Developer Briefing #190 – A New Plan For The Future

Hey everyone,

We would like to start off by saying thank you for your dedication to Hell Let Loose. The voice of the community will always be an important influence for us, and we understand that your trust is earned with actions – not just words.

To ensure we can deliver higher quality updates, we will be delaying Update 15.
We have already begun revising our plans, and are reviewing what these changes mean to the existing roadmap – and intend to keep you up to date with any progress and changes, across developer briefings.

• We’re putting plans together for structured PTEs, where players can provide feedback after each session that will be filtered into the development process. In order to ensure this process is effective, we’ll be rolling this out in stages, while building upon it.
• We’re working on ways to adjust our schedule to see what is possible to better accommodate fixes and patches in between larger updates. This is an ongoing process, and will take time to perfect, however, we are committed to the course of action.
• We have increased our QA resources to begin better supporting both quality of life fixes and new content.
• We’re structuring new ways to address gameplay changes that can take player feedback into consideration, prior to finalizing for release. This process will also include the recent speed increase, and aims to be adopted for any future changes.

Thank you to everyone who provided feedback regarding Update 14. We have read all of the feedback and observed many of the same issues. The patch for Update 14 is not inclusive of all the issues raised, but we are working on getting many fixed, with the view to target additional bugs for Update 15, with a revised date to be announced.

Planned for the 22nd of June, the Update 14 patch targets several UX/UI issues, as well as updates to the dive to prone mechanic and player locomotion.

The Update 14 patch will introduce some refined player locomotion for players to test that will lower sprint acceleration, which aims to combat the current experience and prevent players from zig-zagging in order to avoid gunfire.

The new dive to prone feature introduced with Update 14, unfortunately, left room for players to dolphin dive. With this patch, players will no longer be able to cancel the animation and will not be able to use the function until the animation has been carried out.

We have identified that the XP earned at the end of the match was incorrect. Experience was not being rewarded for multiples of the same XP reward. We have since fixed this and continue to investigate to ensure the XP Reward system is as intended.

We have read your feedback surrounding some of the British weaponry, and for the Update 14 patch, will be submitting fixes for the reports of British weapons not being correctly zeroed, as well as the increased weapon sway when ADSing.

There was a bug causing various ‘F’ key interactions – healing, entering a vehicle and ‘letting go’ during the critical state – to be cancelled when opening the map. This has now been fixed, with the exception of the dismantle function which is as intended.

The newly introduced vote to kick function on console has been fixed. You will now find only 20 votes are required to successfully kick a player. Evaluating how we can scale this feature is ongoing, and we will keep you up to date with progress.

Your reports showed that the British AT-gun movement was inverted. We have now fixed this so that the controls are as expected – the ‘S’ key will cause the barrel to lower and the ‘W’ key will cause the barrel to rise.

The invisible collision present under the bridge on Driel has been resolved. Players will now be able to shoot or drive vehicles through the space.

When typing a server name in the Server Filter box on PC, a bug was causing the box to deselect after each character, making it difficult to type out and search for a server name. This issue has now been resolved.

The audio for the sprinting action has been reworked so it no longer overlaps.

We have received a number of reports indicating some players have been running into an issue where they are met with the ‘lost connection to host’ prompt once a match has ended. A fix for this issue has been submitted for this patch.

Some issues have been harder to reproduce, or require further time to ensure we can submit a successful fix. We are still investigating the following issues:

The British forces’ Sherman Firefly tank’s frontal hull can be penetrated using high penetration weapons, allowing players to destroy the tank from the front. This issue is continuing to be investigated.

Due to our existing development process and in order to maintain the integrity of our files, we are unable to change the accidentally switched map loading screen dates for Driel and El Alamein, with this patch. The change will instead be implemented once Update 15 is released.

Similarly, other text, such as the misspelling of ‘Panther’, will also be amended in Update 15.

There are other issues and additional fixes that we plan to use this time to begin tackling, before releasing new content, and will communicate these once we have scoped how we can deliver them.

We are incredibly grateful to serve such a passionate community, and endeavour to continue working on our transparency, moving forward with a new approach to PTEs that offer the chance to provide quality feedback, alongside seeing what fixes are possible to introduce.

We’ve got a lot of work to do, so we’ll see you all on the frontline!