[2021] Fault - Dev Blog 7

: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page [url=https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/1106750/announcements/detail/2918862426977155390]here[/url].

Welcome
Hello everyone and welcome to a new year of Fault!
‍2020 had a lot of ups and downs for the world, and we are thankful to have such a great community to have spent it with. In today's dev blog, we take a quick look at the life of Fault so far, while also informing everyone of our plans for the future.



Fault 2020
After 1 year and 7 months of hard work from the founding members, and 3 major alpha events where we opened servers to thousands of players, Fault launched its Early Access on 07/17/2020. Since then the game has seen many updates, content releases, community events, and more! Below we have prepared a look back at everything that has been released since EA launch.

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Content Patches In the roughly 5 months the game has been in early access, we have seen 28 patches along with many hotfixes and small updates to address bugs and balance while adding more content to Fault. Many of these patches would not have been possible with out all of the bug reports and feedback we recieve from our players daily, we encourage everyone to continue informing us of any bugs they may come across through our in-game report system.

You can take a look at all of the patch notes Here[www.playfault.com].



Heroes We have seen 7 new heroes since release, giving Fault a current total of 21 heroes, you can view our Roster[www.playfault.com] to learn all about each of them to prepare yourself for the battlefield.



Skins Fault has seen many original Hero skin releases in the past 5 months and even before EA release. These skins include Cyber Kwang, Lumberjack Boris, Bone Collector Khaimera, our Covid Relief Charity skin pack, and all 6 of the Season 0 Pass limited skins. Some of these skins started as community concepts that were submitted in our Concepts Vault channel in our Discord!

13 Original Fault skins.



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4 ward skin packs



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Avatars We love giving players a way to express them selves in game and avatars were a great start to this, we will continue to create more common and event avatars in the future for everyone to collect.

34 avatars


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‍Item system rework + new items and art overhaul Faults Item system has seen many changes over the past 5 months including a full new art overhaul, implementation of new starter and legendary items, and a complete change to the item build system[www.playfault.com].

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Events We held two seasonal events which offered many things such as custom maps, skin sales, exclusive avatars, double EXP weekends, and Twitch drops. We plan to continue creating events for our community to take part in including contests and more. You can view all the info about or past events below.

Shadowfest

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Wintervale



Other Content:

• Custom SFX and VFX.
  
• New additions[www.playfault.com] to the S.M.S team.
  
• Custom active item animations.
  
• Hero ability and emote animations .
  
• Menu UI overhaul.
  
• In-game video tutorial.
  
• Multiple giveaways.
  
• Return of Dev streams.
  
• Introduction of Dev blogs.
  
• Content creator partnership program.[www.playfault.com]
  
• Introduction of Community Showcases[www.playfault.com] and Highlights.
  
• Full player and bug reporting system[www.playfault.com].

Whats Coming Our focus on heroes throughout season 0 has pushed back a lot of features that need to be brought to Fault to make it into the game we all want it to be. We want to focus 2021 on finishing the game so that it is in a good state as soon as possible. We have compared our roster to other popular games on launch such as Overwatch (21), Rainbow Six Siege (20), League of Legends (17) and we see that our current roster of heroes is competitive. Therefore the focus for the coming months will be on the game itself: polish, bug fixing, missing features, production pipelines for cosmetics, and code foundation stability. The sooner the game has all this the sooner we can start porting to consoles and reach our large community that is still waiting.

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To give you a taste of what’s to come, here are the major features we want to implement this year (in no particular order):

• New HUD.
  
• New map.
  
• Client prediction improvements for smoother gameplay.
  
• Main menu re-design.
  
• Replay System.
  
• Ability Casting improvements and Input Buffering.
  
• New Items.
  
• Mastery System.
  
• River and Pre-Prime Objectives.
  
• Training Mode.
  
• AI Game Modes.
  
• Favor System Rework.
  
• Raptors Rework.
  
• Aspect System Rework.
  
• Playable Tutorial.
  
• Item Reworks.
  
• Visual & Animation Polish.
  
• Sound Polish and old hero sound reworks.
  
• MVP/Rating System.
  
• Honor System.
  
• ARAM mode.
  
• and more.

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We are confident that we can achieve these tasks in a timely manner, yet, we can't give any dates for now. We will give ETAs as soon as those features reach their BETA phase. Fear not, the main focus of the development team right now is the HUD. We are working tirelessly every day to bring it to you as soon as possible and hope to start sharing the HUD in-game in the coming weeks.

Finally, because no hero will be released for a while we won’t be doing another season pass until we have enough content ready for one.


Thank You The community here has been very supportive throughout Early Access. The feedback, amazing community art and content, and all of the drafts and laughs we experienced together has been an amazing experience for everyone here at Strange Matter Studios. We cannot wait to continue growing our community as we work to improve everyone's experiences in-game and move closer towards a full release! Thank you to everyone who has stayed with us throughout the life of Fault, we look forward to what the future holds for both the game and our community.