Hello Bloodhunt players,
Welcome back to our Closed Alpha learnings article series.
This is the last one in the series. If you missed the others, you can always find them here:
Let’s dive into today’s topics!
Cosmetics
We saw that many of our players had a lot of fun in the Closed Alpha Test with trying out the cosmetics that were available and, in our survey, we saw many that could not get enough of them. The Closed Alpha was for testing purposes for a limited period, with no progression being saved. This was because we wanted to limit the available options so that you could spend more time playing the game.
Once we start our live service, we will be continuously adding cosmetic items and keeping an eye on both our community and telemetry data to see what types of items you would be interested in having within Bloodhunt.
We’re really excited that so many of you have a desire to fulfil your ultimate vampire fantasy and we can’t wait to see what unique combinations you will come up with!
The Red Gas is Too Slow
Looking at your feedback and our telemetry data, it’s clear to us that the Red Gas moves too slowly during the end phase of the game.
We have therefore rebalanced the Red Gas behaviour and its movements according to the various phases of a match.
With these changes, our intention is to decrease the number of passive play styles towards the end of the game and push everyone that has survived into one last epic conflict!
Session pacing is something that we want to get right, so we will be continuously tweaking related parameters for the foreseeable future.
Gamepad support
In the Closed Alpha you got a chance to try out an unfinished version of our gamepad implementation.
While not fully complete, we felt that it was important to include it for the test, so we could get your feedback on it and because we know that there are many players who only feel comfortable playing with a gamepad.
We will keep polishing the gamepad experience to ensure that Bloodhunt delivers a great experience with a gamepad too.
Finding the Right Sise for the Pacing of our Game
When we were developing the map and planning for its size, our main goal was to find our own unique playing pace and not focus too much on what other games in the same space are doing.
Bloodhunt does not have a lot of large open spaces and empty fields, and instead focuses on getting players into combat quickly and having them constantly adapt to the circumstances in which the Red Gas is unavoidably closing in. At the same time, because we are in a dense city space with lots of buildings, there are many opportunities to find strategical flanking routes to outsmart your opponents or quickly seek cover by using the vampires’ wall-scaling abilities. During our internal playtests, we found out that this really gives our game its own unique flavour, making it truly intense, fast-paced and action-packed.
With that said, we’ll be keeping an eye on how well this works when players eventually master the game and understand how to fully utilise its mechanics.
Improved key bindings
We heard feedback that some players would like to have more advanced key bindings, and here are the latest improvements that we have been working on:
The movement keys are now rebindable – this was high on the list for players using certain regional keyboards.
The hotkeys for using consumables are now rebindable as well.
We also fixed a bug with the Pickup/Interact/Feed button which happened if it had been rebound.
We will continue to gather your feedback on this and see if further improvements are needed down the line.
This is the end of the third and last article in our series covering our key learnings from the Closed Alpha.
Our goal with these articles is to be transparent about the development of the game. We want to explain some of the challenges we face during development and how you can help us improve the game with your feedback.
We will be looking at doing further articles like this in the future, so let us know if they are helpful or if you have any topics you’d like to learn more about.
Until next time, see you at dusk!
Jaqub Ajmal,
Global Community Manager – Sharkmob
