Insurgency: Sandstorm News

Hello Gamers™,

February was short, sharp, and shiny - just like this blog will be.

We just had our first free weekend in a while - welcome to any new players that have joined us; we are glad to have you all aboard! Please send us your feedback either here on Steam, on our subreddit, or via a support ticket.

While we have just started development on 1.9.2 we are not ready to share details yet. I can say it will be a highly defined update.

[hr][/hr]
Earlier this month we closed out submissions for our 2020 Mapping Contest.

After 20 weeks of our community working hard and creating and testing their own maps we ended up with over 30 submissions. Following a 10 day period of public voting we finalized our Top 10!

Our panel at NWI will now be taking a look at these finalists and the winners will go on to take home over $17,000 of prizes from us here at New World and our amazing sponsors Intel, Nvidia, and Epic Games.

We covered the finalists in our announcement (available here) but these homies worked incredibly hard on these maps, so I want to show them off again.

Here are your 2020 Insurgency Mapping Contest finalists!

Oasis by ZAPATISTA

Prison by 13Tisa13

Diplomacy by Flaykes

Sultan of Drugs by Klian

SaltMine by FredricoDLac

Last Light by invalid_nick

Mud Village by Juu_

Coastline by Reeecompile

International by Gremlinmode

Mintaqah (District) by Jason26

Over the next month we will judge and test these finalists along with our sponsors and will be announcing the winning entries around March 22nd.

Thank you again to all the entrants, there is a lot of incredible work here. Even if you don't win, keep plugging away, take on feedback where you think it's helpful, and some of you definitely have the creativity to break into this industry.



As I said last year our Developer Livestreams will not be happening as often moving forward - I just want to ensure that the streams are full of information and not a waste of your time. The next stream will be coming in early March once we can start sharing some new juicy tidbits.

The last stream we did featured the announcement of our 1.9.1 update. As a lot of you saw, the cosmetics were not well received. We take your feedback very seriously so after a few days of discussion we decided it was in the best interest of Sandstorm to not release the skins.

We understood we missed the mark, and we have updated the visual guidelines that we follow for Sandstorm. This will help us adhere to the aesthetic we are looking for, and the aesthetic that you all want to see in the game.

[hr][/hr]
Something that was created and launched this month was our community Trello board. Available here, this is a page to help us communicate with all of you - we will list our known issues (and attach workarounds when applicable), post important links (like how to submit a bug), and attach all patch notes for our releases.

If you are running into any bugs in the game, head here to see if they’re known. If not, please send us a bug report using the link on the left of the page and we can investigate.

We are hoping this is a better method of communication than having people scroll to the bottom of patch notes every time they want to check something.

[hr][/hr]

Interested in competitive Sandstorm?

DGL will be having a PUG Event on the 6th of March at 2PM EST/8PM CET. The sign ups close on March 4th with the teams being picked after that. Captains will contact their players once picked. Registration is available here.

The Newbloods event will be on the 13th of March and start at 2PM EST/7PM GMT/8PM CET. It is expected to run for 3-4 hours. Hideout West will be played for all of the matches to try and ensure a good base amount of map knowledge. Each team will have a coach showing them the map and will arrange practice and scrims the week before the event. If you're interested, you can sign-up here.

Signups close on the 5th of March at 4PM EST/9PM GMT/10PM CET.

DGL Season 4: Round 4
The DGL season is comprised four team divisions. After each round, the top team of each division is promoted to the next division, and the bottom team moves down a division.

Round 4 will begin on the 14th of March and the signups are open until the 13th. All new teams signing up will begin in the lower divisions.

Each team plays a match each week with two maps played. For more information please go to the event page.



[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]The first clip in this video is one of our partners, MGE Gibs, with some self-fulfilling prophecy *chefs kiss*.



When 1.9.1 launched, the QBZ-97's grenade launcher may have had a velocity issue. Sadly, we fixed it. OK, SO I MAY have lost the source on this. I am very sorry, but I love it. If this was you, please DM me on twitter and I will credit you.

EDIT: We found him! Thanks to @mikeytheasian on Twitter.



Continuing our theme of both 16-bit art and art created with mines, we have this masterpiece created by yeonggille on Reddit.


[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]Some beautiful coordination while playing the amazing ISMC mod, posted by ControlledPairs on Reddit.


F4tTony on Reddit created a stats sheet for all of our weapons. Rejoice fellow numbers nerds! The entire sheet with all weapons available here.



I mean, the mask is free, you should be prepared. Thanks to Piromansor on Reddit.

[hr][/hr]
That's it, that's all for February. Just like the final wave of Outpost, grab your butts - fun stuff is coming.

Stay safe, take care of each other, and I will talk to you all soon.

fatherHank

I have the week off, so I won't be around for anyone to yell at me for this. Enjoy TRIPLE XP until Monday @ 11AM MST. -fatherHank

After twenty long weeks of development, we received over 30 incredible submissions for the Insurgency: Sandstorm mapping contest. Today after 10 days of public voting we are pleased to announce the ten finalists that will go through to be judged by our expert panel for the chance to win over $17,000 worth of prizes from New World and our incredible sponsors, Intel, Nvidia, and Epic Games. 



[h2]The ten finalists are: [/h2]

Oasis by ZAPATISTA

Prison by 13Tisa13

Diplomacy by Flaykes

Sultan of Drugs by Klian

SaltMine by FredricoDLac

Last Light by invalid_nick

Mud Village by Juu_

Coastline by Reeecompile

International by Gremlinmode

Mintaqah (District) by Jason26

Over the next 30 days, our team at New World will begin testing and judging the finalists with our sponsors. We plan to announce the winning entries on or around Monday, March 22nd.

Congratulations to all the finalists, as well as our runners up! 

Note to submitters:

Entrants who did not make the shortlist are now able to freely modify their submissions and take onboard any player feedback. 

We want to encourage everyone despite not making it in the top 10 to keep working on your levels or new levels. The contest results are simply a review of the work at this moment. It doesn’t say anything about your future quality of work or pursuing a career as a professional level designer. We hope you enjoyed the contest and we are looking forward to seeing more of your levels in the future! 

Finalists must not alter their submission until the expert voting period has concluded and winners are announced. 

[h3]We've released a hotfix for update 1.9.1 that contains the following changes:[/h3]

[h3]Bug Fixes[/h3]

• Fixed a crash that occurred when toggling an Accessory or toggleable optic without a Primary or Secondary weapon equipped on controllers
  
• Fixed an issue where players who purchased the Urban Digital DLC after the release of 1.9.1 were unable to use the weapon skin
  
• Removed the Contender achievement as it is no longer obtainable
  
• Fixed a level design issue where the floor was missing in the Insurgent Loadout menu when playing Power Plant
  

To see the current known issues list, please see our community Trello board here.

Hello everyone, my name is Tim Perreault and I’m the Production Director at New World Interactive. February has been an exciting month for us, with update 1.9.1 releasing just before a free weekend on Steam. This SoP will be short and sweet, so without further ado let’s jump in!

Key Points for State of Production #17

• 1.9.1 Update and Hotfixes
  
• Free Week Results
  
• New Weapons: QBZ-97 and QTS-11
  
• Community Driven Update
  

[h3]2020 In Review[/h3]
On Tuesday, February 2 we launched our 1.9.1 patch which included various bug fixes, improvements, and two new guns. A big change in this update is our new in-game stats system including the updated end-of-round screens. The new system is much more robust and was designed to eliminate issues that could happen with the legacy system, such as missing level-up rewards.

We have released three hotfixes to address high-priority issues. We’ve been monitoring and investigating reports of players who are having issues with cosmetics they own not appearing to be unlocked in their inventory. We are also monitoring and investigating other issues listed as known issues which you can find linked on our new public Trello board (Shoutout to our new hire on the Player Support Team, Bruno Chasse! He drove the creation of the new public known issues site).

[h3]Free Week Results[/h3]
From February 4th until February 8th, Insurgency: Sandstorm was available to play for free on Steam. During that period a lot of new players tried the game. We saw concurrent user counts averaging just under 10,000 for the period. On the weekend alone, we had over 280,000 rounds played on stats-enabled servers. Free weekends on Steam are a big driver for bringing new players to Sandstorm, so I’d like to extend a big welcome to all the players who have recently joined the community!

[h3]New Weapons: QBZ-97 and QTS-11[/h3]
Our latest update included two new weapons, the QBZ-97 for Insurgents and QTS-11 for Security. I’ve invited Lead Game Designer, Michael “Mikee” Tsarouhas, to speak about the selection, implementation, and balancing of those two rifles:

“Insurgency has a wide swath of weapons, but there’s always new ones we are considering that can offer new gameplay opportunities, unique aesthetics, and thematic appeal. The QBZ-97 and QTS-11 were added in an effort to expand the range of capabilities for the commonly used Rifleman, Demolitions, Commander, and Observer classes, as well as try to have better representation of modern Chinese firearms which could be seen in our setting. We’ve got plenty of international guns, but we’re a little lacking on the East Asian side.



Adding new assault rifles is an interesting challenge for a hardcore modern military FPS game designer. In real life, modern small arms have largely plateaued. The technological advances and distinctions between each weapon a military deploys are much more minimal than they were in the previous century. You have to really think and iterate when trying to make a new gun feel unique in the game but still real. The QBZ-97 gave us a chance to have a low supply point cost weapon that was an alternative to the AKM, firing 5.56 and featuring a higher fire rate. The QTS-11 was an opportunity to make a more expensive supply point cost Security assault rifle that fired flat and smooth with a unique toggleable optic type that keeps you deadly at both long and close range. The fire rate in particular was a fun piece to balance, as pretty much all our assault rifles fire faster than the QTS-11. We weren’t sure if it would be viable. It was a bit of an experiment, and it feels like it paid off.”

[h3]Community Driven Update[/h3]
Our next Community Driven update (1.9.2) is on the horizon. We are still finalizing some of what that content will be, until then I wanted to touch on how we plan these updates.

The goals of our Community Driven updates are to address as many feature requests and bugs as possible. We do this by keeping track of what the most discussed issues are on various platforms. While we’re always looking at our community feedback, there are often requests that aren’t immediately actionable. These updates are the perfect time for us to review the list and take on requests that are too big or require too much testing for hotfixing, but are also small enough that we don’t need to plan them into a major update cycle. There are a lot of reviews that go on with lots of team members to evaluate the technical effort involved and also make sure the gameplay impact is in line with the vision of the game. Once we have a consensus on what is achievable we have our development team start working on the content, get a build put together and tested, and confirm we’re ready for our targeted release date.
We’ll be wrapping up the planning phase this week and scheduling development to start soon. In keeping with the theme for this year, we’re working on the update a lot earlier than normal to provide us with more time in QA.

That’s it for this month’s SoP, until next time, keep your stick on the ice.