Vanguard: Normandy 1944 News

Pathfinder Games are today pleased to announced that Vanguard: Normandy 1944 has been released on Steam Early Access!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/941850/Vanguard_Normandy_1944/

https://youtu.be/U7okrVNnPqo

Following our successful Kickstarter campaign late in 2018, we have been hard at work play-testing and fine-tuning the game ready for this release. We are excited to see people playing the game!

We’ll release a roadmap for our plans over the coming weeks, but in the first patch we are aiming to add in:

• Keybinding
  
• In-game audio tweaks
  
• Audio settings menu
  
• Animation tweaks
  
• Bugfixing
  
• Balance tweaks
  

We’re also looking into more server regions, new maps, new weapons and an enhanced friend system. We already have servers online in EU, USA, Australia, Russia, Asia & Brazil!

Steam keys were sent out yesterday to all our eligible backers. We haven’t forgotten the other rewards, we will be sending those out as soon as we can.

We appreciate all of your feedback, so please tell us what you think of the game on the Steam forums or Discord server.

We look forward to seeing you on the battlefields!

First of all, we really appreciate your understanding of our decision to postpone the launch of Vanguard. The few additional weeks this grants us has proved very fruitful in fine-tuning and polishing the game, which will definitely pay off when we hit Early Access.

It would not be an Early Access launch if the game was finished at this stage so there are things that will not be present in Early Access at launch. We detail a few examples of these below. We will also run down what changes we have been making in development right now.



We will be live streaming our next beta test on our YouTube channel.

Subscribe and tune in for the first live look at the game.





The big feature that has proven to be a sticky one in terms of getting it working has been VOIP. This is an ongoing development focus and has improved greatly in recent weeks. We are hoping to include this as part of our closed beta testing sessions soon and look forward to making in-game comms much easier and accessible to players of the game.



A lot of attention is being paid to launch servers and how they will operate once the launch comes. This is a purely backend issue, but a vital one that impacts the launch for every player! It is important the servers can look after themselves once we go live, auto-applying updates and minimising downtime so we can update the game regularly. Providing servers was a key reason for the Kickstarter campaign in the first place and is certainly not being overlooked as we approach the launch.



Raid is continually being improved and we have recently been on a heavy bug-fixing marathon. Bug-fixing is a big part of any software development, and more bugs are inevitably introduced every time a new feature is added or tweaked. Recently we have fixed lots of small bugs relating to level optimisation or backend code, for example; bugs relating to user interaction such as issues with the spectator cam and UI interaction.

We have also made further enhancements to floating squad markers, which now show your squad mates’ roles (e.g. rifleman). Different versions of each icon are used in the day and night maps to make them less intrusive at night but still readable during the day.





We have touched before on what the Early Access launch will feature, but what about what is not going to be in the game initially? While we are pushing for the most feature-complete version possible, it would not be early access without a few sharp edges, for example:

• Animations: First of all you will notice that some of the animations are not as smooth as we would like them to be. Animation systems are notoriously complicated to get right, and a few glitches or awkward movements will be present.
  
• Lobbies/Friend system: We will be overhauling the way in which players join servers by introducing lobbies and gamemode tweaks after launch. We will also make it easier to play with your Steam friends and form squads.
  
• Customisation: At the moment you cannot change the default keybindings. We will be adding in support for remapping the keys to your preferred configuration.
  
• Audio: Dialog and weapon audio will be the focus of changes during EA, so expect a lot more character shouting later on.
  
• Steam Achievements
  

Don't forget to add the game to your Steam Wishlist. We will be back with more news on the game but in the meantime you can find us on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter as we countdown the final 2 weeks until Early Access Launch!

The first two months of 2019 have had us regularly play testing and fine-tuning the game. This has included bug-fixing, gameplay improvements and increasing the usability. The game has already come a long way this year, with recent additions detailed below, but we’ll get straight to the elephant in the room…




The game needs to be at a certain level before we can launch on Early Access. It needs to be stable and include essential features. Unfortunately we have just run out of time to launch in February, as we planned.

We need a few extra weeks to polish up the game, continuing the optimisation, testing, fine tuning the gamemode and pushing ahead the development of ingame VOIP. Implementing an integrated voice chat into the game has taken far longer than we anticipated and unfortunately it just isn’t ready yet.



We believe these are vital tasks.We do not want to launch without advancing further. The game is launching onto Steam Early Access and we will be continually making improvements but we want players to be able to enjoy the game on Day 1.

We will be continuing to work hard to finish up on these outstanding features in the next few weeks.

We are able to announce that the game will be released on Friday 5th April


The game is continuing to evolve as we tweak and improve it based on our testing, which is benefiting the game hugely.

Since the beginning of February we have done a total of over 176 hours of beta testing, pushed 18 builds to Steam for testing, made over 100 bug fixes and improvements to the game and been fueled by up to 12 cups of tea (or coffee) a day.



Recent changes have included improvements in orienting players, streamlining event information to the player through a refined user interface and audio notifications, stability improvements and continued optimisation.



Elsewhere we’ve continued to work on localisation which will allow us to have text support for French, Spanish and German languages at launch and we are working on the backend to support audio localisation in the future. Several audio additions have also been made recently, the most noticeable being English and German callouts recorded by our talented voice artists. We’ve also been practising our streaming etiquette, as we look forward to live-streaming a test session in the very near future!




We hope you will join us on the battlefields on release. We have enjoyed seeing excited people play testing the game, and are determined to get the game out to our Kickstarter backers and community as soon as possible. It really does hurt us to have to push the release date back, but it is beneficial in both the short and long run. We look forward to sharing more with you in the coming weeks.



If you have any questions about the release or the game in general, you can always reach us on our forums or our official Discord server.

You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.