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Hello Troopers! It’s time for the November Community Q&A. Thanks again for all the great submissions, as always we decided to select questions from a range of topics to answer. This will be the final Q&A for the year, our goal is to continue this initiative in the new year.
Are there plans to create more communication lines between player characters, like shouting quotes from the movie?
Yes, we will be looking to add more voice overs into the game post 1.0 and are exploring a robust Emote system for players to communicate with each other.
Will there ever be more Grenade variants added to the game?
We definitely want to add more grenade types into the game. Nothing is planned short term, but new grenade types are in the works.
Will there be customizable Troopers in Game?
A big thumbs up to this. Not only will there be customization for you to earn through progression, you will be able to customize three different areas on your trooper. The exciting news Trooper customization will be coming in the December Update! Stay tuned for more info!
Will you consider adding a third-person camera mode?
Not at this time.
Was the performance and stability impact from the Unreal Engine 5 upgrade expected?
As a team we decided that if we were going to upgrade the engine we needed to do it sooner than later. The more we continued to add features to the game the more complicated it would be to upgrade the engine, as more systems would have to be verified and integrated and eventually the ROI would not be there for the team. So we decided to do the upgrade when the game was still relatively small and had a smaller set of features, maps and game systems to upgrade.
There was expectation that there may be some short-term performance degradation after the update, but the goal was to have performance parity with UE 4.27 or close to. Since the upgrade was also mixed in with feature updates, it became very hard to keep track of the performance across the engine upgrade and new features.
In the end, some upgraded settings and changes slipped past that severely degraded performance, specifically on our server-side. The worst of which did not appear until our production servers were put under load.
Although we did hot-fix the major issues, future updates will further improve performance as we use the new tools available to us in UE 5.2.
What steps are taken to deal with player griefing through Team Killing? Can we have a vote-kick option?
Since our game has friendly fire, we need to make sure every report and individual case is handled with as much due diligence and investigation as possible. We all understand this is a serious issue and we look at every player report that is generated when players behave this way.
We are actively managing this through our player support operations and are actively actioning accounts that have been engaging in this behavior. We have acted on over 1000 accounts since Early Access began.
With all this being said in our December update we will be releasing an in-game system that will hopefully put the power to deal with this traitorous behavior back into the hands of all you loyal members of the Deep Space Vanguard. We have codenamed this system Shoot to Kick!
Will there be a Morita Mk3 in the game?
Yes, down the road we want to have as many of the weapons from the movies in the game.
When do we get our Text chat to communicate with each other?
Text chat will be added in Game Update 6.0. We will also be adding more accessibility features around communication such as Text to Speech and Speech to Text options during this update.
When are you going to introduce weak points on Bugs?
We are hoping to introduce this feature around the 1.0 launch of the game.
How do the developers intend to monetize the game in the long term?
We have no plans to move away from a buy to play model. Our goal is to offer cosmetics through skins for both Weapons and Troopers. We will NEVER sell POWER!
If this game takes place after the events of the CGI films, why do we have lower grade gear?
Our game takes place 25 years into the future from the first live action movie. More upgraded tech and weapons are coming to the game over the next few years, we have just started!
What is/will be the difference in difficulty levels?
Currently right now the only difference between difficulty levels are the following:
Recruit
Trooper
Veteran
Increased Threat Event Frequency = Every 180 seconds (3 minutes) starting at 2 minutes into the game, they last 5 for minutes.
We are planning on updating our approach to mode difficulty over time. The first one is rewarding players who choose to take the fight to the Bugs in harder difficulties. In update 0.6.0 with Trooper and Veteran difficulty levels now having a bonus XP amount per game mode. This new XP reward table will be outlined in the 0.6.0 patch notes.
In a future update, we will offer different enemy challenges and scenarios per difficulty level. So that people who chose to play on higher difficulty tiers will have new interesting game mechanics. More to come on that closer to the design being finalized.
Powersuits/armor?
They are on the roadmap to come to the game in the future. Our hope is to get some of this into the game post 1.0. We do not have an exact timeline but we want to include powered armor into the game eventually.
The good news is we have concepts and high level designs on these important aspects of the universe. We also need to ensure the current gameplay balance is not impacted by introducing this impressive tech into the game.
Will it be tied to classes? Will it be world drops akin to power weapons, or will it be tied to base building? All of these scenarios are being discussed internally by the design team. The good news is that everyone at the studio is very gung ho about this feature.
Below are some very early concept images:
Is it possible to change the mutator for different servers?
No, currently right now it is a global system, though as we move to the Bug War (Galactic War) we will be adapting and curating the mutator system around the missions you go on.
Are you thinking about a solution for the dropship camping “problem”?
Yes, nothing we can share yet, but our designers are working on something.
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Check out our last Q&A for October.
Thanks again for supporting Starship Troopers: Extermination!