Sitrep - August 2020
Hello everyone!
It’s already been a couple of weeks and two patches since we released Onward on Oculus Quest and the PC 1.8 update. There’s been a lot of discussion, and a lot of things are happening backstage, so it’s time for us to share our plans moving forward.
Reflecting on our release and latest update
As with any release a few issues weren’t caught or resolved before the game went live, and we’re currently addressing those issues in patches. There’s a handful of issues that we’ve labelled as critical out in the wild or that we consider to be fixable in a very short time frame. These will continue to be resolved in the coming weeks with further updates to the game. These issues include voice chat sometimes cutting out, improvements in for example gun firing sound effect loudness, and upgraded visual assets for PCVR.
On the PC side there has been a lot of discussion surrounding the changes in graphics levels that have proven to negatively affect the immersion that is vital to so many of you. Although the changes we’ve made under the hood with update 1.8 are fundamental to Onward’s future development the simple truth is that we misjudged the impact the changes to the graphics would have on the immersion for many of you who play on PCVR. That led to two specific mistakes: most importantly, we didn’t allow ourselves enough time to bring the level of graphics for PC back up before the release, and second we didn’t communicate this change clearly to you, nor what our plan would be after release.
This is something we’ve learned from, and some of you will have read the post on the Onward Discord in which we committed to bring the graphics quality for PC back to the levels it was at in a series of incremental and quickly succeeding updates that will be coming out over the next couple of weeks and months. Version 1.8 created a lot of performance headroom in the game, and we intend to make use of that headroom to push the graphics to a higher level. We will be committed to our PCVR community. Without you Onward wouldn’t have been possible, that’s beyond discussion.
Onward’s launch on Quest has been amazing: we’ve welcomed a whole new group of players who have been enjoying Onward over the past couple of weeks. With the successful launch of Onward on the Oculus Quest we’ve been having discussions backstage about our development roadmap going forward. The overwhelming support for the game on Quest has enabled us to not only finish Onward in the way we had planned, but also means that we’ll be developing Onward beyond the original timeframe and scope, on all platforms. Over the coming months we’ll be hiring new developers to help us make this happen, and we’ll be keeping all of you up to date on the changes that will be coming. Exciting stuff!
Update planning
One of the things we’ve reflected on as a team has been the amount of time we took to bring you a new update. Going forward we want to bring patches and incremental updates to the game as soon as they are finished, instead of collecting the changes made over several months and then releasing major updates. This requires us to make large changes to the development process, which is something we’ll be doing starting next week. Our goal is to have a new patch or update ready for you every couple of weeks to every month at least. These updates will not only include fixes and improvements, but also new and returning features for Onward. In this new setup we’re also planning to invite players to give us feedback on an update before we push it to all players- this is something we’re still drawing the outlines for, and that we’ll be sharing more details on in a future Sitrep.
So, what’s cooking?
As we’re working on fixing critical issues that have popped up after release, we’re also looking into the improvements that will follow the update, based largely on the feedback we’ve gotten from you. Right now we’re investigating a significant improvement to lighting and shadows for PCVR (the first results are very promising), as well as adding new particle effects and more details for PCVR maps, we’re adding a recenter button button for the tent and main menu that will place you back in position should you need to and we’re reintroducing features to the AI such as for example allowing them to throw grenades and allowing them a greater variety of weapons.
Custom maps will be making a return on PC, while launching for the first time on Quest. We’re very excited to see what maps, old and new, the map makers among you will bring to the game. While we complete the map maker tools for Onward 1.8 we’re also working on bringing back the Jungle, Turbine, Snowpeak and Abandoned maps. Outlet will also be making a return as the custom map update is released.
Even the best made plans don’t survive contact with reality of course and so some of these fixes, changes and improvements will take more time than others, or may turn out to be infeasible. We also haven’t included some of our more ambitious and/or opaque plans yet - we’ll share more on those in the future.