Honor and Duty status

It’s been quite a busy week with the release of the PSVR/aim controller update to Honor and Duty: Arcade Edition.  It’s great hearing from players and we try to respond to everyone although some messages may occasionally fall through the cracks. Thanks for all the comments!

Here’s our official Honor and Duty: D-Day announcement

We just released the first patch to fix some VR related issues and have a long list of things to ultimately fix and improve. We’re still working on some things to address spawn camping as well as the player orientations.  The big challenge is that we use the UFPS middleware and sometimes something that should be easy to do is really hard just due to the way it works.

Here’s the short list of priority items for the next patch. We’re targeting a release sometime this week just depending on how things go.

1. Framerate issue – this is a top priority and is hard to fix because we need a large match to duplicate it.  Simply putting 7 debug sessions in a match doesn’t really do it. It seems to be related to real time gameplay.
2. Syncing glitch. It seems that some people are walking forward in real life to get ahead of their player model in the game so they can look around corners. We’re going to put something in to detect and stop this.
3. Player gun/headset inside geometry – The last update disables the gun when the gun goes inside something. This was to keep people from poking into a rock and shooting through it. This was a quick fix and we’re going to make some changes here. What will likely happen is we will fade to black when the headset goes into geometry.  Then we’ll only disable the gun after it’s been inside geometry for a a period of time and only when a large portion of the gun is detected.
4. Spawn camping – We spread out the spawn points to help with the spawn camping. One downside is you may spawn away from the ammo crates. Since you don’t lose your ammo, you should be ok most of the time but is not perfect. The best solution is probably going to be a combination of a 5 second invulnerability and more map cover.  The invulnerability may take some time due to issues with the middleware but it’s a top priority.

Those are the critical bugs we feel adversely affect gameplay.  The additions we want to add for the update include vibration for shots, swapping triggers for lefties, and the ability to toggle the hud.  Long term, the hud for VR will be reworked to be less intrusive like having the info panel at the player’s hip.

We’ve also started on the EU release by getting the PEGI rating started. We need this first since we have to specify the rating when we submit a game. The PEGI rating process takes around 5 days and once that’s complete., we’ll submit to QA for the EU region.  Right now, we would like to have a March 14th release date but that might not be possible due to deadlines for QA and store prep.  We’ve reached out to our EU rep to find out when we would have to have it submitted to make that date. There’s also the possibility of other things on the store schedule that might make the 14th or even the 21st a bad time. The 21st is a more realistic date due to the timing of everything and we’re just waiting to hear back as to whether that’s a good date or not.  The PEGI rating wasn’t cheap so we really hope there’s a lot of EU players out there!