Letter from the Team - January 28th

Hello Everyone, and happy (belated) New Year! We hope you all had ample time to rest, relax, and reset over the holidays. To kick off the first letter of the new year, we wanted to look back a bit on our engagement with all of you. Let’s get right into it…

As we mentioned in past dev letters, the team has been hard at work developing further updates for the game. We’ve also mentioned that we wanted to become a bit more transparent with what we’re up to with our roadmap. While this isn’t the exact letter we can share that in, we can tell you that it is going to be coming soon and will also be accompanied by a big update on all platforms. So, keep an eye out for teasers to come on our channels.

We’ve been communicating some of what we’ve been up to during the delays last year, but we did want to take a moment to recap, as we’ve noticed follow-on discussions to the dev letters have sometimes lost sight of those or could have been misconstrued depending on how it was read. What we’ve shared in the second half of 2021:

  • COM-10
  • Molotov Cocktail (Not in the Landfall Update, but can arrive in time for summer)
  • Plundra expansion
  • Weapon wheel
  • Free base defense items

While we have shown these, they do not constitute the only things we have been working on besides getting into Game Pass. We have some big additions to the game in the first half of the year that we can’t wait to start talking about!

In addition to the above, we do recognize that Xbox has not always been applicable to everyone reading these as it’s not always the platform it’s being read from. We thought it best to be transparent across our entire community with what is going on, in a unified way. This might feel like filler for some if they are PC only, but we want everyone to understand why there might be delays, the troubles causing them, and how we’re trying to mitigate those issues.

Old bugs and optimizations - This has been something on our radar for some time. We’ve also been keeping an eye on conversations after the publishing of our Letters from the Team. We hear you. We are working on improving the quality of our releases with an incoming Landfall Update that will address many of the known issues, but not all. We are aiming to work incrementally on improvements with each release post-February. This will heavily depend on the depth of individual issues. Not to say we wish to sweep any under the rug, but some can take more time to resolve while we continue work on forward content and features for Generation Zero with our small development team.

We are constantly improving our production cycles, as well as expanding our battery of testing with further QA assistance, internally and externally, to more readily find these types of bugs before they might sneak into a release. This also helps us dig into long lasting bugs that are difficult to find the root cause of.

There will be more insights to share in the near future as we find causes and solutions to these issues. In the meantime, we only ask that you keep sharing with us! Our community reported bugs in forums, reviews, and social media posts have always helped. For that, we thank you!

-The Generation Zero team

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Landfall is defined as “an arrival at land on a sea or air journey.”

Soviet invasion themed DLC? Will this be the first time we see human enemies, or will we be forming an alliance with them?

Stay tuned to find out!!

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Thanks for the information. Keep going! Can’t wait to see more :smile:

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Thanks for updating us, looking forward to the future!!! :robot: :robot:

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Landfall ey !!! :thinking::+1::+1:….

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thank you guys and gals for all your hard work best dev team out there

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Landfall… For me it sounds like a new class of enemies (machines) coming in and a new region (the large isle in the upper east).

I’m very excited and keep on staying tuned.

I hope the next news won’t take much time… And as I’m very excited every single week can be much time :joy:

Nice to hear from you again. The best news for me is the roadmap and that you want to share more on what you are working on. Lets see what the next dlc has to offer.

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Maybe many more animals… :thinking:

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Oh yes, I would like to watch some whales, like this one man seems to do from the great windows in the hotels restaurant. :crazy_face:

Or imagine…

“Oh dear, deer!”

Dead or alive… Some more animals would be cool, but just secondary.

I rather hope that machines would finally react better to damaged components. With the tech view we can see all the different components but only the destruction of weapons change the abilities of the machine. When we destroy the hydraulic pump they should move slower or at least are not able to sprint anymore. This way fights would gain an additional tactical level and become more interessting than shoot the weapons and then dump a ton of lead ind them.

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It would also helps players identifying whether they actually hit what they were aiming for.

Well… … Apparently it doesn’t matter where you hit, which I didn’t know. :frowning: I honestly thought that robots would behave differently depending on the damage they took, especially since promo material can be read like that:

Enemies will bear those scars until you face them again, whether that is minutes, hours, or weeks later.

I’m not really far into the game because I stopped playing when I read about basic (read: “should have been shipped at launch”) UX stuff coming in the February patch. (Item/weapon wheel being the main one… I’m also thinking about the “prone” feature now working correctly on a gamepad.)

Not sure how that says anything about specific parts changing how the machine act.

Destroy a machines components and it acts different than before, in general.

And if you run away then instead of destroying it completly and meet it some time later again, the components you destroyed are still missing…

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As far as I know there is no negstive effect for the machines when you destroy optics, hydraulic pumps, drive axels or hinges besides the lower over all HP.
I described some possible effects here a while ago:

The apo Tanks have a module which produces their fire wall attack (I unfortunatelly dont know how it is called in the tech view) and you can destroy it but when I tested it they could still use this attack.
Only weapons and Tick pods have the effect that they can’t use them once you shot them off.

Mmh. I’d bet that at least there is an effect when destroying the optics. With the rest I’m with you.
I’m a bit disappointed that there are’t more effects. But just a bit.

Would be cool if could slow the tanks and harvesters down or destroy their run/stomp/gas attack. Or at least the apocalypse hunters flamethrowers.

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Prettu sure it just means the components will just be missing in the lines
“Enemies will bear those scars until you face them again”

Not that it would change how they act.

Unless I misunderstood what you meant.

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You’re right, but a hunter without its guns will just try to rip you :wink:
That’s what I meant.

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Imagin how cool it would be if you damage/destroy the hunters ammo container and when it tryes to shoot you with the main gun it suddendly jammes. To get it going again the hunter than tries to hit the gun with its blade a few times. Than it works again and it continues to shoot you :slight_smile:
Or it could flip the gun by 90° upwards and ejects the remaining 5-10 bullets out of its arm to remove the jammed one (the ammo goes from the containers in the chest through the arm into the gun) than flip the gun back infront of the arm end. The gun is ready to shoot again and the hunter continues to focus on you :smiley: