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Full Urban Warfare comes in Update 7!Hey everyone,
Welcome to Developer Briefing #82!
This week we’re starting to formally reveal and go into detail on some of the content you’ll be diving into when Update 7 drops in the near future.
This week, Lead Developer Max is taking you on an introduction to the next map coming to Hell Let Loose… Carentan!
Introducing Carentan
Hi everyone,
Max here!
For a long time we’ve wanted to put together a proper urban map that took the more open-field combat of Hell Let Loose and placed it in a dense, built-up environment. To do that effectively and in a way that captured both the best of gameplay and the best visuals relied on us building up a huge asset library that would allow us to curate gameplay, as well as create a convincing urban landscape.
We’re incredibly proud to finally reveal that our next map will be Carentan – coming in Update 7 alongside our animation overhaul and many, many other additions.
Carentan is very different to every Hell Let Loose map you’ve played before. We studied all the feedback from Sainte-Mère-Église (our urban test-run). From this we boiled down key elements that made up great urban warfare and then set about building a pipeline that would allow us to deliver this in an optimised way.
Carentan is hugely iconic – first made so by Band of Brothers, and then by the countless iterations of the location in games – starting of course with Call of Duty 1. We wanted – in typical Hell Let Loose fashion – to recreate the town exactly and lay it out in a way that enables you to fight the battle at the scale of the real-life engagement. All the most iconic locations are present, but in their own location. You’ll be able to fight from the Cafe Desire Ingouf and the Cafe De Normandie, through the train station and all the way to the Arcades of the Place de la République before crossing the canal locks into the countryside.
As you can see from the tactical map below, the key to Carentan is owning and protecting the bridges crossing the canals to the north, as well as the four main thoroughfares through the town itself.
The town is huge – easily the largest playable urban landscape that we’ve ever attempted. Building a photoreal town from to-scale reference is no easy feat – and to achieve that we’ve taken the liberty of closing off many of the 2000+ gardens that lay nestled behind the street fronts.
Like the battle itself, we wanted to consolidate the combat to the streets, squares and houses. As such, we’ve curated key locations and access points as happened in the real battle. We’ve tested player density considerably and are confident in the brutal street-to-street and house-to-house fighting.
We’ve changed much of our level design ethos and systems in the last six months. We’ll explain this far deeper in it’s own Dev Brief, but you’ll notice that Carentan has a much higher level of consistent detail in every location.
Beyond the town itself are the low lying flooded fields, the outlying farmhouses and the Mont Halais position – a hilltop flak position that overlooks the train station.
We’re starting to prepare for the launch of Update 7 in the coming weeks and the coming dev briefs are going to contain some of the biggest changes to the game that we’ve ever made.
‘Caption This’ Competition by MoscaTnT – The Winners
Thanks for all of your submissions to the recent HLL subreddit competition that was run by our very talented community illustrator MoscaTnT. We were very taken back by the response from the community and we will be sure to do more of these or similar comps in the near future! So if you haven’t done so yet, make sure to follow the subreddit for all the glorious future content!
If you would like to check out the other submitted captions here is the link
The Winners
We decided to give an extra key away, as the judges were torn because there were so many good captions!
1st Game Key goes to _SGP_
For:
2nd Game Key goes to PANZERmx
For:
*Drumroll*
And the winner of a Custom Designed Avatar from Art creator MoscaTnT and Game Key goes to
Uomodelmonte86
For:
The prize in all its glory:
Steam Summer Sale 25% Discount & Next Week’s Developer Brief!
Prepare for Carentan, grow your unit, join the battle right now in the Steam Summer Sale with a 25% discount:
