Even in its earliest designs, Rend’s development has been guided by two principle mechanics: survival gameplay and third-person-shooter gunplay. Over the course of Early Access, we’ve been harvesting player feedback and found that while Rend’s survival elements are strong (if a little daunting which we’ve begun to address as of Patch 6), its gunplay needs to feel more impactful and visceral. We’ve taken the community’s insights to heart, evaluating where combat can be improved upon further and how best to make Rend’s weapons “feel good” with the goal of designing the game’s combat to be competitive with other mainstream multiplayer shooters.

AIMING HIGHER WITH REND'S GUNPLAY

Combat improvements will always be a top priority for our team. Feedback from our Early Access players indicated that their key pain points centered on weapon imbalance with clearly superior and inferior options and a general lack of visual and audible information with regards to the gunplay. While we planned for the game to do a better job of conveying what was happening in a fight, it was community feedback that helped us prioritize those improvements to be deployed sooner. Involving our players in the development process is using Early Access the way it was intended: listening to and incorporating constructive criticism from the community, focusing on making the gameplay more enjoyable, and producing a more polished game as a result.

We began making immediate, iterative improvements to Rend’s combat with the first elements implemented in September as early as Patch 4. These initial updates centered around rebalancing all of Rend’s damage sources with a focus on scaling outliers back in line with the greater weapon curve. This led to more than a few “greatly increased/decreased [value]” patch notes -- some of which were unpopular at the time -- but as a result, this data revealed necessary changes. This was followed by a series of improvements to how Rend communicates combat to the player: shaking the camera when shooting or shot, adding more sounds for footsteps, reloading, and empty clip clicks, and implementing visual interface indicators and audio cues for hits and crits. For instance, now a player clearly knows when an arrow is nocked in their bow and ready to fire from sound alone.

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Read more at https://www.rendgame.com/news/article/rend-roadmap-combat-reloaded