Quantum League: Developer Update #1

Hello, Quantum League community!

Now that the first stage of the open beta is over we wanted to give you an update on the current plans for Quantum League.

First of all, we wanted to thank you again for joining and providing us with your feedback. As you know, QL is a new concept and we need your help to make it the best game we can make. The feedback that we’ve got from the Open Beta has been priceless.

For the first two years of development, Quantum league was an experimental project with a very small team working almost in the dark. Since we started the closed beta program a small yet super supportive and dedicated community started to grow (we love you people!). Those early supporters were the ones who proved to us that the value that we perceived in this innovation was actually real.

Now, after running the first stage of the open beta the game has reached a larger, broader and much more diverse audience. Of course, this brings a new set of challenges as we try to make the game more accessible. But this time, we will be supporting our decisions on data and suggestions generated by you: the people who will bring life into The Time Paradox Shooter.

With that said, here is a brief summary of some of the things that we will be working on.
There’s a lot to be decided yet but we can share at least some of the things that we are thinking about. Just in case, let me clarify that some of these items may change as we continue to develop the game:

The data is clear: to begin with we need to focus on 2 areas of interest:

[h3] Player onboarding
Weapon feel & balance[/h3]

[h2]Player Onboarding - the “Minor League”[/h2]
Quantum League is a very new and unique game that bends the formula by changing some preconceived notions of your typical FPS (looping time, continue playing while dead, reviving your own self, overtime to name a few).

After the Open Beta, it was very evident that our onboarding is still not up to the challenge, even when we covered the basic mechanics in the tutorials and training videos, newcomers were still not ready to face an actual Quantum league match. It was too much, too fast and that frustrated a lot of people.
Even though overhauling the tutorials was always part of the plan, we believe that that’s now enough. Anyway, we don’t want to bog people into endless videos and singleplayer training missions. We want people to learn the game by facing other players, but do so step by step.

That said, we are thinking about creating a New “Minor League” for newcomers. Where new players engage each other in combat in specially designed arenas that have a simplified rule-set (for example no reviving health packs and no overtime). This way, players can start to learn the core time-traveling FPS mechanics first and we can introduce the more advanced mechanics after, once they are ready to face the pro leagues.

[h2]Weapon feel & balance[/h2]
A great shooting experience is one of our design pillars for the project alongside meaningful (as in not gimmicky) time travel mechanics with time paradox consequences. Even though the time travel mechanics present some restrictions in what we can do with the weapons (to give you a couple of examples, we can’t have hitscan weapons because of the bullet-time effects at the end of each loop and we can’t add knock-back effects to explosions as the movement would not be the same the next loop if such explosion was prevented.)

In any case, there is quite a bit that we can do to continue improving the weapons. The data proves three very important things: the SMG is the most used weapon to an extent that may prove that is a little OP, the grenade launcher is proving too difficult to control and the Laser Gun doesn't seem to be powerful enough or useful in many situations.

For the GL and the Laser, we plan to do quite a bit of a rework. We will update you on the progress of this as we are comfortable with our results.

In terms of feel, there’s some people that stated that our weapons are not packing the “punch” that you are looking for in an FPS. This implies a broad range of tiny improvements in terms of animations, camera effects, visual effects and sound effects.

The good thing is that our weapon code, tools, and systems are very advanced and capable of supporting all of these improvements. It’s just a matter of time, effort and love! We hope to provide you with the best gunplay possible!

[h2]The next steps[/h2]
If you have been paying attention, there is a hidden message in this post. A couple of times we referred to the Open Beta as the first stage of it. This is because we have decided that we will run -at least- another Open Beta test before venturing into Early Access!

In terms of our roadmap, there is a lot that we are working on besides the items mentioned here., Sadly, this post is starting to get too long so you will have to wait until our next update to know more about what’s coming!

We will try to keep you posted about our development progress as often as we can. So don’t forget to click on that follow button here on Steam, follow us on Twitter and join our Discord channel.

[h3]Our accounts are:[/h3]
Discord: discord.gg/quantumleague
Instagram: quantumleagueofficial (https://www.instagram.com/quantumleagueofficial/)
Facebook: Quantum League Game (https://www.facebook.com/quantumleague/)
Twitter: @quantumleague (https://twitter.com/quantumleague)
Webpage: https://quantum-league.com/

Finally, we wanted to say that we at Nimble Giant are deeply concerned about the Covid-19 pandemic. in order to take care of our team and their families, we will start to work remotely beginning next week. We hope everyone around the world starts to take the measures necessary to fight this thing and save as many lives as we can.

Please, try to stay at home, take care of yourselves, play some games, and stay tuned! There is much more to come!

- The Quantum League Dev Team