that, console players should have a much better early game experience going forward. We will do our best to fix other ui/compatibility issues with Xbox as well.
Bugs
There have been plenty of bugs discovered through this test and we’re doing our best to address all of them as they come. In the next update we will be fixing many that we’ve found - prioritizing the biggest ones first.
Moving Forward
As we move forward into the Canyon maps, we expect fights to have a lot more depth as the tech level increases along with different ammo types, weapons, and walkers. With the quality system, event tiles, and proxy walkers there is sure to be a lot more content and large fights on it’s way.
Please remember that this test is all about finding the right balance of gameplay and ensuring the direction we’re going is what the players want.
See you in the wastes!
