In the runup to the TICR we asked our community to submit their burning questions in the official forums. We’ve gone ahead and gathered those up and sourced answers to them. Have a question yourself, check out the guidelines in the forums and keep an eye out for the next call!
Joining me once again to help answer these questions are Alan Wilson, VP of Tripwire Interactive and David Amata, Product Director here at Tripwire.
The first question comes from Zacker
Alan
Let me try and answer some of those questions. We are aiming to do another QoL update, but the big question is what can we realistically get done in it? As soon as we start messing around with maps, changing gameplay, QA becomes a big factor - ensuring that we haven’t created more trouble than it’s worth. So, most likely, it will be relatively simple code pieces that get addressed. If you want to influence what we have a go at, tell us via the forums.
On the EGS release - simply put, we had an external team that was not experienced with Vietnam doing the work, plus the bulk of the QA. main lesson learned is that it really does take a decent amount of experienced Tripwire dev time (especially QA), which we simply don’t have available at the moment. That’s the major “rate-limiting step”.
Our next set of questions are about Killing Floor 2, so I’ll sling over towards you David. From rockit!
David
Quality of Life updates for Killing Floor 2 are still an essential part of what we hope to target with each seasonal update but we need to be very judicious and targeted with what we adjust and change at this point in the game’s life cycle which some players have been playing for over 5 years now.
While we certainly hear the community’s feedback on wanting some big systemic changes to KF2 from system overhauls, survivalist reworks, new perks,and we ourselves looked deeply at it internally about different approaches, it's not really in the cards for the future at this stage with the resources within the team while still being able to accomplish the fundamentals within each update that most players expect.
To put it another way, Killing Floor 2 is an extremely well understood and well oiled machine and some of those asks are akin to pulling out and replacing a car engine while it's still barreling down a highway.
s5yn3t asks
David
Objective Mode was a huge initiative for us last year and easily took us the better part of 8 months to ship back in the Summer 2019 which we had already started the objective maps within production for the Halloween and December update that year prior to releasing. Our objective for Objective Mode was to build upon the systems we had in place and had been steadily integrating into Survival with maps like Krampus Lair, Airship, and Santa’s Workshop and put within a more cohesive, episodic narrative focus that could be cleanly separated from the survival experience.
What we ended up seeing is that the community really wanted to see a full story campaign mode whose scope goes beyond the means of a quarterly cadence we have for Killing Floor 2.
To be fully candid, when we started looking at the analytics of what players were playing consistently we didn’t see the adoption rate we would have liked that made the much higher cost of making an Objective vs. a standard Survival map worth doubling down on for KF2 so at this stage we’ve pivoted back to earlier framework for maps that provide the best replay value for the fans.
And a question about modding from one of our KF community modders GearShift
David
Modding is a vital part of Killing Floor 2 and what keeps the game alive beyond what we are ourselves are able to create so on a case by case basis we’ll certainly take a look at what makes sense to add or fix as a form of Quality of Life update with the seasonal updates. I wouldn’t expect many new tools to be available in the future but its reasonable for there to be some polish and fixes if it's within scope.
We also have another general studio questions. From Lemonater47
David
What we all saw in that Unreal Engine 5 demo was very impressive and if it all works as they described I think it has the possibility to streamline a lot of production processes and make development much more efficient. We are very excited to get our hands on the engine when it becomes available next year and see what it's capable of and how it can be leveraged for future projects that we have on tap in the coming years.
I want to once again thank everyone who submitted a question, and Alan and David for taking the time to help me source these answers. Be sure to let us know if you enjoyed these written answers as well as video answers, or would prefer just video answers moving ahead. One thing to keep in mind is we will likely be able to answer less questions if they are all video (We love to hear Alan go on for 30 minutes on one topic as much as everyone else, but we have to limit our time making these somehow)!