Dropped a few comments here but I wanted to touch base on the decision to cut the modes:
Ready or Not released into early access with a lot of experimental content — some of you may remember grey maps with no art at all, some that were partially completed, and some that after significant time with users, were cut completely (I’m looking at you Fast Food).
The road to releasing Ready or Not into early access was not an easy one, but once we finally had something fun we wanted to make sure there was enough content to keep players coming back while we worked on new things. That’s how this came about, as it was a pretty easy way of giving you guys more stuff to play without the request for entirely new maps. However, like many things back then it was added without a consideration for how it would affect development of future content. While some maps did have a number of modes available, many of the new ones had only one extra (Valley of the Dolls for example only had Raid if I recall), which usually only changed the rules of engagement. It didn’t do much else.
As our team grew and the desire to make brand new content increased from both internally and externally, it became very apparent that developing these modes alongside the maps would not be tenable with a small development team, alongside all of the testing required for these maps to work. Some even used different parts of the level, essentially meaning that not only did we need design to stay focused on each mode, but art would have to get involved to ensure each mode was fully ready for presentation.
So, you can imagine on release having 19ish missions, each having 5 modes, and some of those inconsistently having different “levels” within them, and also having to make completely different briefings for each mode variety, we had shot ourselves in the foot with this experimental, early access feature.
It pains me to see stuff like this disappear and I understand the community sentiment about its removal, but I also feel as if there’s a bit of rose-tinting going on. Many of the missions were just not there, they didn’t add too much variety and our analytics showed that most people barely touched some modes (eg. Bomb threat on Dealer). Could we have hunkered down, hired 20 designers and split them up into each map? No, not really. Money =\= An efficient workforce, it actually means you need to manage that many people and scale up all other aspects of development to match.
Scaling up the team was done, but in a way that allowed to progress forwards with new content and a more sensible pairing of narrative and gameplay (eg. Kids robbing a gas station aren’t placing C4 all over the building). We’re still finding our way but many of the steps taken last year have paved the way for the ability to actually create more content that aligns with this, without worrying about missing deadlines or running out of time.
With that out of the way, I hope with some extra clarity, I do want to note that I’ve made it my business to go through many posts identical to this and many more quite similar, to ensure that we release a feature that allows for players to curate experiences. I’m not sure when something like that will appear, but I do want it to be in a reasonable amount of time.
This should also signal that there isn’t a plan to stop working on RoN and giving it more love, more content, and additional features :)
devtrackers.gg
