Hell Let Loose News

You want something that's fun, gratifying, and simple to play, but also has tension, strategy, and stakes. It's quickly dispiriting, if every time you spawn you're instantly shot down by a sniper. At the same time, running, gunning, and racking up kills en masse is an experience of ever-decreasing thrills. Battlefield and Call of Duty occasionally hit this ideal middle spot, but there's one large-scale WW2 FPS that does it better. Mixing all-out warfare with the squad-driven tactics of Company of Heroes, Hell Let Loose is now available to try for free.

Read the rest of the story...

RELATED LINKS:

One of 2023's best indie games is now on sale

Hell Let Loose devs "deeply apologize" after glitch-filled trailer

Hell Let Loose is being review bombed on Steam after glitchy trailer

• Carentan Skirmish
  
• SME Skirmish
  
• Updates to the Field Manual
  
• German Practice Range
  
• General UI and user flow changes
  

• Carentan - Rain - Skirmish
  
• SME - Night - Skirmish
  

With the Practice Range already being available for the U.S. Forces, the next logical step was to bring this functionality so that players can experience the same mechanics with the German Forces. We have brought this into a variant of the existing Normandy map to keep the experience thematically authentic while providing a safe space for players to hone their skills using the existing German equipment.

Carl Rutter, Senior Level Designer - Expression Games

As part of our UI/UX improvements, we’ve been working towards making features such as the Field Manual a much more intuitive experience for players to access and browse. With a whole new layout, an expandable category interface and a search bar feature, the new and improved Field Manual design allows for a much more streamlined experience for players to learn about the inner workings of Hell Let Loose.

Jack Jenkins, Senior Game Designer - Expression Games

During the development of the previous Sainte-Marie-du-Mont town centre updates, internal discussions mirror the recent community requests for a similar upgrade to the Carentan town centre.

Using a similar process to that undertaken during the Sainte-Marie-du-Mont update, we utilised both internal playtest feedback, and common community sentiment across social media to help guide proposed changes.

The main objective of this update to Carentan was to increase the total playable space while refraining from making the town centre a maze-like experience. These new routes act mainly as side paths and shortcuts, allowing players to either avoid highly contested bottlenecks or give them another avenue to counter these chokepoints. Furthermore, these routes also offer useful areas to place both outposts, garrisons, and forward positions across Warfare/Offensive and the new Carentan Skirmish map.



The above GIF showcases the reduction of invisible walls throughout the area, in turn showing the extent of the new pathways throughout the town. These changes should not only improve navigation but also help drastically reduce instances of being stopped from entering an area because of an invisible wall.

The following images show before and after shots of the key routes that have been implemented throughout the town.

Kienan Southern, Level Designer - Expression Games

To help increase the number of urban maps available to play in Skirmish, the fan favourite Carentan will be available as of the release of Patch 15.1.

To make the most use of the extensive urban setting of the map, players will fight over the Town Centre making their way through the streets, alleys and newly opened gardens to take control of the objective. As always, please use the linked forms to share your thoughts and feedback with us.



Kienan Southern, Level Designer - Expression Games

With the want to make more popular urban maps available with Skirmish mode, and to tie in with the 80th anniversary of D-Day, we are proud to announce that Sainte-Mère-Église will be joining the Skirmish roster. Fighting over the town itself, players will have to navigate the variety of narrow streets, open courtyards and enterable buildings to dominate the town.



As you can see from the in-game tactical map, we know that churches are often a dominant structure, however, to mitigate against dominant spawn camping, we have decided not to include the church itself within the hard capture, retaining the church as a viable strategy for planning your teams’ offence/defence but not being the sole focus of the capture point. As ever we are keen to hear your thoughts on the map and the capture point, so feel free to use the feedback forms attached to let us know what you think.

Carl Rutter, Senior Level Designer - Expression Games

[h3]❗Known Issues[/h3]

For today’s session, there is a list of unfinished items/bugs that we’re aware of, including:

• [Field Manual] UI and layout redesign is currently ongoing and may have some content/functionality issues
  
• [Barracks] UI and layout redesign is currently ongoing and may have some content/functionality issues
  
• [Loadout Screen] UI and layout redesign is currently ongoing and may have some content/functionality issues
  

It was decided early on that we needed a dynamic snow/blizzard scenario for Elsenborn Ridge, so the Technical Art team started prototyping some ideas to support this. The new tech allows us to blend between different intensities of weather, allowing us to go from gentle snowfall as can be seen currently in Foy to a heavy blizzard.

To transition the weather states, we take the current values and blend them over a transition time to new settings that we pull from a preset data asset containing all the VFX elements for each setting.

In addition to the above, the Technical Art team have been improving the occlusion system for rain and snow whereby render targets will be used to occlude rain and snow instead of having to manually check each level for mesh distance fields on buildings, in turn, this makes the possibility of adding differing weather scenarios a lot more flexible in the future.

The dynamic blizzard VFX tech is still in development and the Technical Art team are working to fine-tune, polish and optimise for when we are ready to ship Elsenborn Ridge.

While the work has been mainly based around snow, we added the functionality to do the same for rain as well, however, these will require further development.

Technical Art - Expression Games

The Battle of Elsenborn Ridge is a less-documented, but important battle nonetheless set in the Büllingen region in the Ardennes. 43 miles away from Foy, the Elsenborn Ridge is but one of many examples of how far the Battle of the Bulge was spread out in 1944.

Set during the winter months of 1944, the 99th U.S. Division who had been stationed at Wirtzfeld were under heavy suppression from the 6th Panzer Army composed of the 12th SS Panzer Division, 12th Volksgrenadier and 277th Volksgrenadier to the east, who had finally broken their lines and forced a retreat to the Elsenborn Ridge.

The U.S. were forced to abandon their supplies en-route to the ridge, and settle in for weeks of bombardment from Wirtzfeld. Having retreated to the ridge and established a network where they had become heavily dug in with makeshift trenches, foxholes, camps and artillery gun positions.

Taking place between 16th-26th December, 1944 winter had fully taken hold in Belgium, the thick snow had settled, the roads were slippery and slushy, combined with the constant fog/blizzards made it impossible for the U.S. bombers and the Luftwaffe alike to battle from the skies without succumbing to the elements.

Carl Rutter, Senior Level Designer - Expression Games

As with any Hell Let Loose map, we had considered which maps were already available to players, this allowed us to decide on which kind of thematic map that we wanted to create next. We had decided as a team that the map could be:

• A map that is different to Foy in aesthetics, but fits in with the existing biome
  
• A map that has a much more interesting topography to avoid the repetition of dull, flat terrain that exists in other territories
  
• A challenge to create a map that’s based on controlling land, rather than buildings
  
• An opportunity to design a map without the safety net of large structures and historical landmarks in mind, while retaining visual interest
  
• A map that works for all playstyles, but will be more suitable for vehicles/armour
  

Because the Elsenborn Ridge itself is a forested region where the U.S. dug in with defensive positions rather than a historical landmark, this gave us a lot of space to choose from when designing the initial concept. We chose the absolute edge of Wirtzfeld over Rocherath-Krinkelt because it has a much better road network for vehicles, and to minimize the need to create another village.

Carl Rutter, Senior Level Designer - Expression Games

• 5:00pm EST Omaha Beach - Warfare Mode
  
• 7:00pm EST Utah Beach - Warfare Mode
  

BR1 invites the Hell Let Loose community to join in a charity event to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the WW2 Invasion of Normandy. We invite players to make a minimum donation of $5 dollars to participate. We encourage everyone to give as they can, and will even accept larger donations from our fellow gaming communities. All Donations will benefit the Wounded Warrior Project.

This is our 4th annual Road to D-Day event -- in the previous years we have raised over $6,600 for the WWP, and so we have set our sites a bit higher this year for a single year goal of $3000.

BR1 is a gaming community founded by Veterans and is dedicated to service and leadership. We welcome mature players interested in joining a fun and engaging community that promotes respect and congeniality, both internally and externally. One of our founding principals is providing social support for our Veteran members, as well as guidance toward professional help, when needed. This makes our partnership with Wounded Warrior Project a natural conclusion. WWP provides too many services to Vets and their families to try to list here, and their work speaks for itself. BR1 is proud to be a partner with WWP and by hosting our annual RtDD event, do our small part to help our Veterans.

• [15.0] Some skirmish achievements do not progress/unlock despite meeting the criteria after the new 15.0 update
  
  
• [RCON] Admin message pop-up doesn't register the changed keyboard input
  
  We have addressed this by exposing the keybind to the Keybindings Menu:
  
  
• Dialog Ok
  
• Dialog Cancel
  
• Dialog Ignore
  
  These by default will be bound to the Y, N & I keys however can be changed to any preference.
  
  
• [Mortain][D6] Walls presents collision issues and physics
  
• [Mortain] Birch Tree asset has no bullet collision
  
• [Mortain] Birch Tree Asset presents bullet collision on its branches
  
• [Mortain] Light tank can become stuck on rubble
  
• [Mortain][E5] Player can get stuck if they try to vault over a pile of stones
  
• [Mortain] Assets created along a spline are different between the Editor & the client
  
• [Mortain] [B3] Player locomotion is hindered by collision on the following assets & locations
  - - This should generally fix any instances where you can get hindered / stuck when navigating rubble found across the map.