Good Morning Vietnam fans!
As many of you may know by now we are planning to kick off Closed Beta Wave 4 tomorrow if all goes well on our end! As part of this all of the players who stopped by our booth at PAX South will be joining us. But as always we are once again inviting the next wave and sending out many more invites so keep an eye out on your emails.
Before I go into any more specifics on what CB 4 (Closed Beta Wave 4) entails I want to cover some lessons learned in CB 3 (keep in mind that not all of these will be addressed in CB 4). First of all I would like to thank those of you who responded (just under 50% of our new players to the wave and many of our regulars from previous waves). And a quick reminder - we update the survey every time, while we're also looking for your views on "did we do better or not" - so we strongly encourage everyone to fill in the survey, even if you've done it before! So let us take a look:
As always to those who participate in the next wave we are preparing another survey which we would love for all participants to fill out after playing to help us better gather and react to player feedback!
Now let us move onto some specifics about Closed Beta Wave 4:
Bringing our Direct X 11 renderer online has gone faster than we originally anticipated and as such DX 9 has been removed from the build and replaced with DX 11. Players will need a DX 11-capable card and OS moving ahead. The first part of this renderer replacement was focused on getting parity with the previous renderer (so no new bugs were introduced while the efficiencies of DX 11 started to come into play). As we move forward we will be looking at ways to leverage some of the new graphical capabilities the renderer brings to the table.
Something else you'll notice is a lack of new sounds as we are working to replace our audio middleware with WWISE as we move towards Closed Beta Wave 5. Our audio team has switched their focus towards bringing our existing sounds into the new system as well as continuing their work on bringing new sounds online there as well. Expect great things in the audio department for Wave 5.
And the last item I want to highlight for CB4 is we have been doing some UI work to make things more familiar to players new to the series (don't worry, if you prefer the classical way it is available as an option!) This includes things like default squad colors (being green), teammates as blue and enemies as red no matter which team you are on. Repeat - from here on, "friendlies" are BLUE and "enemies" are RED.
We'll see you in the jungle! Or come visit us at the PC Gamer Weekender event in London, Feb 18th and 19th! Meet us in person (and get a beta key!). We'll also be live-streaming from the event for more goodness…
As many of you may know by now we are planning to kick off Closed Beta Wave 4 tomorrow if all goes well on our end! As part of this all of the players who stopped by our booth at PAX South will be joining us. But as always we are once again inviting the next wave and sending out many more invites so keep an eye out on your emails.
Before I go into any more specifics on what CB 4 (Closed Beta Wave 4) entails I want to cover some lessons learned in CB 3 (keep in mind that not all of these will be addressed in CB 4). First of all I would like to thank those of you who responded (just under 50% of our new players to the wave and many of our regulars from previous waves). And a quick reminder - we update the survey every time, while we're also looking for your views on "did we do better or not" - so we strongly encourage everyone to fill in the survey, even if you've done it before! So let us take a look:
- For those of you who were playing commander and doing a good job, you'll be happy to know we've fixed several bugs in the vote kick system that will keep the enemy team from ejecting you.
- We have looked into both map setup and bugs with spawn tunnels that were allowing the North to spawn in or too close to the American spawn on CuChi and are making adjustments and fixes as needed
- Player feedback on trap planting was a bit flat between (too easy/fast, just right and too hard/long) so moving ahead we'll be taking a look at some changes we can make here and perhaps more detailed questions in the survey
- Many players also let us know that mantling felt way to slow to execute so we've made an adjustment here to speed things up a bit.
- And as always we are looking for cases where the system fails to work at all or as intended so we can fix it up!
As always to those who participate in the next wave we are preparing another survey which we would love for all participants to fill out after playing to help us better gather and react to player feedback!
Now let us move onto some specifics about Closed Beta Wave 4:
Bringing our Direct X 11 renderer online has gone faster than we originally anticipated and as such DX 9 has been removed from the build and replaced with DX 11. Players will need a DX 11-capable card and OS moving ahead. The first part of this renderer replacement was focused on getting parity with the previous renderer (so no new bugs were introduced while the efficiencies of DX 11 started to come into play). As we move forward we will be looking at ways to leverage some of the new graphical capabilities the renderer brings to the table.
Something else you'll notice is a lack of new sounds as we are working to replace our audio middleware with WWISE as we move towards Closed Beta Wave 5. Our audio team has switched their focus towards bringing our existing sounds into the new system as well as continuing their work on bringing new sounds online there as well. Expect great things in the audio department for Wave 5.
And the last item I want to highlight for CB4 is we have been doing some UI work to make things more familiar to players new to the series (don't worry, if you prefer the classical way it is available as an option!) This includes things like default squad colors (being green), teammates as blue and enemies as red no matter which team you are on. Repeat - from here on, "friendlies" are BLUE and "enemies" are RED.
We'll see you in the jungle! Or come visit us at the PC Gamer Weekender event in London, Feb 18th and 19th! Meet us in person (and get a beta key!). We'll also be live-streaming from the event for more goodness…
