World War 3 News

Available in the following languages: PL | RU | DE | FR

Hello, Soldiers!
We're currently working on 0.8 patch on the PTE, with our newest Breakthrough game mode, but there are some things that the current live version could benefit from, namely fixing the problems with replication of players (resulting in missing markers or having wrong marker color) and, of course, performance. We have a few fixes coming your way, so let's dig in.

Update 0.7.2 Patch Notes

• Added TeamManager debug printing on server and client side to find more problems,
  

• Multiple fixes for team replication (missing markers, wrong team colors),
  
• Changed how actors replicate to reduce server crashing,
  
• Fixed a server crash related to debugging data,
  
• Fixes for audio occlusion and spatialization,
  
• Fixed destructible objects not having particles at the start of the match,
  

• Fixed OnVideoBasicSettingsChanged() hitches on the render thread,
  
• Fixed hitches on the render thread when updating material scalar parameters,
  
• Fixes for reloading assets that were already loaded (reduced hitching),
  
• Disabled ticks on multiple actors,
  
• Disabled DoF calculations for remote vehicles.
  

- World War 3 Team

Available in the following languages: PL | RU | DE | FR

Hello, Soldiers!

This week we wanted to let you know how things are going and what the current development tasks are going on. It can be pretty obvious for us involved with the game on a daily basis, but it’s easy to forget not everyone spends 50 hours a week working on World War 3, so letting you know what we’re doing from time to time is a good thing.

0.8 has been in public testing for a while and the newest gamemode, Breakthrough, has gotten a fair share of feedback. We’re very happy to see that people love the game mode in general, but also see some problems worth addressing. We agree with this wholeheartedly and we’ve started fixing some things.

For starters, the plant/defuse visibility will be increased, so you really know when they happen. Secondly, as we wrote last week, the Retreat mechanic is now fleshed out further: the attacking team won’t be able to rush the next objective until the retreat is finished. We will rebalance the points that attackers and defenders get, move some stations around and fix some bugs that make Breakthrough a bit less enjoyable.

You can catch up on the BRE feedback in this topic and throw your two cents in - we encourage you to do so! The overall 0.8 feedback topic is here.

Some of those changes are already done or are being done, so keep training on PTE so you can help new players once 0.8 hits Live. Yes, help. Not crush.

Our design team asked the players about the current armor system. The main idea behind this is to know what makes sense for the players and what is still not explained well enough. Because the time for balancing is coming soon, we want to be prepared and know what our players want and need, so we can make better decisions, so log in and let us know where you stand!
https://forum.worldwar3.com/index.php?/topic/10826-poll-vehicle-armors-system/

We’re also working on the new HUD a lot, with changes to the strike bar on the bottom, some icon redesigns and implementing feedback we got on it from you. It seems to be a big hit in general, with a few points of contention, which we’re addressing.

On the optimization front, we’re starting to move more and more resources into making the game smoother as we’re nearing the 1.0 slowly. This will ramp up greatly before release and we’re expecting big changes in the last patch or two. Right now we’re optimizing the loading order of things (especially levels) and moving more and more things to be loaded asynchronously (or “on-the-fly”), so the freezing related to loading assets when playing (streaming, player or vehicle customization etc.) should be reduced. It requires some changes to the item database, so there’s no ETA, but we’re constantly working on optimizing the game and making it work better.

We’re currently still in the process of merging the movement system into the newest version of the game. It will take some time, because since we started working on it, the game changed a lot and we have to make sure we’re not breaking anything and the system works as intended once merged together. It’s more of a tedious and repetitive work, so it takes some time. It’s getting close, and we can’t stress how excited we all are to show it to you. Remember - we can’t wait as much as you do!

The other work is progressing as always: more vehicles, more attachments, more weapons, more maps, the new UI is progressing nicely - we’re also working on a firing range in tandem. There’s some cool things coming to the player progression, constant bug fixing and so on - there’s a lot of cool stuff coming to World War 3 in the coming weeks and months.

We've also received another award for our game - this time from a polish magazine. The award took a bit to get here, but it finally arrived and now we can present it to you. World War 3 is the Best Polish Game, as voted during the IThardware for Gamers 2019 plebiscite! Thank you for the recognition - the coming year will be even more exciting!


As we wrote in last week’s report, we’ll be creating a community trailer for Breakthrough game mode. Keep recording, make sure you’re ready when we open the submissions up!

One more small thing: November 11th is a national holiday in Poland, so the Weekly Report will be late by about 24 hours, so don’t be alarmed, when the report is not out on Monday.

See you then and thanks for reading!

- World War 3 Team

Available in the following languages: PL | RU | DE | FR

Hello, Soldiers!

Last Friday we’ve pushed the 0.8 update to the Public Test Environment. It includes the brand new community game mode and a new player HUD. Both those are still being worked on, so this is the perfect time to submit your suggestions and bug reports to our forums!

Breakthrough has been a game mode that our community wanted to have in the game for a long time. It was you, the players, that came to us with a request for a password protected server to test a game mode. You organized the testing, got everyone on the same page, we all got together and played a number of matches, slowly finding problems and strong points of the gameplay. After that, we took what we learned during playtesting and here we are a few months later - with a brand new game mode, directly influenced by the players.

You can read more about the Breakthrough Community Game Mode in one of the previous Weekly Reports.

It’s playable on all current Warzone maps, features a 20 player cap, full strike support and some intense firefights and rushes for the bomb plants. Some of you might see the 20 player cap as low, but it can get pretty insane when all of those 20 players are on a single point. We want to try a larger versions as well, but first we want to see how it plays out with you!

With 0.8 now on the PTE, we’ll be refining the gameplay and HUD elements further, going into future patches. For now, what you can see on your screen is a work in progress.

Finally, there’s also the Napalm Strike we showed a few weeks ago together with Artillery Smoke. We wanted to keep it in a bit longer for performance reasons. It’s still not 100% there, but it’s working well enough to start testing its gameplay viability and usage in the war zone.

If you are not aware of how to join the PTE, you can find it as a separate game in your Steam library named World War 3 PTE.

The full 0.8 Patch Notes are available here!


When it comes to the HUD, the last week at the office was filled with Breakthrough testing and information layer improvements. We’ve added on screen messages about defuses and plants, all the timers and a few additional things to let people know better what is happening around.

We have a few more things we’d like to add, but we’re waiting for you feedback, since there are a few ways we could go about it. We want to show the current contested area on the map better and direct people more into the proper place. Also, the retreat mechanic will get some additional features, like bonuses for defenders if they retreat successfully and for attackers if they stop the retreat.

One of the questions you might have is about the movement overhaul. Next big milestone on our Roadmap is the Movement Overhaul - this is still the case, but we decided to not wait until it’s 100% done and release the Breakthrough patch in the meantime. Its release is somewhere in-between the milestones. This is why we’ve decided to not put numbers on them knowing we could have something like this happen.

We figured that it’s better to give the players something that’s nearly done right now rather than make you all wait for the movement and bunch it all together. This is mainly why we were able to release 0.8 to the PTE so soon after 0.7 hit Live - it’s only been a little over 2 weeks!

While we’re working on an internal trailer for Breakthrough, we had an idea, that since it’s a community game mode and a lot of you took your time to help us make it, we want to give you an opportunity to have your gameplay in an official trailer. For now this is not set in stone, nothing is concrete, but this is how we would see it happening:

The trailer would be a montage of cool stuff from the Breakthrough PTE testing - clips of great actions and all that fun things you can do in this game mode. There are way more of you than us at the studio, so there’s a good chance you can record more of the sweet destruction than we do. We would also take stream footage, if the compression won’t abysmal. We’ll tell you more about this in the coming weeks.

We are currently planning to keep 0.8 on the PTE for a few weeks to refine it and make sure there are no big exploits and problems and to release it to the Live servers soon.

See you in the next Weekly Report!

-World War 3 Team

Here we go again! After the 0.7 technical update, we can now start sharing content we've been working on during the technical work on the engine. Easily the biggest one is the new Breakthrough game mode, about which you can read more here. It's a very dynamic, quick-paced mode, with no time to stand around. Your split second decisions matter and one soldier can win the game with a good plant or last second defuse. It's available on all Warzone maps, some of them in the Large variant - so you'll be fighting in places that are normally not available in Warzone - like the school and train station on Warsaw or shopping mall on Moscow.

Important: Breakthrough is going to have the Retreat mechanic expanded in the coming weeks to make it something unique and cool.

Supporting this game mode is the new infantry HUD. It's not finished yet, the Strike Bar, Chat, Kill Feed and Score Feed are going to be refreshed as well, but it works a lot better and has a couple new features, like markers on the compass and animated icons with progress bars for gadgets.

The respawns are also a lot better finally, but bear in mind that there's a few things coming to the respawning system during the time in PTE that will make this a lot better (like marking people that you can't spawn on and possibly people under fire being marked as dangerous spawns).

Let's all test the new game mode, especially when it comes to spawn placement, station placement, possible exploits and overall balance for attackers and defenders.

Be sure to post the feedback in the comments or on our forum : https://forum.worldwar3.com/index.php?/topic/10797-feedback-on-update-08/

PTE 0.8 Patch Notes

There's no warmup on PTE (so testing is easier) - this means that Breakthrough match balance will be skewed, If clicking Deploy on another player doesn't do anything, keep trying - this means that the game didn't find a suitable spawn for around them. If this happens on a point, report!

• New game mode: Breakthrough,
  
• New Infantry HUD (WIP),
  
• Napalm Strike is in,
  

• Fixed spawning in a wrong place when there's no space to spawn around selected player,
  
• Fixed being able to look inside a building with Mini Done gadget,
  
• Fixed lasers staying while throwing grenades,
  
• Other bugfixes.
  

- World War 3 Team

Available in the following languages: PL | RU | DE |

Hello, Soldiers!

Last week we’ve told you a bit about how to repair vehicles in World War 3 and how our Hunter/Killer system works. We want to continue the streak and tell you a little more about some of the systems we have implemented in our game, so let’s dive into another set of gameplay secrets. As we said previously: there’s a lot you might not know about our game, but we’re here to help you out!


We wanted to strike a balance between complexity and ease of use with our vehicles. They’re easy to control and operate on a base level, but also have a lot of quirks and features - and we think some of them will interest even people that think they know everything about vehicular combat in the game.

We’ve decided to bring those to the spotlight and let everyone know about what and how to use in WW3.


First, the most obvious part is the customization. Our vehicles, just like characters and weapons, are created by combining lots of attachments. Each attachment has not only its cost in Battlepoints, but also weight and other properties. Attachments can, and some do, change the weight and centre of gravity of the whole vehicle. For example, a heavy turret can make a vehicle unstable by raising it’s centre of mass and make it drive slower due to the added weight.


Second important part of customization is armor. It’s heavy, yes, but also can really help with those pesky RPGs. Since 0.7 you can check how good your armor is against RPGs in the customization menu:


Those values (Front, side and rear armor) are representing the number of normal RPGs you need to destroy an armored vehicle by shooting it in any particular armor section. As you can see, the difference is huge - shooting tanks in the front armor is going to take a long time.

Conversely, a well placed Tandem (which deals around twice the normal RPG damage) can take down even a well armored vehicle in a couple of shots.

As a tank driver, you have to be conscious of this weakness and position your vehicle in a way that prevents enemies from surrounding you. Your vehicle is well armored and can take a lot of punishment before being destroyed, but if you’re outsmarted - that’s it. The slow and unwieldy beasts are no match against a swarm of little guys with well placed grenades to the back of your machine.

This is why the best squads will protect their vehicles and take down any RPG carrying enemy soldiers before they can take the vehicle down and won’t let anyone get behind. It’s called “combined arms” for a reason - even the most armored tank is weak when operating alone.

Below you can see a rough approximation of damage zones you can expect on vehicles in World War 3.



Some vehicles can carry more than one weapon. With MBTs and some other vehicles having the main cannon, the auxiliary machine gun and RCWS possibly having 3 different ways of defending and attacking. You can change between weapons by pressing [1], [2] or [3] depending on your customization. A small tip for everyone not familiar with this: if the main cannon is reloading: you can switch to the other gun while the main is reloading and switch back to continue firing.



Another rarely used feature is vehicle locking. You can toggle between the states by using [L] key. This is useful when you’re trying to give your vehicle to your team or lock your team out of using your vehicle, because you want to fit all your squad members in.

The values this can be set to are:

• Locked (Only the owner can get in),
  
• Squad (Only squad can get in),
  
• Team (anyone from your team can get in).
  

We’ve also got a few additional attachments you can equip your vehicle with. Depending on the platform, there’s smoke grenades (default [G]) to potentially cover your escape or smoke up a street to help your team cross it under fire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmajcTFcM9U
There’s APS - automatic protection that triggers when a missile, grenade or tank shell is coming your direction, shooting it down and going into cooldown.


As we said in the last Weekly Report, we’ve been nominated in Visual Art category for CEEGA 2019. We didn’t win that one, but we got different award - China’s Choice! Thank you for the recognition!


That’s it for this week, we really hope this helps you out during fights against the enemy. See you in the next report, soldier!

- World War 3 Team