Onward News

Hello everyone!
Over the past couple of months we've seen Onward grow as many new players have joined our ranks. On top of that we've recently brought back custom map support for PCVR, and introduced it on Oculus Quest. Now, the holiday season is fast approaching and we've recently seen the launch of some exciting new technology. A perfect time then to celebrate a successful year for Onward, and to do that we're launching a community contest where you all will be able to compete for eternal glory, and spectacular prizes.

We will be awarding prizes in the following categories:

• Custom (Snow/Winter) Maps (3 prizes)
  
• Fan art (1 prize)
  
• Fan video (1 prize)
  

Custom (Snow/Winter) Maps
This category will be familiar to those of you who participated in our last community contest: creators will compete by making new and interesting maps for Onward. We'll be giving away prizes in three categories: overall best map, best PC map and best Quest map. Because we encourage creators to create maps that support all platforms, any map that supports both PC and Quest versions of Onward will compete in all three categories. Maps that support only one platform will only compete for that category. As a twist we've added a theme to the custom maps competition this time around: all maps submitted for this contest must have a winter setting!

If you're new to creating maps for Onward, go to the Onward Custom Content Guide to download the Onward Custom Content SDK for Unity and make sure to read the Rules For Content Submission on the Onward Custom Content Guide. All entries must abide by these rules.

• Submission deadline: Thursday January 21st
  
• Prizes:
  
  • For the best cross-platform map: 1x your choice of either an NVidia RTX 3090 video card or an AMD 5950X processor with a high end motherboard
    
  • For the best map on PC: 1x your choice of either an NVidia RTX 3080 video card or an AMD 5900X processor with a high end motherboard
    
  • For the best map on Quest: 1x your choice of either an NVidia RTX 3080 video card or an AMD 5900X processor with a high end motherboard
    

Fan Art & Videos
We always enjoy seeing the creative side of our community, and there's a lot of creative talent going around! We want to encourage and reward those of you who put your talents to use, and so we've added two new categories. For (aspiring) videographers we'll be giving away a prize for the best fan video, and we're also giving away a prize for any other form of fan art that catches our attention. Pretty much anything goes: from a drawing or painting to a music piece: catch our attention and you can win yourself a nice upgrade for your gaming system.

• Submission deadline: Thursday January 3rd
  
  
• Prizes:
  
  • For the best video: 1x your choice of either an NVidia RTX 3080 video card or an AMD 5900X processor with a high end motherboard
    
  • For the best fan-art: 1x your choice of either an NVidia RTX 3080 video card or an AMD 5900X processor with a high end motherboard
    

How to enter the contest For all categories

• Join the Onward Discord to stay up to date on any announcement we may make during the contest submission periods. This is mandatory if you want to be eligible for any prizes.
  
• Send an email to [email protected] with the following information:
  
  • Which category you are joining (Maps, Fan Art, or video)
    
  • Your Discord username
    

For map creators

• In your email, include all the information listed above, and also:
  
  • The name of your map
    
  • The category/ies you wish to compete in (cross-platform, PC, and/or Quest)
    
• Make sure the email address you use to submit your entry to [email protected] is the same email address you use to submit your map using the Onward Custom Content SDK.
  

You will receive a response from us as soon as possible to confirm your entry and the details on how to submit your entry or entries.

Submission deadlines & winner announcements

• Fan art: Sunday, January 3rd
  
• Videos: Sunday, January 3rd
  
• Custom Maps: Thursday January 21st
  

We will announce the winners of the Fan Art and Video categories on Monday January 11th, and the winners of the custom map category on February 1st.

The Fine Print

1. All participants must join the Onward Discord
   
2. Any participant can only win one prize, but they may submit as many entries as they want in as many categories as they want.
   
3. Submissions for this contest must be original work, created after the date of this announcement.
   
4. Submissions may not contain any material which is subject to a copyright or trademark owned by another person or entity than the one submitting the work.
   
5. Submissions must not break or encourage breaking of any laws of the United States of America.
   
6. We reserve the right to remove any person from this contest and/or reject any submission for any reason without prior notice.
   
7. Downpour Interactive will, at its sole discretion, select the winners of each category of the contest.
   
8. When the winners for each category are announced we will send them an email to claim their prize. If the prize isn't claimed within one week from the date of this email, that person will have forfeited their prize and we will award it to the next best entry.
   

Hello everyone!

Another month passed, and it’s time for our monthly update on the development of Onward! Since our last Sitrep we’ve released two major patches: 1.8.5 and 1.8.6. Update 1.8.5 brought us specular maps for the weapons so that they catch light more realistically, custom maps to enjoy and improved support for haptic devices, to name a few. Onward 1.8.6 was an iterative update to improve on the foundations that 1.8.5 gave us, and to address a good number of bugs. We’re still investigating reports of some new and existing issues, and if needed those will be addressed in a patch before update 1.8.7 drops. We’re hoping to drop 1.8.7 just in time for the December holidays.

The most noticeable change coming in with Onward 1.8.7 will be the game’s audio system, which will be completely overhauled for this update to bring you a more immersive and AAA quality audio experience. To do this we have replaced the Unity audio system with Wwise, which gives our sound designers a lot of great tools to make the audio sound like you are really on the battlefield.

In terms of improvements you can look forward to directional voice quality, improved (ambisonic) ambience sounds, improved reverberations and high dynamic range settings. On top of that actions will have more audio feedback, and we’ve improved the general audio quality as well. It’s hard to convey changes in the audio quality through text, but we’re very impressed with the results so far.

Aside from the audio improvements we’ve been working on something else we’ve received a lot of feedback over the last couple of months: smoke grenades. We’ve changed the smoke grenades so that they’re no longer directional, but instead form a sphere of smoke around the grenade: these types of smoke grenades are easier to use in game because of their predictability. We’ve also managed to remove the blinding effect encountered when looking at the smoke through a scope due to a series of performance optimizations.

On to the re-release of Onward’s various maps. we’re working to release an improved Snowpeak map in the next update, and to follow that up with the Abandoned map. As a special preview we’ve included aerial top-down shots for Abandoned and Snowpeak below so you can get an idea of what we’re working on. Jungle, which we had hoped to release with update 1.8.6 last week, will need more work based on the feedback we’ve gotten from our Unit 51 player feedback group. We’ll be taking our time to get it right, rather than release a map that doesn’t meet your expectations and our quality standards. Also on the topic of maps we’ll be announcing a new community mapping contest with prizes later this week, and we’re excited to see what the map creators will amaze us with. If you’re interested in learning how to create maps for Onward, check out the Community page on our website.





We mentioned the Unit 51 playtest group a bit earlier. Unit 51 has been doing a great job providing us with feedback and catching some nasty bugs that had slipped by us. As a result, we’ll be looking to expand Unit 51 with new players in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for that announcement on our Discord and social media.

That’s it for this month, until soon and stay frosty!

Hello everyone!

We’re excited to share Onward 1.8.6 with you! In this patch we’ve focused on two key areas: first, we worked to improve gameplay and graphical issues we’ve seen players run into such as for example people appearing to jump around if they have a poor internet connection, players spawning near you in social game modes and some performance problems a small portion of PC players ran into after the last patch. Secondly, we’ve fixed dozens of bugs all across the game, the highlights you can On our website.

In the previous patch we delivered some of our previously announced features earlier than we had expected, those included improved support for haptics devices and custom content. We’re still working on the next set of major new features, including the game audio overhaul and the Shadowmask feature we shared a preview of in the September Sitrep. In that timeline we had anticipated the Jungle map to be released in this patch, and although we got close we got some valuable feedback from Unit 51, our playtesting group, that made us realize we want to change our approach to that particular map.

We’ll be giving you an update on our overall progress on new features later this week. For now we trust you’ll enjoy Onward 1.8.6, and we’ll see you on the battlefields!

Onward 1.8.6 s available now and will download automatically.

Hello everyone!

We have just released an update for #OnwardVR. v1.8.5.2 solves two issues for PCVR users: we've temporarily disabled depth of field while we investigate related performance issues, and we've addressed a bug that could cause graphics settings to not apply correctly for some users.

We advise you to double check your graphics settings when you play Onward after applying the patch.

Hello everyone!

We’re very excited to release a major patch with Onward 1.8.5. This update has been long in the making and features a metric ton of fixes and tweaks that we know many of you have been waiting for. Some highlights:

Support for Quest 2 with improved graphics
Playing Onward on the Quest 2 you will enjoy an improved level of detail bias, meaning you’ll encounter less noticeable transitions or ‘pop in’. All new for both PCVR and Quest 2 are the Support for Specular Maps on weapons which improve the weapon visuals.





Custom Maps
We’re very pleased that we’ve been able to include Custom Maps in this update, instead of having to wait for update 1.8.6 as we had originally anticipated. Over the past couple of weeks We have collaborated with several map creators to make sure there are several maps available to play on both PCVR and Quest.

Improved support for Haptic devices
For those of you who are looking to take their immersion to the next level we’ve added support for bHaptics body haptic devices on both PC and Quest. We’ve also added support for the ForceTube to the Quest version of Onward - it was already available on PCVR.

Social Game Modes
When we last switched out the rotating social gun mode we had received a lot of feedback asking us to allow you to play your favourite social game mode (Gun Game, Specops or One In The Chamber) at any moment you want. With update 1.8.5 that is now possible.

Improved visuals for PCVR
Update 1.8.5 brings several improvements to the game’s visuals for PCVR. Aside from the specular maps we mentioned above, we’ve made improvements to the visuals of the Downfall and Suburbia maps. Bazaar and Quarantine have had revised lighting to be more faithful to the 1.7 representation of the maps. The PC maps are getting model overhauls, effects additions and more that will continue as time goes on.

The full list of changes is available on our website

Onward!