Good day, Survivors!
Welcome back to the Resistance Report! I’m so glad to be back writing these in 2024.
Let’s get into the latest and (not so) greatest of what’s happening.
Crashes and how to find them
Many of you know that Generation Zero has always had difficulties with stability and performance. When you make an open world game with tons of machines roaming around, loot containers maintaining their contents, and explosions happening fairly often, it’s hard to make sure that game always runs smoothly. We missed that mark when Generation Zero was released back in 2019 and have been wrestling with the consequences of that ever since.
However, we are determined to get our game up to speed and we’ve been implementing tons of performance improvements as I’m sure you’ve noticed, especially on old gen consoles.
Crashes have also been reduced significantly (by about half) in the last couple of patches and there is less lag during combat and traversal.
This is where it gets tricky, though: Because we’ve been going deep into the code base and changing code that was written 6 years ago, other underlying issues are coming to the surface that have been “dormant” for most of that time.
That’s why after we released the initial hotfix, a specific subset of our Steam community playing on older CPUs started crashing before they even got into the game. We took that feedback and released another hotfix on January 23rd, but now many people on Steam are crashing randomly during gameplay whereas they never had any issues before.
Now, I know this is super frustrating to you. Even if you’re not directly affected by the crashes, reading about a new issue appearing so many times in such a short time span leaves a bad taste in the mouth of anyone who likes to enjoy their games in peace. I am asking you, though, to see this for what it is: a symptom of the fact that we are no longer putting band aids on our issues, but going deep and fixing them so they don’t break again in the future. In the long run, this will do wonders for the way the game plays as well as how easy it’ll be for us to identify any future problems. In the meantime, we will do everything we can to fix any new problems as fast as possible while also working on the 60FPS on PS5 patch.
I am super looking forward to getting our beloved game in a stable state so we can focus on working on new things for you to play. Follow the dev letters we release during the upcoming months as they will talk about some of what we’re working on!
The Swiss German word of the day is “cheib” (ch as in /x/, or the noise your cat makes when coughing up a fur ball, and eib like the “ibe” in “tribe”). It’s a slang term for “guy” that does not exist in standard German!
Until next time, I’ve been
Carni, Community Manager