Welcome Renowners, Mr. Z here with some exciting news about a new map and changes to our backend.

One of the biggest complaints we’ve had in our Survival playtests has been the lack of space to build bases on the map, given the map was originally designed for a 4 Team Raid mode, this is quite understandable. Fear not because we’ve addressed these issues by completely revamping the map. The newly named map: Algara Isle, now has the shape of an island with water on all sides, and the former map boundary cliffs have been removed.

The overall size of the map is roughly 60% bigger, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Originally, the Winterhold castle area took up a pretty large proportion of the map, with the area being unavailable for player bases. Most of the new areas with this map extension have added quite a bit more building space for players. We’ve also added brand new POIs to the map to give players more locations to fight over and to spread the loot a bit more, as it was too concentrated in the Winterhold area, which let high performing groups of players dominate most of the loot too easily.

Here KZ wrote us some details on what the goals of the new map expansion are:

Main Goals of the Map Expansion:
Increased Space for Building: The primary objective was to provide players with more room to construct without feeling crowded.

Enhanced Player Interaction: Despite the expanded area, maintaining player encounters was crucial to fostering community and interaction.

Abundance of Points of Interest (POIs): To prevent the expansion from feeling like a mere walking simulator, numerous POIs were scattered throughout, offering exploration and activities.

Balanced Development Opportunities: Ensuring that building in the outer regions remained worthwhile was a key consideration.

Integration of Features and Optimization:
Gradual Introduction of Biomes: The expansion serves as a platform for introducing and refining biome mechanics, allowing players to experience varied environments.
Incremental Feature Testing: Features from the larger map are being methodically integrated and tested in the expansion, optimizing functionality and player experience over time.
Continuous Improvement: The expansion provides an opportunity to address existing issues in the larger map, refining gameplay and performance iteratively.

There’s a couple of questions many of you must be thinking, why did we expand the old map and what's going on with the upcoming survival map? As many know, navigating the waters of game development is a very volatile experience, and often requires changing course quickly. We’ve made a slight course correction as we were expecting to be able to release a new map around this time, but unfortunately we ran into a lot of obstacles along the way. The biggest of which was performance issues that we haven’t been able to resolve yet. When making the new map we decided to use a new system for placing foliage in Unreal 5 called PCGs. It produces some pretty impressive and organic looking results but unfortunately it has nuked our performance to well below our intended targets.

Given the time crunch we’re currently under (we only have 4 developers), we decided to revamp the old existing map to alleviate most of the issues players had with it as it was pretty playable already. Thankfully, the expansion of the old map seems to have had no effect on performance. There were also other performance issues with the full survival map, and we haven’t had enough playtesting on it to balance out all the Loot and POIs. A map extension to our old map seemed like the obvious thing to do and it seems to have paid off as we’ll be getting it released in a major patch shortly.

So what’s the plan with the full survival map? Our focus right now is shifted at the Steam Open World Survival Crafting Fest at the end of March. That’s right, we’re doing another demo and this time for a Festival, we’re going to have a lot of players during the festival so this is the perfect time to gather up the gang for a new wipe. After that demo ends we’re going to redirect and redouble our efforts back into the full survival map. We’re very excited to get it playable since the map’s large size is also going to necessitate the introduction of rideable Horses to the game, which have been expected for a long time.

We have some other good news relating to the backend of the game.

We’re now using Epic Online Services (EOS). EOS gives us 2 new features we’ve been badly needing, a good anti-cheat service and VOIP. To be perfectly clear, the game is still coming to Steam without question, EOS is compatible with Steam and lots of games on Steam are using it lately.

Anti-cheat has long been on our minds, despite the game still being in Alpha we’ve already attracted the attention of hackers. Nobody likes hackers, we’ve all played many games that have been ruined by their presence, so we’re taking a proactive approach early to deal with them.

One key feature that was missing in our last playtest was Voice chat. It’s a very integral feature of PvP open world survival games and its absence was felt pretty strongly. We were relying on a duct tape solution for voice chat that was sending the voice data through the same game server that players were on, but unfortunately that has massive performance issues and simply doesn’t scale to the player counts we’re expecting. We’re now using Epic Online Services Voice, which shifts the performance costs of Voice chat to the Epic Backend instead of our game servers. We can’t wait to see what silly antics players will get into now that Voice chat works again.

We’ll have another dev blog soon with a big announcement, follow our announcements channel on our official Discord and Renown on Steam to stay appraised.