Soldiers!

We would like to say a massive thank you to everyone for your support and feedback since we released our re-announcement trailer, the enthusiasm for ‘83 and what we are building has been brilliant and we’re very excited to share more with you on the road to launch.

Since the announcement, the ‘83 team has been growing rapidly across development, community, cinematics and marketing, and we plan to share development progress here showcasing updates across different maps, weapons, gameplay mechanics and what to expect when it comes to ‘accessible realism’ in ‘83.


Our level design team has officially begun crafting brand new environments, expanding the future battlegrounds you'll explore. While we can't reveal specifics just yet, the process of bringing these new locations from concept to reality is well underway and incredibly exciting for us.

Simultaneously, we've been dedicating significant effort to refining the core experience. This includes ongoing network optimization work aimed at ensuring smooth, stable online gameplay. Our animation department has also been busy, focusing on enhancing the feel and responsiveness of weapon handling to make those in-game moments even more immersive.

Underpinning all of this is our continued work with Unreal Engine 5. We're constantly striving to harness the power of UE5 to deliver the best possible visual fidelity and performance for '83.
It's been a productive period, and the positive energy in the studio is palpable.


The team has also been busy working on a range of different weapons that players can expect to get their hands on when we launch in Early Access this year including the RPG-7, AKS-74U and AK-74, we’re pleased to share some screenshots of these below (with much more to come in future trailers)

AK-74



AKS-74U



RPG-7



Make sure to support & follow us on social media and wishlist us below for more updates!

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@83thegame
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/83thegame/
BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/83thegame.bsky.social
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Itsnotreditsblue
Twitter (X): https://x.com/83thegame
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/83TheGame/


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1059220/83/

We're excited to announce that we're planning to bring '83 to Steam Early Access later this year. We've decided to put things up to speed, and as we're just coming up to the final phase of development of our vertical slice milestone, we're confident we can really make '83 happen this year.

We would like to kindly ask you to share our trailer with your friends in DMs, on social media, or talk about '83 as you play other games within your online community.

Each and every one of you can help '83 reach new players on YouTube, or Steam, and every wishlist you can bring will help us secure more favorable conditions with our investors.

Please, also do share your questions or feedback on just about anything related to the game here at Steam Community forums - we plan on hanging around a bit more often from now on!

Thank you, and please check out the new Steam store page of '83 for more details about the game!

Dear ‘83 Community!

We’re excited to bring you our first development update of the new year.

Thanks to the feedback from the 8 playtests we’ve held so far, we’ve been able to make significant strides in server performance. Our code team "assaulted" these challenges head-on, and we’re now able to support sufficient player counts to start showing the fun aspects of the game to testers!

Overall, these tests have been invaluable in helping us debug several critical issues, and it's been great to see players not just fill, and stress test the servers, but also enjoy the game as it’s meant to be played with 75 players running!

Looking ahead, we’re now turning our focus towards weapons and animations. This is no small task, as we've essentially had to recreate the animation framework from the ground up.

Without being too specific (to manage expectations), we also want to give you a look at our overarching production plan for the next two months. Here’s what the team is focused on delivering:

• Rollout of an all-new animation framework
  
• Significant progress on weapons systems

• Continued optimization along with key additions and tweaks to core gameplay systems
  
• Full Integration of Unreal Engine 5 features like Nanite and Virtual Shadow Maps for visually stunning environments with a manageable GPU load
  
• Deeper exploration of UE5's IRIS networking architecture, which we aim to leverage for smoother, large-scale multiplayer performance

By the end of February, we’re aiming to achieve a critical milestone of the ’83 project: the vertical slice build. We’ve had many of you asking what specifically that means – roughly, this is the gist of it:

1. "Show the Fun in ‘83": A showcase of one example map where core gameplay loop of ’83 shows its main fun element
   
2. Core Gameplay Systems: Demonstrate most of the core systems that define the ‘83 experience
   
3. Graphics Optimizations: We’re aiming to implement Nanites and Virtual Shadow Maps to deliver the best possible visuals along with scalable performance
   
4. Server Stability: Further optimize the game to support for 80-player servers without server CPU or network hiccups
   
5. Gather more HW spec data: Collection of data to define accurate minimum and recommended system requirements.

The year is off to a great start, and we’d like to thank all of you for your continued support and enthusiasm. Your feedback and participation in playtests have helped shape the game into what it is today, and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve been building as we move closer to our vertical slice goals.

We’re also excited to report that we’re putting additional focus on the marketing side of things – and we want to deliver a proper update to our Steam page in January, including new screenshots and a trailer.

Stay tuned for more updates!

The 83 Development Team

We're excited to update you on '83's development journey. Our team is working hard on our current primary objective: to get a stable build ready for closed community playtests, with the main hurdle so far being sub-par network performance.

Fortunately, running the game on a powerful bare metal Windows server (as opposed to the standard, more cost effective cloud-powered virtual machine we aim to use) offers acceptable performance and enables us to begin some level of testing – as we proved in a short, closed test earlier this weekend.

Our progress in net code optimization is now driven by a talented duo of experienced programmers, which marks a significant improvement from a few months ago when we solely relied on volunteers. The development ultimately moved from a slow crawl to a steady jog and we are continuously gaining momentum!

Thank you for your ongoing support and patience as we continue to bring '83 to life. Your feedback is invaluable, so stay tuned for more updates!

At Blue Dot Games, we're excited to let you know that after a long period of downtime, we're officially resuming development of the '83 project!

Some of you may have noticed our earlier announcements (we acquired the rights for '83 back in 2023, and had a short segment at the #PCGamingShow this summer) but we did not have the funds to support an actual professional team of paid developers.


After a long series of meetings and negotiations with various investors and publishers, the funding came from the most unexpected place of the games industry: our Discord server! ːsteamthumbsupː

We would like to use this space to express our thanks and gratitude to a fellow Rising Storm 2 fan Kevin Green aka Beer_Brigade who decided to fund 5 months of development of '83!

Learn more about our plans and get to know Kevin in our Dev Talk Q&A video below:



To sum the Q&A video up: we're a small bunch of experienced game developers who can finally make our favourite game happen.

We've previously worked on Red Orchestra and Rising Storm games (including the OG mods!), as well as have ties to some of the original '83 developers at Antimatter Games.

In fact, Sturt Jeffery, the Lead Designer of '83 at Antimatter Games, has joined us as well!

If you don't remember exactly what '83 was all about, we will let Sturt remind you in another Q&A video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiiDjQRoU48

In this episode of 'Through the Gunsights' we take a closer look at the sound design for '83.

Find out more about 83 here - http://www.83thegame.com

Or get involved with the community here:
Discord - https://discord.gg/hnZaDWY
Reddit - http://www.reddit.com/r/83thegame
Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/83TheGame/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/83thegame

'83 © Antimatter Games Ltd.
Unreal® is a registered trademark of Epic Games Inc. Unreal® Engine, copyright 1988-2022.

This time on 'Through the Gunsights' we take a look at the visual effects workflows currently in development on '83. Taking a closer look at prototypes for destruction, explosions and our gore.

Everyone at Antimatter has been working really hard through this strange and interesting year. We wanted to spread a little bit of joy by giving you, our awesome community, a daily gift! So for everyday until the 24th our Advent Calendar will open a new door and give you a peak of what we've been developing.

So from all of us at Antimatter Games, to all of you....
Happy Holidays and an excellent New Year!

https://www.antimattergames.com/2020-calendar