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 a lot 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. As the Closed Alpha was for testing purposes for a limited period, with no progression being saved, we wanted to limit the available options so that you would spend more time playing the game.
Once we start our live service, we will be continuously adding cosmetic items, and keep an eye on both our community and telemetry data to see what types of items you would be interested in having within Bloodhunt.
We are very excited that so many of you have a desire to fulfill your ultimate vampire fantasy and we cannot 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 behavior and its movements according to the various phases of a match.
With these changes, our intention is to decrease the number of passive playstyles 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 that 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 Size 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 play 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 wall-scaling abilities of the vampires. During our internal playtests we found out that this really gives our game its own unique flavor in being truly intense, fast paced and action packed.
With that said, we will be keeping an eye on how this will work when players eventually master the game and understand how to fully utilize 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 re-bindable - this was high on the list for players using certain regional keyboards.
The hotkeys for using consumables are now re-bindable 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 these 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
