Dev Brief #198 | Mortain Updates

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

Hello everyone,

Welcome to our Mortain-focused dev brief, highlighting various changes and implementations thanks to your feedback.

Mortain is a new map for Warfare, Offensive and Skirmish gamemodes. This map is based on the US defence of the French town of Mortain, which sits in a shallow valley – where the US rallied against German troops amid Operation Lüttich. The battle took place in August 1944, in Normandy, France.

In this dev brief, one of our Senior Environment Artists will cover enterable buildings, provide additional context on Collégiale Saint Evroult and La Petite Chapelle Saint-Michel, discuss the environment; foliage and more. We want to be as transparent as possible when it comes to our development process on new maps – and we hope this provides useful insight into what it entails.

Mortain is due for release after part 2 of the British Rework.

Your feedback

I would first like to say a huge thank you to all of the players who participated in the Mortain PTE. The team across all disciplines are incredibly grateful for the tremendous amount of feedback, both positive and constructive about your experiences. Now we've had time to thoroughly process your comments, let’s talk about some of the pain points and changes we have already started to implement thanks to your suggestions.

Another thing to note is that when we have released images of Mortain in the past, I've used offline rendering techniques to produce the best image quality possible. But, to give you the most up-to-date images since the map is still in development, the in-game screenshots within this dev briefing are taken straight from the engine in real-time, so what you are seeing is Mortain from a developer-only point of view and may not represent in-game accurately. All of the work in this briefing is a work in progress and subject to change.

Enterable buildings

We acknowledge that players generally really enjoyed the urban combat that Mortain had to offer. Still, one consistent piece of feedback we received is that it was disappointing how few buildings were enterable by the player.

In truth, this is a concern we had about the map for a while, but due to the amount of new content required for Mortain and the significant amount of work required to retrofit old interiors with our refreshed buildings, we decided to create a singular variation of enterable buildings that could be reused across the map. Upon reflection, however, we understand that more enterable buildings are a priority for players. I'm happy to say that we have successfully created 3 more variations of enterable buildings and have begun their rollout in Mortain.

In real terms, due to the number of reusable assets we utilise within Hell Let Loose maps, this means up to 63 buildings already placed in Mortain could potentially be accessible across the map, with the possibility of more to come.

Given that we want the map to flow and provide enjoyable combat for players, our Level Design team now has the task of deciding which buildings they feel appropriate to be enterable - and will be implemented with support from our Technical Art team, to ensure this doesn't impact performance.

In addition to this, we are currently producing an extended amount of modular pieces used in our destroyed buildings kit, including floors, stairs and strategically placed inner walls, to offer players a similar experience to fully constructed enterable buildings, while maintaining the destroyed appearance and feel we offered in the PTE. We are excited to implement the new assets and thank the community for raising concerns which have created positive changes for Mortain's urban gameplay.

The town environment

As with any PTE, members of the development team jumped into Mortain to experience first-hand how players were feeling as it went live and one piece of consistent feedback we heard was that the town, and in particular the buildings, felt too clean and lacked immersion.

Admittedly, with Mortain being the first map constructed by Expression Games, optimizing old assets and applying memory-saving shaders was our priority. We wanted to tackle performance issues seen across other maps, and although we researched to make sure textures and materials were dated correctly for the period and location, we missed the mark on creating a town that feels engaging and at war. Now that we are confident that our optimization work has been effective, we will look to polish the visual aesthetic of the town to be more in line with an active battlefield.

For us, that will include reworking textures to look old and grimy, smaller varieties of rubble will be implemented to compliment our existing piles and a VFX pass will be done as well as other ways we are looking to add polish and immersion.

Collégiale Saint Evroult and La Petite Chapelle Saint-Michel

Besides enterable buildings, further feedback we received, is that players were disappointed that both the Collégiale Saint Evroult and La Petite Chapelle Saint-Michel are unenterable.

We completely understand the community's frustration with the decision to have them closed off, and so I'd like to give a brief explanation of why this was the case.

Collégiale Saint Evroult - The large church within Mortain town, is a historically accurate building that remained largely untouched during the conflict, but I should start by saying that we agree that it really should be open.

The decision to keep the Collégiale Saint Evroult closed was made very early on in the development of the map. As with any game, there are a certain amount of people working on a given piece of work, and at the time we prioritised our efforts across lots of content which is to be revealed in the roadmap. Being a historically accurate building, we would look to provide an accurate representation of the interior, as well as the exterior, which is a large task given its size and technical complexity.

Having reassessed what we need to focus on to meet our proposed schedules, we have decided to concentrate our resources on delivering the rest of this year’s roadmap content polished and on time.

That being said, we want to be as transparent and open with players as possible, so the possibility of us opening the church post-release of the map is not out of the question, we just need to balance it across our priorities as a team and the roadmap going forward. For the time being, we will look to add set dressing around the church so it’s clearer to players that this isn’t accessible.

La Petite Chapelle Saint-Michel

Much like the Collégiale Saint Evroult, La Petite Chapelle is a historically accurate building that would require a bespoke interior mesh, and although it could be feasible to open the Chapelle in time, we feel getting the town to a good place is our greatest priority, and so this also won't be available on the release of Mortain.

We received lots of positive comments about the elevation and uniqueness of the Petite Chapelle capture point, and the current consensus is that it's well-balanced from a gameplay perspective, so any decision to open it would have to be carefully considered. But again, this is not out of the question further down the line.

Foliage draw distance

The positive reception to Mortain's luscious new foliage has been overwhelming, although we acknowledge that there were some teething problems.

To ensure the map ran smoothly during testing, we overcompensated by culling grass, trees, and crops earlier than we needed to. Given that the performance for Mortain's wooded areas is good, we are confident that we can push the distance at which foliage culls further away, so there should be less advantage for snipers and players with a keen eye.

However, we cannot guarantee that the foliage will always keep you hidden from several hundred meters away, as we need to ensure that the map still runs smoothly and that comes at a great cost. Despite this, we hope the next time you play Mortain there is a noticeable difference when observing foliage at a distance, and as a minimum, it maintains consistency with other Hell Let Loose maps in terms of render distance.

Final words and a small teaser of the new front end!

Although this is a general overview of the key pieces of content we are currently working on, every comment and score submitted through the PTE feedback form has been analysed by the team, so there are lots of changes being worked on that aren't mentioned in this summary.

I hope that this insight into our plans for Mortain shows our commitment to listening to and actioning your feedback. Hell Let Loose is defined by its gritty feeling and tactical gameplay, but more importantly, its community. As developers, we naturally won't get everything perfect the first time. But, I know first-hand that every person on our team is dedicated to bringing you the best experience possible, so we thank you all for your contribution to making that a reality.

See you in-game,

Ryan Thomason-Jones - Senior Environment Artist, Expression Games

We hope you enjoyed reading about the changes and improvements coming to Mortain. We’re looking forward to sharing more details and developer-focused information throughout the year.

Thank you to the development team across all disciplines for their contributions to Mortain, and for sharing their hard work and passion for Hell Let Loose.

Mortain will release after part 2 of the British Rework; but before that – the roadmap. Reveal coming shortly!