GUARDS! News

Attention GUARDS Hunters!

We have some exciting news from our team - our next game HUNTERS, INC. has just been revealed and you can sign up to get invited to the playtest over on the Steam page.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2937090/Hunters_Inc/


[h3]What's In the Closed Alpha Playtest[/h3]

• Orcs!
  
• Our first Class - the Berserker. Straight forward monster smasher extraordinaire
  
• Our first biome - Bluemane Savannah
  
• Procedurally generated maps with a variety of hazards and endemic life
  
• TWO! target monsters to hunt - the Slimesnapper and Spider Queen
  
• The ability to dismember monsters and harvesting their bits!
  
• XP and Levelling System
  
• New primary and Secondary weapons to purchase
  
• Weapon upgrades to unlock and purchase
  
• FIVE difficulty modes
  

[h3]Solo / Multiplayer[/h3]
The game is playable in solo and multiplayer, and we'd love to get feedback from both solo players and groups.

To start a multiplayer session either invite your friends through steam or join a session in progress via the join button on the main menu.


[h3]Let Us Know What You Think![/h3]
One of the great things about being a small, independent team is that we can be significantly more open with development and share the game with you significantly much on.

We’ve been playing the game a lot internally and are really excited to get the public playtest underway to get gathering some extremely valuable and much needed external feedback.

The best place to give us feedback is in the feedback from linked from inside the game, but we will also be keeping an eye on the feedback on the official Steam Forum and Discord Channel.


[h3]Availability[/h3]
Since this is a Closed Alpha there may not be room for everyone - so if you are interested in playing we suggest signing up ASAP! Don't worry though - this is the first of many playtests so there will be more opportunities to play. If you'd like to be notified of future playtests make sure to hit the "FOLLOW" button on the main store page


We hope you have fun in the playtest, and as always, we greatly appreciate your feedback!

ATTENTION GUARDS!

Version 8.2 is now live and with it we have addressed the most common issue you had with the game - timers!

[h2]New Features[/h2]

[+] Reinforcement Waves
Timers are gone! Originally we added a time limit to force players to go fast and generate more chaos, but in retrospect, it meant players having a good time in missions were unceremoniously booted back to the hub. As mentioned in our previous update post this one caught us by surprise (it didn't come up at all during our demo!), however, as it was one of the most common complaints about the game we wanted to address it ASAP!

In it's place is the Reinforcement System. You can now spend as long as you like in a mission, however, the longer you take the more criminals become alerted to your presence and join the battle. This actually solves another major issue players had - the huge influx of enemies at the end of the mission. Now, enemies will filter into the battle on a fixed reinforcement schedule maintaining the pressure on the player but removing the likelihood of an insta-fail scenario.

If you're still finding the game too easy or too hard - don't worry! You can change the frequency with which enemies reinforce in the host options and mission select screen. Let us know what you think!


[+] Merged Shop and Weapon Wall
Players love the collection aspect of the weapon wall, but could get confused by the "discover" criteria in the store and wanted to take acquired weapons on mission without having to paying for it.

To address this, we have merged the weapon wall and the armoury. Now, when you bring a weapon back from a mission, you can store it in the armoury making it available to buy from then on. Every time you buy your favourite weapon it will reduce in price, reducing the sting of losing them and making it easier to deploy with them on a mission.


[+] Training Mode
Many of the issues players were experiencing were simply due to a lack of proper tutorialisaiton for many of the games mechanics. We have created a more traditional, structured tutorial that can be accessed from the main menu that teaches new players about the fundamentals of the game. Let us know how quickly you can clear the kill house !

[+] Order NPCs as a Group
No longer do you need to painstakingly order each individual hostage or perp to follow you. Now you can tell everyone around you to either follow or stay by simply shouting at them! Use the taunt key (default "V") to utter the magic word that will get them to comply.


In addition to these new features we have made the following fixes and improvements:

[h3]Alterations[/h3]
[~] Updated defaulting starting gear available from APC
[~] Improved Halberd enemy telegraphing and attack combo
[~] Increased the cost of re-rolling missions
[~] Made shields discoverable and added them to crates in the world
[~] Improved damage on headshots. Can now 1 shot elite enemies.


[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]
[-] Fixed issue where Halberd attack wasn't being blocked consistently
[-] Fix for weapons being lost when picking up items that require 2 hands (crates, objective items, etc)
[-] NPC should no longer run head first into spikes
[-] Fix for keybindings not being saved between sessions
[-] Fix for missing resolution widget in settings

As always, thank you for all the feedback and suggestions. If you like to let us know what you think about these changes we'd love to hear from you in the discussion forums or over on our discord channel.

- The GUARDS! Team -
.

ATTENTION GUARDS!

It has now been a little under 6 days since we pushed the big green button and released GUARDS!. In that time we have had nearly 10'000 players and over 1.5 years worth of playtime generated in less than a week. To say that we were not ready for the level of attention that GUARDS! received would be an understatement!

With that level of activity comes a huge amount of feedback. Now that we have left "New and Trending" and things have calmed down, we have been able to review hundreds of individual feedback items across the Steam forums, Discord and reviews and look for patterns.

Thank you to everyone who took the time to give us feedback. When we started making this game, we decided it was important to be as receptive and reactive to feedback as possible. Since launch we have read every piece of feedback, responded appropriately and released 6 updates to address some of the key issues we saw during launch.

In this update, we are going to briefly cover the most common feedback items, the timeline for addressing it and answer some of your questions about the games development.


[h2]
Most Common Feedback[/h2]



Looking at the data, we can see 3 issues that account for over a third of all negative comments.

[h3]Combat Feel[/h3]
When we started planning GUARDS! we knew we couldn't compete with Mordhau, Chivalry and Vermintide in terms of combat feel so we set out to try something a little bit different. We were inspired by the fast paced, punitive combat found in games like Hotline Miami and Angerfoot and wanted to make something in that vein.

Obviously combat is a pretty integral part of the game, and we need to be really careful when making changes. We have started reviewing the game to understand what specifically is causing people to become frustrated and how to address it. This is probably the issue where we will spend the most time identifying and implementing improvements.

[h3]Timer[/h3]
This one caught us by surprise. We had no idea that people hated timers this much! To us it helped force the action encouraging players to take risks, cause chaos and generally increase the amount of funny moments that happen in game.

Originally, we had the inverse system, where players would get gold / silver / bronze medals based on how long they took to complete a mission. In retrospect that probably would have been less frustrating. We hear you loud and clear and will make the timer more of a way to show mastery rather than a hammer to punish players who want to take it slow.

[h3]Difficulty[/h3]
This is a 2 part problem. First there is a combination of the mission timer, enemy frequency, enemy composition and combat values like health and damage. That is all fairly straightforward to fix, as it is mainly editing existing values and testing it in all the various party sizes.

Secondly, we suspect that there are too many ways to insta-fail a mission. Spikes, killing a hostage, killing a suspect, breaking too many crates, etc. We will look into ways of letting players make mistakes without them being instantly shown a game over screen.

With all of these changes, it is important that we don’t swing the pendulum too far in the opposite direction and throw out features that people are already enjoying. The goal is to smooth off the rough edges so players are more incentivised to stick with it, rather than instantly rage quit the game.


[h2]Why Didn't You Launch Into Early Access ?[/h2]

We just genuinely didn’t expect the amount of interest in the game that we received. At one point Lirik was streaming GUARDS! and we had hundreds of concurrent players. If we’d have known that in advance we would have definitely opted for an early access launch!

As players we’ve all been burned by early access games that make grand promises and fail to deliver. As developers it was important for us to avoid that trap. Hindsight is 20:20 and we put this squarely in the “good problem to have” category!


[h2]When Will You Implement These Changes ?[/h2]

Addressing the 3 issues above is our highest priority. Our mission is to work with the community to narrow down the cause, implement improvements, test it on a separate branch and have them ready in time for the upcoming Steam FPS fest on April 15th.


Hopefully that answers some of your questions about how we ended up here, what we’ll be working on next and when you will be seeing the next update! Thanks again to everyone who took the time to give us feedback and we look forward to working with you to make GUARDS! the best it can be.

Thanks!
- The GUARDS! Team -

ATTENTION GUARDS!

Thank you to everyone who took the time to give us feedback on the forums, discord and in the reviews. Honestly, we were not prepared for the level of interest! Largely, the reception has been really positive but we did notice a few trends starting to appear that we have been working hard to address.

First - a bit of context!

Since our release on Friday we have had over 9000 players. Even if we assume each player has played for just 30 minutes, that still equates to over 2 years playtime for a single person playing 8 hours a day, Monday to Friday.

That is alot of playtesting in a short period of time! And, without a doubt, the most common trend so far has been difficulty. This was a bit of a surprise to us, as we didn't really hear that the game was too difficult during our demo phase. So to address that we have made the following changes:

- You can now increase or decrease the time limit for a mission
- You can now toggle friendly fire on / off
- Tuned the number of required mission objectives based on player count (i.e. less players means less to do in the time limit)
- Tuned the number of enemy reinforcements based on player count (fewer players means fewer enemies)

Hopefully this should make the game experience much more manageable and less frustrating now that the time pressure is off.

In addition to the difficulty improvements, we have also been making daily bug fixes and improvements. The 2 most critical being:

- Fix for huge Gold rewards for clients in Extract missions
- Fix for some players crashing on loading District 2: Outskirts (due to a lighting issue on the level)

Along with the following:
- Updated server messages - no longer just "connection lost". Will now articulate the reason ( kicked from session or host quit)
- Fix Invert Y being default on first play
- Fix an issue where users could not equip unlockable capes
- Fix an issue with Kingpin achievement unlock
- Fix for an issue with shields not guarding correctly
- Added region to server browser
- Removed a debug that was causing issues
- Enabling host to set max player count
- Crossbow bolt removed after 10s in a players head (so no more being blinded by enemies stuck to your face)
- Translation issues and fixes in collaborations with the community.

We still have a large list of improvements, issues and feature requests to work through but we consider some of the most critical issues addressed enough to give us a bit of breathing room.
Our plan is to take a bit of time, review the rest of the feedback and figure out how best to implement it in one, slightly bigger and more meaningful update later on in the month. 

As always - thanks for all your support and appreciate you taking the time to tell us what is working and what isn't. Keep it coming, and look forward to seeing you on patrol!

- The GUARDS! Team - 

// DAY 3 PATCH NOTES //

• Host can now set max player count
  
• Crossbow bolt removes after 10s in a players head
  
• Reduced objective counts for larger player counts (no more impossible arrest 80 perp missions!)