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Hey everyone,
Welcome to the Save the World AMA, we’re so happy that you could be here! Let’s introduce who will be answering your questions today.
Today’s Devs
- PoppinFreshDoze - Production
- EpicIrascible - Design
- EpicJason - Design
- GILLIES- - Design (Hero Loadout)
- EpicGoinHamm - Engineering
Before we dive into more specific questions, we wanted to cover some topics that came up many times in the initial AMA announce:
Performance/Console issues
We’ve not been super great on communication here, so we do want to confirm we’re aware of the console and performance issues and consider them very high priority. Late last year, we did a big push to improve client game thread performance and eliminate hitches due to loading assets during play. Once some progress was made on this front, it became clear that we had other classes of issues still degrading the player experience.
Most recently, our perf attention has been targeting networking concerns. When bandwidth is limited (for any number of reasons - not just the quality of internet connection), there will be out of sync issues that are distinct from other client hitches. We have a series of optimizations in the works for sending less network data, especially during combat. These began rolling out in 7.40 and will continue through Season 8.
Historically when the community reports an issue, we attempt to reproduce it in-house, using a process where we can clone and test against copies of live accounts to help narrow down if it’s isolated to particular account set-ups or gameplay scenarios. Some of the remaining issues have actually been complicated by only reproducing against our live servers, so we’re also investigating both our server configurations as well as any platform-specific implementation choices in an attempt to narrow down the root cause(s).
We want to thank everyone for helping to surface these issues and for your patience. It actually helps us quite a bit when people post very clear videos showing problems and/or describing the scenarios when things went wrong. Special thanks to multiple members of the community who have helped provide logs, joined games with our QA staff, etc. in an effort to help track down general performance issues, as well as the infinite loading bug.
Locker/Emotes
We’re going to kick off the work to allow emotes that you’ve earned or purchased in BR to be usable in StW soon. We’ll share more details as we have them.
Future of Twine Peaks
Lots of questions from everyone here, both about narrative and about end-game activities. For now, our short-term plan with Twine is to start revamping it into an area with content more appropriate for end-game players (with light narrative support) instead of starting a brand new campaign in Twine. This effort will be a long pull, but we’re planning to introduce higher level and more challenging missions, as well as a means to earn unique loot only available in Twine, ideally by the tail-end of this season.
For the narrative, we fully intend to continue to tell stories about the denizens of Homebase, both as contained, stand-alone episodes, as well as those that advance the established story. We love the characters that make up Save the World and we’re going to experiment with new narrative delivery methods in the future.
Season 8 itself will feature two different event-based storylines, one available at the beginning of the season and one in the middle.
General Direction
Many of the initial questions were some variant of “will you improve feature X?,” “will you ever add feature Y?,” “have you thought about Z?,” etc., which can occasionally be tricky to answer very well. The long (and probably unsatisfying!) answer is that we have a lot of ambitions for Save the World and where it could go in the future, so often the answer to all three questions is a “yes,” it just depends on where it ends up in the priority stack.
For the immediate short-term, we’re looking to release the hero loadout (tomorrow!) and respond/iterate on it some from there. Aside from things already mentioned, we’ll also be looking to add some more activities/missions as well. For now, those will show up as Beta Storm tests over time, but we’re also going to be experimenting with more ambitious ideas that will take longer to pan out. The first Beta Storm coming up is called "Eliminate and Collect". This new mission is all about combat, you only have 10 minutes to eliminate as many of the enemy as possible. You will have a minimum number to eliminate and have to collect a set number of samples the enemy will occasional drop to claim victory. The more you eliminate the better your reward. Watch out, the storm is closing in fast. There will also be random bonus objectives each time you play.
From a broader vision of the game standpoint, we also want to continue to make strides against moving more of the game out of UI and menus and into game. We really want to address some of the pains of inventory management this year as a goal.
We have some great questions to start off with. Here we go!
Got more questions? Let us know below in the comments!
Edit: And that's a wrap! Thanks so much to everyone who showed up! We loved being able to answer your questions and interact with all of you. We plan to do future AMAs for Save the World in the future.
The Save the World devs will continue to review and answer questions through out the afternoon!
The new content Launches Tomorrow, Thursday February 28th. See you there!
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