In the coming weeks, Foxhole will be getting it's largest update yet, which will include a version of World Conquest for everyone to play and will transition the game to an initial One World experience.
Be sure to join us on our next Devstream (Tuesday, March 6th 2PM ET) as we talk more about this big release for Foxhole.
Disclaimer: Any feature or piece of content shown here is a work in progress and subject to change in the future.
Character Uniform Research Project
The concept of player uniforms has been brewing for a long time and we've constantly been chipping away at the idea. Recently the art team started a research project to determine the range of designs that would work within the visual goals for Foxhole.
In our current game design iteration, we want there to be two types of features that change your character's visuals. The first is wearables (Gas Mask, Radio Backpack, etc), which have an impact on gameplay and the second is uniforms (visual only). This approach is slightly different from what we've discussed in the past. The focus of this research project was on uniforms.
Colonial uniform explorations
Colonial engineer uniform concept
The big design challenge was to find the delicate balance between ensuring that players still feel like they are part of a unified army, while allowing them to have some distinctiveness for role playing / communication purposes. In our earlier attempts, we tried some designs that swung too far in the later direction. The designs that we have here are much more grounded and don't take away the feeling that the player is part of a larger army, but we still aren't satisfied with them yet. All the designs shown here will likely be discarded as we attempt more iterations in the future. We aren't anywhere near rolling out uniforms as a feature but we wanted to show the progress that we are making internally.
Modelled out Colonial uniforms (to be discarded)
In-game comparison of Colonial uniforms
0.10 Update: World Conquest
The 0.10 update is going to be our biggest update for Foxhole yet (once again!). The update will be coming on Tuesday, March 13 [EDIT: Release date has been pushed back one day to March 13th] so be sure to mark that down on your calendar. As always, unexpected issues may delay the release, but this is the target we are aiming for. Besides the features listed below, there is one more neat feature that we will be revealing on Tuesday's Devstream.
Key Features
World Conquest Full Release (3x3 grid)
Home Region Islands
Initial One World experience
Unification of World Conquest game mechanics to Skirmish Mode
Observation Tower (World Strategic Structure)
Mooring County (New Region)
Colonial and Warden Truck Variants
The first version of the One World experience (no server browser)
The Travel screen that will be used to access Skirmishes and the Conquest in One World
World Conquest Test Feedback and Changes
Thanks again for helping us evaluate World Conquest. We just opened up the feedback channels so you can finally give us your detailed thoughts on the last World Conquest test event. Even without these channels available for the last week, we've been keeping an eye on your comments and complaints and have worked ahead to resolve (or plan to resolve) the top issues. We will continuing to integrate feedback up until the next update is released and beyond. Here's the status on some of these issues.
Border Camping
This has probably been the most severe issue we've seen in our Conquest tests. We gave players the option to respawn at the border so that they would be able to get a foothold into another region during invasions. It turns out that this system was flawed both for the attackers and defenders of a region due to spawn camping. We will be making some changes to address this:
1) Players that die in a region without a Home Town will be returned to the Home Region island (where they can rejoin the Conquest through the Travel screen). This should help the defenders of a region since they won't feel obligated to camp borders.
2) Players will be able to travel to neighbouring regions from anywhere along the border of a region (except water for now). This prevent attackers from being spawn camped.
3) Players will be able to build Camp Sites at the border to help them gain a foothold in a region. The Campsites will have fast decay so that they can't be used to clutter the travel area.
Decay Timers
We've sensed that the decay timer on structures are too short, resulting in a diminished feeling of accomplishment for dedicated builders. Most structures in Foxhole decay for two reasons. First, we want to reduce the amount of structure clutter / spam that appears in the later stages of long war. Second, we want to reduce the amount of CPU time the server spends on simulating structures in the world. If too many structures exist in the world, the server will be under a lot of strain which results in lag and other technical issues. In the next update, we will be slowing down the decay by 10 to 30% (depending on the structure) to help address this problem. We understand that this isn't a complete solution, but we do have longer term plans to improve the decay system to be smarter (such as only decaying when there is actually a lot of clutter instead of all the time).
Night Swings
The tests we've run has shown that much of the large swings in the progression of the war happen at night or during low population situations. It's frustrating to make progress in the war, only to have it all lost over night. There is always going to be back and forths in the game, but we don't want them to be as severe as they are now. In the short term, we hope that this issue will be mitigated by the Conquest simply having more players (since it will be a main mode of play and not a test anymore). We are also looking into more long term solutions, such as a weather system that will reduce combat effectiveness during low population or unbalanced situations.
FMG Spam
We've gotten a lot of feedback about FMGs being overused in the early game for Conquest. To address this issue, we will be making FMGs require Blueprints to produce.