PREPARING FOR LAUNCH

• Integrated 8 new weather scenarios.
• Rigged all commercial buildings and small props for destruction.
• Created a massive technical optimisation solution of map assets management to increase performance when driving.
• Massive town polish pass on all southern cities (Saint John, Fort City, Bridgetown, Southbay, Eagle Cliff)
• Updated world map and minimap assets.
• Added tornado sirens in all towns.
• Fixed an issue on lower end PCs with terrains sometimes not loading correctly and leaving big holes in the map.
• Fixed an issue requiring players to restart their game client between matches to join another match.
• Integrated a system to prevent players not getting the same scenario too often in a row.
• Integrated new loading screen digital art.
• HUUUUUGE Day 1 patch following Closed Beta Testing https://steamcommunity.com/app/1107320/eventcomments/4411920671410569399/

LAUNCHING OUTBRK

SERVER STUFF

• Servers took some time to warm up and scale so it took time to identify the real issues that were preventing the players from joining.
• We had different issues on NA and EU, further complicating our investigating process.
• Once we identified the actual issues with matchmaking we got to work on hotfixes.

FPS STUFF

• We are well aware about the fps issues with our new cloud technology and we are working on it, that being said, we released the game with the “fantastic” graphic preset by default for everybody so that really hurts the player’s experience with the game when they first launched it.
• We failed to explain what we’re trying to do with our cloud technology to the average gamer, people see the average look of the game, which is very indie we know, and compare the performance with AAA titles. All our weather is a completely unique technology made for OUTBRK and it’s something that has never been done before. We’re rendering real weather data accurately, this is absolutely out of scope for any video game usually. The technology is brand new, we made it work for OUTBRK at the very end of the development cycle, right before we launched Early Access, there is a lot of work remaining still, for the people that follow our Trello work board, it’s everything under the Backlog - Catalyst section.
• Part of this same point, we have some settings to mitigate some of the cloud fps issues in the graphical settings, such as Cloud Downsampling, but this is not really understood by players since it’s not a setting usually found in games. People think they have to play on low with a high end computer to run the game, when in fact they just have to up their Cloud Downsampling a tiny bit.

OUR REACTION TO THE FEEDBACK

• Let’s not kid ourselves, launching a multiplayer game is hard as hell. If AAA games have server issues at launch, we expected something would go wrong too, no matter how much we would prepare to some extent. However, being in the driver seat is another experience entirely. Having to work on critical bug fixes at the same time as we have to answer to the community is an incredible amount of pressure. Huuuuge shout out to our moderation team on Discord and Steam and our lead tester WalkOverYou that handled the bug reports coming in MASS, gave swift answers to the people getting stuck, and gave workarounds to players. Really an incredible support team that did a fantastic job under the huge amount of pressure that is release day.
• We did our best to keep our cool and focus on what we do best, fix bugs. We went in “war room mode” tackled urgent issues, got a first patch out addressing critical issues, and behold, it worked! We released PATCH 0.1.571 and servers stabilized dramatically and new players now have much better FPS getting in the game.

NEXT STEPS