Guide
Hello everyone! My apologies for the article not being released for so long — community managers collected your questions at the end of December, but I didn't have time to answer them. But the New Year's rush is behind, and I will try to respond more rapidly in the future!
So, let's see what interesting things you guys asked:
Generally, there are two factors affecting ping most: remoteness from servers and established internet backbones. The first factor is quite explainable: the SEA servers are in Singapore, and the farer you are from this country, the worse the connection is. The second factor depends on how well connected the countries are. For example, your countries can be rather close to each other in proximity, but the mountainous terrain or other geographical stuff made the to lay communications networks over a huge hook. And this is what matter, not the hours of flight by plane.
Overall, the SEA is one of our broadest region (judging by the range of countries the players log in from) and our mission in this region to enter specific markets in specific countries and open individual servers there. Now, for example, we're working on Korean and Chinese localizations. After we finish it, we will go further.
We're going to start working on Lyubech-3 during this year, and we're gonna rebuild it from scratch. There are some interesting plans for it. However, the probability of the release being in the next year is really high due to wide range of work. The city itself takes a half of a year to build, and here we don't count the decorations and polishing.
Although I'm not denying the fact of adding some simple cool features to the Lyubech's current version to smooth the wait.
We're planning to release Spanish localization very soon (it should have been released in the past year) and then we're going to evaluate the future options and possibilities. We will need to examine all the possible infrastructure problems, probably we will have to find local partner to make things more effective. So, no guarantees of any strict dates here.
The North side quests are still trying to make its way to release, although they were in development before the Day X. We have rather major inner problems with communication between the Narrative and other EXBO Departments. That is why the side quests always don't get released for so long. We've already taken and are continuing to take several measures to solve this issue — I hope, you'll see it very soon.
The previous Northern locations weren't initially made for 4 factions confrontations (these locations appeared long before the factions) the gameplay was a buzzkill and rather tight on random in terms of PVP-type battles. If you were lucky, you wouldn't meet any players, if you were not, you would be bumping heads with the whole squad in the narrow transition.
New northern locations are far more intuitive, and even the child would say that it's a piece of cake to see which zones are more dangerous and which are less. Also, if there is a skew of online towards one of the factions, it affects mostly only the central locations and leaves the rest of us to farm, albeit less profitably. Generally speaking, the issue of the online skew is still present, but solving it is much easier now.
Personally, I'm sad for having to remove the northern bases that were taken over by clans and could be used by any faction members of those clans. It gave more audience involvement up for captures, but what do we do? Maybe in the future we'll come up with something decent as an alternative.It's also worth remembering that we're still missing locations between Mercenaries and Frontier, as well as between Covenant and Rise — there will be outpost captures there too, and this will give more room for gameplay. By the way, such mechanics as outposts would be impossible without symmetrical arrangement of the warring parties, and we plan to develop it and everything related to faction confrontations as well.
Yes, sounds seem to be the most outdated part of our candy wrapper right now, especially the sound of gunshots. We have some upcoming improvements on this part. Moreover, many of them have been waiting for their turn since the summer. The whole point is that we have our own engine. So if other shooters can just put FMOD: we need to take the time of our programmers, who often have a huge pipeline of other tasks on top of that.
And the tasks of improving the audio usually lost out in priority to gameplay, graphics, and a lot of other things. However, we've already accumulated some technical debt on the sounds, and we're serious about not dragging it out.
This example lacks a third option. Is it completely rare to encounter altruists who just return backpacks for nothing? In general, we were thinking about some sort of reputation mechanics that would highlight those who often unselfishly return backpacks. To get people more motivated to do it. Well, the return of backpacks is an important part of player social interaction that makes the game more lively and adds depth. If you limit the ability of some players to influence the gaming experience of others, it will make the game bland and uninteresting.
For Day X, we made the captures split into brawls and 1-on-1 captures, which was supposed to allow smaller clans to at least breathe more freely at the brawls. The reward there isn't that big for the top clans to be interested in spending time on it. Also, smaller clans can band together and do something like politics of reward sharing.
We have the next big pack of changes for clans in development right now. We plan to introduce divisions and a lot of other things to change/add. So that's the part we're working on, and we realize the importance of lowering the entry requirements into this activity. So we get more clans fighting each other.
Many mechanics in the game are tied to a character's name, so reusing them would create a lot of technical difficulties.
We generally want to produce more quests, of any kind. The narrative department is now functioning more as scriptwriters, and they have a year's full of scripts. They have also already come up with a quest similar to Rune. Now, there's a problem with the fact that you need specialists from other departments to realize the quest, and they are usually busy with higher priority tasks. To solve this problem, we want to allocate separate people from different departments to work specifically with quests.
If you make something like a ranking of complaints about STALCRAFT, the topic of matchmaking has always been at the top. That's because the matchmaking system is closed and does absolutely nothing to explain how it works or what affects it. As a result, many players start making their own conjectures about how it should eventually be organized. Thus, when what happens in the game goes against those conjectures, they call the system broken.
The closed matchmaking system has a very simple goal right now: not to confront players in the open world who have too big of a difference in equipment. And that difference is determined by the hidden Gear Score (which has nothing to do with what is now displayed in the inventory; it's an old rudiment that needs to be kicked out), not the rank of the gear. This might be a bit like World of Tanks, where level 8 tanks can participate in the same game session as level 6 tanks.
There's also a small impact of success in PvP. If a player is dominating a location and is near the top of the Gear Score, he will be bumped to the next level of matchmaking quicker. In general, we have a fairly low TTK (Time to Kill) and the small difference in gear is more than compensated by the player's hard-skills (shooting skills), knowledge of the location and the banal “who spotted the first”.
But of course, usually players (and even more so new ones) don't get a lecture on matchmaking before the game starts. When they see a gun or an armour of a higher rank on the death screen, they start assuming by default that it's some kind of imbalance and that they were shot over just because of it. Also, after putting on a new armour, the system does not instantly calibrate the player. So sometimes you can meet a player with Master armour on some Scrapyard, who just got them from the season pass or transferred from another account. It has its technical reasons, and it doesn't happen that often. However, it does present a serious morale problem for the rest of the players he'll have time to kill before he flies off to higher ranked servers.
I hope that this year we will have time to prepare a new open matchmaking system where players will be able to track the real Gear Score and where the level of matchmaking will be determined by the gear a character is wearing when leaving a safe zone, so that they can choose which servers to play on if they wish. With this system, we will be able to calibrate players instantly, and there will be no more stray guys with Master gear in the Scrapyard. However, it's still not very clear what to do about the impact of success in PvP: but we'll figure it out.
There is concern that this could significantly disrupt the balance of power between factions. However, our game designers are currently working hard on figuring out which faction balance tools could make this possible. In general, work on the possibility of joining any faction is underway.
This is planned, but unfortunately, only for next year.
Yes, throughout the fall, we tested various session-based modes with presets — there were three variants, and so far, none of them have been fun enough for release. We currently have dedicated game designers working exclusively on this issue, and sooner or later, they'll come up with something interesting. We have plans to introduce a rotation of session-based modes — so that every month or longer, one session-based mode with presets replaces another. However, this currently depends on the implementation of specific modes.
As for the Standoff mode, it will remain a place where players first train for clan battles and test their open-world gear.
Yes, signals are an outdated mechanic, and work is underway for a complete overhaul. This work is already in progress, and the release will definitely happen this year.
We don't plan to bring back the Red Forest in its old form because that old North is a thing of the past and won't return. However, it's quite possible that the Red Forest will appear as one of the two missing locations of the new North (where the outposts are), or we might use it for other purposes. For now, there are no specific plans.
Our online player numbers are growing across all regions, which is great. The team has also tripled in size over the last two years. Because of this, our company currently resembles a lanky teenager whose muscles can't keep up with the growth of their bones. To avoid collapsing under our own weight, it's critically important to solve many organizational problems right now. The larger the team, the harder it is to manage. As a result, there's less room for creativity in my work than before — but I’m confident this will improve once we establish proper processes within the company.
At the same time, it's very important to ensure that EXBO doesn't turn into yet another bureaucratic office focused on business rather than creativity. We don't have publishers or publicly traded stocks, so there's no need to chase specific profit targets or constantly prove something to someone. All the money we earn is reinvested back into the game. With each passing year, this opens up opportunities for cooler and more ambitious ideas — and that’s very inspiring.
They are currently in production, and it's very likely that this year, on STALCRAFT's anniversary, we will be sending out collectibles for both 10 and 11 years, just like last time. If everything goes smoothly with the new suppliers, we'll be able to streamline the process and avoid such delays in the future. As for the contents of the collector's set—it's a surprise! :D
The biggest update this year is the release of the first Operation, which is a fully PvE dungeon offering a layer of content not only for casual players but also for hardcore gamers. We also plan to completely overhaul open-world mechanics such as Caches and Signals, along with introducing new detectors with new functionalities. A new NVG is in the works, and the “Arsenal” project is also nearing release. With it, there will be an opportunity to upgrade certain weapons. A new skin and style catalogue system is also in development to make it more aligned with modern games. A new auction system is actively in development, and it will include offers from the developers as well. Important sound features are expected to arrive soon.
There are many projects currently in development, but there is still no certainty about their release timelines. With those projects, there's an equal chance that everything might suddenly go smoothly or that a lot of complexities might arise, significantly delaying the release. As I mentioned earlier, we're working on new session battles and want to launch their rotation. I also hope that open matchmaking system won't encounter any sudden difficulties and will be completed by the end of the year. At the same time, there are various unannounced projects of different sizes that might appear in patch notes out of the blue.
Additionally, I'll share that I'm personally working on ensuring that we release more frequent, small, budget-friendly content additions. These may be modest, but they add a touch of variety to the game. Currently, most of us are occupied with large projects and fundamental overhauls of mechanics, which often means that the main game goes a long time without new content. Although, practice shows that sometimes even the slightest addition can bring a lot of fun to the game. For example, proto-anomalies with trampolines or something related to the guitar.
I hope you found these responses useful and interesting to read. This year, our community department and I will be working diligently to bridge the gap between our Russian-speaking developers and the English-speaking audience. Of course, due to the language barrier, it feels like we spend less time with you, for instance, by not conducting streams in English. However, we will certainly strive to come up with something to improve this situation. We are very interested in interacting more with you, and in doing so, we aim to grow more globally.
