Hell Let Loose News

Hi everyone!

We apologise for one of the longest turnaround times between patches that we’ve experienced so far. We had a ton to fix and tweak and wanted to make sure our brilliant QA team had the time to test everything we’re sending down the pipe. With Update 4 currently in full swing and Sainte-Mère-Église going through some final optimisation, we needed to make sure the Patch would be as bullet-proof as possible.

Patch 8 contains a lot of fixes to both the back-end - including server and client crashes - and to the front end - including the introduction of a new server queue and large-scale tweaks to the Offensive gamemode and fixes to the audio fall-off. There are a lot of notes, so be prepared to dig in.





Server Queuing

You can now queue for a server in Hell Let Loose. We’ve currently limited the total queue spots to 6, with Admins having the ability to adjust the number down. We’ve capped the server queue count to encourage server seeding and avoid situations where we may have 100 players queued across a similar region, instead of a new server up and populated.

Customisation

Added many new German helmets to the cosmetics array. The majority are unlocked by increasing your Career level. Several are unlocked by increasing the Sniper and Spotter Role level.

• Fixed: Players have reported their career level decreasing or exponentially increasing after several consecutive games.
  
• Fixed: The Allies Medic has graphical issues on all Heads when the Melton Winter Coat is selected.
  
• Fixed: Crashed airplanes have increased collision with tanks on the left wing.
  
• Fixed: Certain Steam users are not affected by the global banning system.
  
• Fixed: Graphical issues can occur when entering/exiting vehicles and changing seats if the player is changing weapons while entering.
  
• Fixed: Debug text is displayed when US Engineers attempt to place a resource node on columns I and J.
  
• Fixed: The post-match experience calculation may occasionally freeze for Career Lv100 Players.
  
• Fixed: The Objective distance indicator does not update accordingly when the player is over a kilometer away from said objective.
  
• Fixed: If both final sectors are being captured when a match ends, the following match will not load as the timer will loop indefinitely.
  
• Fixed: Two hour bans are not lifted automatically after the two hours have elapsed.
  
• Fixed: There is no value next to the 'Audio' sliders and is inconsistent with the sliders in the other settings menus.
  

• Implemented and expanded bullet fly-by ricochet and snap volume. You will now notice incoming nearby small arms fire.
  
• MG42 FPP sound improvement.
  
• M1919 FPP sound improvement.
  
• All weapons have been rebalanced, polished and had attenuation adjusted to keep them louder at range.
  
• Vehicle engine and fire sound mix changes.
  

• Added a new RCON command “Set High Ping Threshold” to change or disable kicking players with high ping.
  
• Added a new RCON command “Set Max Queued Players” to change the number of players that can be in the server queue at the same time.
  

• Tweaked TPP muzzle flashes to be 3D and now visible from front-on.
  

• Fixed: Players can clip through a bunker roof by performing a jump-prone action while standing on-top of an item.
  
• Fixed: Grass and terrain clipping inside one of the bunkers in sector I3.
  
• Fixed: A small tree has incorrect bullet collision.
  
• Fixed: Two bunkers in I4 have invisible collision blocking their entrances.
  
• Fixed: A bunker in I3 has invisible collision blocking its entrance.
  
• Fixed: A specific building's front wall has no player collision.
  
• Fixed: There are multiple cases of destroyed tanks with partially failed collision along the shoreline of Omaha Beach.
  
• Fixed: Partially failed collision with a destroyed armored vehicle in the H7 sector.
  
• Fixed: Window LOD issue in Omaha sector D5.
  
• Fixed: There is a layer of water present in the fountains and wells that does not react to bullet penetration.
  
• Fixed: Destroyed buildings between the cliff and the beach will change their geometry due to an LOD issue.
  
• Fixed: Extended collision is present of the grounded cliff faces placed behind the German artillery in sector A6 of the map.
  
• Fixed: The player can get stuck inside one of the stables present in a a specific barn in the B7 map sector.
  
• Fixed: There is a visible seam in the water when deploying on the US team.
  
• On Omaha, the player is able to see a small section of the edge of the map in sectors A7, A5 and A4.
  
• Fixed: Wave animation present on a net located inside a barn in the F6 map sector.
  
• Fixed: The brick walls near the beach on Omaha are observed to have visual issues.
  
• Fixed: An audio error is occurring in specific areas of the beach.
  

We’ve read a huge amount of feedback across all channels, as well as collated our own through playing the map with you. We’ve made some changes to the gamemode below and outlined our rationale for those changes. Please know that we’ll adjust any of these changes against your feedback and our play experience. We are keen to make sure the Offensive gamemode has the right level of intensity and asymmetrical balance as we can achieve.


Reduced number of first active sectors on the beach from two to one.

Currently the US forces are able to spread themselves easily into the inactive sector and push around the German defenders and take the beach faster than we’d intended. We’ve altered the first row of the Offensive mode to now only have one active sector that the Germans must defend and the US must attack.


Attackers now land only in the single active sector.

The largest change to the gamemode is that for the first sector only, we keep only one strongpoint in play. This means that the landing experience will be far more intense and fraught, with the US forces taking considerable fire as they come in. Instead of deciding to land all along the beach, US forces will now need to land in the active sector - consolidating both teams efforts around one location. Please note: once the first row (the beach) has been captured the available sectors will widen back out to two.


US tanks now only spawn in the active sector.

Due to the US forces being able to field three tanks immediately on the beach, the Germans were often more scared to peek at the beach than the attackers. We’ve limited the attackers tank spawn to the active sector, meaning that they’ll have one instead of three tanks to use. Once the first row is taken, all other sectors will spawn their tanks as normal.

Allow attackers to push beyond current attacking sector by 1.

We felt that this was overly restrictive and punished the success of the attacking force. This was designed to consolidate action around the front line. Instead, we now let the attackers push into the sector beyond the active one, but limit them from pushing deeper than that.

Increased the turn back timer to 30 seconds for vehicles out of bounds.

While Infantry could nimbly turn around, many vehicles were overshooting the boundary and being destroyed simply because they could not reverse or turn fast enough. We’ve increased the turn back timer for vehicles to 30 seconds in order to make it much easier to retreat without losing your vehicle. We recommend that you don’t leave your vehicle in this time.


Round start timer for staging.

We’ve implemented a two minute round timer for staging, so that players with slower HDDs are able to load and form up before all landing on the beach (or running to their MG nests).

• LOD issue occurring on one of the trees in the German spawn.
  
• The in game map does not correctly represent the actual position of the player by approximately 10m in specific locations.
  
• Stretched textures are present on non-ground floor levels of the Brecourt Manor.
  

• Fixed a potential server crash triggered by character customisation.
  
• Fixed a potential server crash in the replication graph code.
  
• Fixed a potential server crash triggered by an issue with the engine’s garbage collection.
  
• Fixed client crashes when changing map to Omaha from an active game.
  

• Sainte-Mère-Église German Offensive and Warfare Gamemodes.
  
• New unlockable role loadouts.
  
• In-game loadout and customisation selection.
  
• Server host reserved slots.
  
• Continued wide-spread optimisations.
  

• Continuing HUD and UI updates.
  
• Implementing mocap and making large changes to our TPP animation systems. These will result in a much more natural look and feel.
  
• Our FPP experience - with a focus on gunplay - is being overhauled in a separate branch.
• This is to both match our new TPP look, but also to greatly increase the fluidity of the FPP experience.
  
• Diving (performed by proning while sprinting). This is wrapped up with our FPP overhaul currently.
  
• Bullet penetration.
  
• Map balancing (addition of cover and other features in locations that are either boring or creating a tedious gameplay experience).
  
• Wheeled vehicles.
  
• Three new maps are currently at different stages of development.
  
• Updating all audio and SFX. We’ve been testing reflections and different reverb volumes alongside all new weapon fire and reload sounds.
  

We’ve read the subreddit, Discord and forum feedback and are making the Garand sight picture easier to use! You can expect to see this in U4.

Thank you for continuing to share your thoughts and feedback on all elements of Hell Let Loose with us, it does make a difference.



If you’re enjoying Hell Let Loose, you can help us by leaving us a review on Steam.

See you on the frontline!

Hey everyone,

Welcome to Developer Briefing #46! This week we’re incredibly excited to share with you
a look at the next map to be added to Hell Let Loose - the French town of Sainte-Mère-Église.





The largest urban map to be added so far to Hell Let Loose, Sainte-Mère-Église is a faithful 1:1 recreation of the location made famous by the D-Day paradrop landings in and around the town.



The town - which stretches across the three middle sectors of the map - is dominated by the enormous church at its center and will force both teams to engage in tense street-to-street combat as they seek to push the enemy back out into the fields on either side.



Narrow lanes and alleyways create mazes between buildings before opening out onto the wider town streets and main church square. Armored units will need to take care as they enter the closer confines of the town - as mines and enemy anti-tank infantry will make short work of them if left alone.



Outside of the town, the countryside is made up of drainage ditches, small hamlets and farms. More dramatic height differences allow for armored units to command dominating positions and reign supreme.











Sainte-Mère-Église will be coming to Hell Let Loose this November!

Join us next week for another Developer briefing where we’ll have more to share!

See you on the front lines!

Good news! We’ve extended the Hell Let Loose sale to last over the weekend until 6PM BST on October 21st!

Board the landing craft now!

Hi everyone!

We want to thank you for an absolutely huge weekend. We had an enormous number of people both jump into the game, and then support the game further by buying a copy! To those new players, we want to say welcome, and to the veterans - we want to say thank you for taking to the front lines to give a guiding hand to newcomers.

Hell Let Loose is very much a work in progress. As a dev team, we love adding content, fixing bugs, overhauling systems and working to bring the game to the highest level of quality that we can. We hope that over the course of our Early Access you’ll see significant steps forward in each of these areas and we’re looking forward to having you join on the journey with us.




We’ve been reading a lot of feedback and feel that Offensive mode has brought a great new set of tactical and strategic challenges, but that it definitely needs to be polished. We collate large amounts of feedback and pair it with meta-data to give us a good picture of win rates and different aspects of how the mode is performing (we’re also playing in there with you!).

We want to share our reflections with you now:

• The initial beach experience needs to be much more fraught and dangerous for the US forces. Currently the first beach sectors are captured very quickly - due to an abundance of US armor and the sheer breadth of the beach itself. This is leading to it being easy to push the beach, as well as silent and generally lacking the iconic atmosphere you expect.
  
  
• It is very unsatisfying to push the enemy all the way back to the final sector row and then lose the game as the US forces.
  
  
• Driving a tank out of bounds in Offensive mode punishes you far too quickly - causing a loss of armor that could be avoided if the timers were more generous.
  
  
• It is frustrating as US forces to not be able to push more than one sector in - in order to take down crucial Garrisons and OPs behind the boundary.
  

We’ve already implemented tweaks that deal with many of these issues and they’ll be applied the next time we update. We’re using our time in Early Access to really hone in on the key desired experience for both Warfare and Offensive. Tied to these is the resource metagame, role of the Commander and then each role beneath the Commander. As the game develops, you’ll see each role evolve and be fleshed out in functionality and their place on the battlefield.

Later in Early Access we’ll be introducing the Campaign metagame, in which both Offensive mode and Warfare will sit. Before then, it’s crucial that we make sure both game-modes are performing as intended.

• A plethora of bugs, crashes and bad optimisation caused issues for players on lower end machines or specific graphics cards or CPUs. These are all aspects that we’re working hard to fix. Optimisation will be an ongoing thing. Many of our assets are now streamlined and becoming increasingly optimised - but we’ll be doing a large optimisation push for our release from EA.
  
  
• The experience/progression bug is incredibly frustrating for obvious reasons. Fortunately, our QA team were able to jump in over the weekend and play a large number of full population games back to back in order to reproduce it. This is near the top of our list for a fix.
  
  
• Sound attenuation distances were too low and too quiet. In the push to move to the upgraded audio engine, we’ve redesigned our assets and this was an unfortunate side effect. You’ll see a significant fix for this in the next time we update the game. We’ve also worked specifically on the assets for the M1919 and the MG42. We feel they need improvement and you’ll be able to hear the difference in the next time we update.
  

Our FPP and TPP animation is possibly our weakest area now - we animations feeling overly stiff and lacking fluidity. We are working extremely hard to bring you our Version 2 animation overhaul. This is made up of three parts:

1. New photoreal hands, including customisation appropriate hands/sleeves (ie. wearing the winter uniform will mean your FPP hands will be gloved and have the winter sleeves).



2. IK-enabled procedural animations. This covers a large number of nuances that go into the character of the gunplay. We now have procedural recoil per calibre, animated stance shifting, animated ADS, animated leaning, endless procedural sprints, the ability to blend multiple animations at once (crouch, reload and sprint) and much, much more. The experience now feels like it sits amongst the very best examples in the FPS market and we’re very excited to show you how that will perform closer to the release date. We feel it will be one of the most significant graphical and experience overhauls in the life of Hell Let Loose. Finally, the last major benefit of this system is that it will make our inclusion of new weapons much faster and of a much more consistent quality.



3. Motion-captured full body TPP animations. These bring a level of realism to the player movement that feels far more fluid than what is currently in the game. In addition to this, the system upgrade means that feet now adjust to the surface, the body bends to match the ground when prone and we’re able to blend many animations all concurrently. We feel that this will finalise the TPP experience. Like the FPP overhaul, this also means that adding new weapons is a very painless affair compared to our current system.





There are hundreds of these - from non-verbal comms, radial menus, better handling of solo-tanking, new weapons (flamers and trench guns anyone?), new maps, new weather conditions, new vehicles, new customisation options and all the rest. We’ve got a huge amount of content in the works that we’re very, very excited to show you.




Next week we’re proud to bring you a dev briefing on our next map: Sainte-Mère-Église.

Sainte-Mère-Église is the first large-scale urban map to be introduced to Hell Let Loose and features giant urban battles through backyards, town streets and the famous church and church square. Defenders and attackers in Warfare will begin in the countryside and push into the town in the middle of the map for intense street-to-street combat. Initially, we will be offering Offensive mode that position the Germans as the attackers - as they push in to reclaim the recently captured town.



Sainte-Mère-Église will be coming soon in Update 4 with Warfare and Offensive mode, along with a large number of bug fixes, sound fixes, sound upgrades, Offensive mode tweaks and all new features that we’ll unpack in a dev briefing closer to its launch.

See you on the front line!

Click here to check out what's on offer!

Included in this sale are the recently released Blasphemous and Overcooked! 2 'Carnival of Chaos' DLC, early access titles Hell Let Loose and Monster Sanctuary AND some of our older classic titles too!


Happy gaming!