We are wrapping up our A Winter Onwardland contest by announcing the winners for the map creation portion. The community submitted some really fun maps. Thank you to everyone who submitted entries. Lots of creative style throughout them all.

As a refresher: we are announcing winners in three categories today: cross-platform, PC and Quest! The overall winner will receive their choice of an RTX 3090 or an AMD 5950X processor with a high-end motherboard, whereas the best PC and Quest maps will be rewarded with the author’s choice of an RTX 3080 or an AMD 5900X with a high-end motherboard.

Without further ado, the winners are…..

Cross Platform
Sommet - Submitted by Weidz

What some of the judges had to say:
Tribly: Sommet is impressive from when you first spawn in the cable car looking out over the mountains, to sneaking around in the caves and back rooms. Everything felt hand crafted from the observatory at the top of the mountain, all the way down to the map on the tablet. From the museum, to the kitchen, the wine/cheese cellar, every area felt unique which makes learning the map and orienting yourself much easier.
Eritheis: I liked that the map had different distinct areas. All of them were interesting and made me want to explore to see what else could be found. Having the different areas being so different from each other made it easier to figure out where I was on the map too.

PCVR
Panda Towers - Submitted by Monorchid

What some of the judges had to say:
SyrinS0ng: This is a unique design style we haven’t seen yet. Set on the rooftops of a large building with skyscrapers all around you. You have to weave through different obstacles to find your enemies and need top communication to navigate though this map.
WH1SKEY: An enjoyable map that adds verticality to Onward. The battles that engage on this map make any angle action packed and really puts a player's tactics to the test.


Oculus Quest
Frostbite - Submitted by Evolution

What some of the judges had to say:
SyrinS0ng: As soon as I spawned in I felt immersed in the location. I could feel the cold fog around me. The rooms were great to explore and lots of area throughout to get some team tactics going.
KasperVld: I enjoyed the verticality in this map quite a lot: the fact that your opponents can be hiding behind any hill makes for a slower paced, nerve wrecking match. Never let your guard down, and always keep your gun pointing up.


Congratulations to the winners! All of the maps that were entered are available for you to download and play on. Go check them out! If you are interested in custom map building, check out our discord for more information and chat with fellow map makers.

Map Contest Entries available for Play:
Arctic / Arctic Night (PC & Quest) - Heclak
Ashes In The Snow (PC & Quest) - Stahr
Cerbere Landing (PC) - Justin
Dumpster Fire (PC & Quest) - 04
Hotham Day (Quest) - DaveSparhawk
Ice (PC & Quest) - Koiz
J-Street (PC) - GiantRobot
North Pole (PC) - WhiteFang
Trench - At Christmas (PC) - Winston
Wilderness (PC & Quest) - Monorchid

Hello Everyone!

Happy 2021! We are stepping into a new year and have a lot of opportunities and things to look forward to. Onward keeps moving…. well… ONWARD! This month’s Sitrep is a little lighter on development updates than usual due to the holiday season, but we still have some news to share.

Earlier this month we released Update 1.8.7. We have received lots of feedback from the community, we are listening to it all and we hear you. We are happy that you are enjoying the audio improvements and the updated Snowpeak map. With all improvements come some bugs and rest assured, we will be addressing things in 1.8.8.

1.8.8 will be coming out a little quicker than our usual patch releases as a maintenance release to address some ongoing issues and make some adjustments from 1.8.7 based on community feedback. Fixes that will be addressed include significantly reducing the occurrence of broken lobbies, which often cause issues such as voice chat issues, lobby lockups, rounds not assigning points correctly. Additional Audio improvements based around voice chat are also in the works. Fixing an issue allowing players to sometimes see through smoke emitted by smoke grenades and a fix for the infamous “jiggle peek” are on our provisional list as well. We also continue to work on a couple of large new features which are due to release over the next couple of months. Be on the lookout for more details as the patches get closer.

Downpour Interactive continues to grow as a company and we have been adding to the team to keep up with the game design, improvements, and the future of the game. You have already been introduced to our new Community Manager Korine (SyrinSong) earlier this month, and now we would also like to introduce a new Programmer, Ben, and Level Designer, Joe who many of you may know under his nickname Snooper Fax. They have been a great addition to the team here at DPI. We would also like to announce some changes to people you know and have interacted with in the community. Daan (MrDeath) will shift his focus from Community Management over to level design and Kasper (KasperVld) will be taking up the role of Producer while still keeping an eye on community tasks and supporting Korine where needed.

We have wrapped up our Community Contest and judging for the custom maps has begun! We will be announcing the winners in the upcoming weeks. If you missed the announcements for the Fan Art and Video winners, check out our social media accounts.

In addition, for our community we have posted a new Support area to our website with an FAQ section to help with common questions that people may have about playing or any suggestions/reports that need to be sent to us.

To stay up to date on the latest news between Sitreps, make sure to follow our social media accounts and join the Official Onward discord.

Stay Frosty!

Hello everyone!

We are pleased to announce that the time for the 1.8.7 update is now! This update is primarily focused on audio upgrades and the re-release of the Snowpeak map, but also contains a lot of bug fixes and general improvements. The full change log is posted below.

Our audio improvements comprise amongst many other things gunshots that are more consistent in their quality, more immersive and directional footsteps, higher quality voice chat, more immersive environmental sound, and more consistency between the volumes of different sources. Two new features for audio are the ability to independently adjust the volume of gunshots and voices, and audio mixing presets to select.

Enjoy those updated audio sounds while playing again on the re-released Snowpeak map (day and night versions available!) and hear the crunch of the snow under your feet as you tactically sneak around on the ice to get that perfect shot in as you notice the other team coming your way. Snowpeak features long distance engagement and close quarter combat options. This map will test your skills in stealth and tactical abilities.

Smoke grenades have also been reworked. They have changed to spherical from the previous comic spray to allow them to be used in a more predictable way which benefits gameplay. Full screen tint will be more accurately bound to the area of the smoke, and is harder to see through. We have also fixed an issue where AI wasn’t affected by smoke grenades and could ‘see’ players as usual. Finally and perhaps most importantly scopes no longer fully tint when looking at smoke grenades, allowing you to see players in front of the smoke through scopes once more.

For all other changes, refer to the full change list below. Update 1.8.7 is available now and will download automatically. Enjoy!

For all the details check out our blog post.
https://www.onwardthegame.com/devblog/

Thank you to everyone who entered our Winter contest in the fan art and videos sections! All submissions were great and this was a hard one to judge. We appreciate the hard work and creativity you’ve put into these masterpieces. Today we’re announcing the winners in the first two categories: Artwork and Videos, while those working on their custom maps still have just over a week to finish their entries.

The winner in the artwork category is … *drumroll* …. Ovoideum!
This gorgeous art piece is done in a Japanese block art style. It has so many Onward references in the details, everytime we look we seem to find more. We already ordered a print to have put up in Dante’s office!



Our winner for the best fan video is a long time active community member: nin10doVR




His video really brings home the feel of team playing with a catchy music tune. It’s a reminder of how during the pandemic Onward has given us an opportunity to play online with our friends and offer us some community and social interaction while we can’t go out.



We will also be posting our runners up and other entries on our social media accounts throughout the coming weeks. Keep a lookout and thank you again for all the great entries.

Hello everyone!

Welcome to the last Sitrep for 2020! Work continues on update 1.8.7, and although we had hoped to release it before the end of the year we had to acknowledge that making sure this update is as good as it can was the more important factor in that decision. With Christmas approaching that meant that the update wouldn't release until mid-January. We'll be spending the coming week working on the last few bugs and improvements, and polishing the new features.

One of the key new features coming in 1.8.7 is the overhauled audio system. The audio update is currently being tested and the general picture is that it will be a big improvement in both accuracy and immersion. We have been working towards providing better audio across the board. The changes to note include gunshots that are more consistent in their quality, more immersive and understandable footsteps, higher quality voice chat, more immersive environmental sound, and more consistency between the volumes of different sources. New are also the options to adjust the volume of sfx, gunshots, the volume of voices, and the audio mixer being used. Customised audio will also be available again for our custom map gurus!

If you've been keeping up with the Sitreps over the past couple of months you'll know that the second big new feature coming in update 1.8.7 is the re-release of a fan-favourite map: Snowpeak! Last month we teased the layout of the map, and this month we're ready to share some on-the-ground images of what's coming your way soon.



Keep an eye out for improvements throughout the game. These improvements include the smoke bombs behavior change that we detailed last month, and a fix for a bug where AI would ignore smoke grenades. We've also applied a small boost to the night vision to make it brighter in dark areas. A memory leak that would result in crashes if players stayed for extended periods of time in respawn-enabled game modes has been fixed and should help those of you who like playing in the Shooting Range. A final highlight of the small changes is that you'll be able to set custom time limits in private Uplink matches now. Keep an eye out for the full change log when the patch releases!

We would be remiss not to mention an issue that's been affecting Onward's competitive scene. The "jiggle peek" issue is being worked on and we are hoping to have a fix that will come out in the new year soon after the 1.8.7 update releases. Speaking of things we're actively working on for the new year: we haven't forgotten about the graphical improvements we mentioned a while ago, and continue to research and develop improvements in that area, including shadowmasks and various shader and lighting improvements.

Unit 51 continues to be a great help and valuable asset for helping test some of these new features and help provide valuable feedback. In December we found that we needed to recruit new members to the unit to help with the evolution and expansion of the game. We received over 300 applications and are grateful for everyone's interest. From that we picked and added our new members to the unit. Due to the overwhelming interest and limited space we weren't able to invite everyone we wanted to based on their applications this time around, but we'll definitely have more recruitment drives in the future.

Switching gears from development news to community highlights we'd like to give a huge shout out to the Onward Master League. After intense battles the VR Master League (VRML) has finished Season 10. Congratulations to the Beginners for topping the league, Aimless Gaming for making sure they don't get too comfortable up there, and Bossfight & Mayhem for completing the podium with nothing to separate them.



Season 11 will be starting up in the new year, so make sure to hone your competitive play skills if you're looking to participate. If you are interested in joining the league for season 11, check out the Onward Master League website for more info.

We have our Winter Community contest running and have a lot of great prizes to give away including up to an RTX 3090 graphics card or an AMD 5950X processor with a high-end motherboard! There are prizes for three categories. Fan Art, Videos & Custom Maps. We have been seeing some very promising entries coming in already, and we're looking forward to seeing more coming in over the next couple of weeks!

To put the cherry on top of our year, Onward has been titled Best Action Game of 2020 by Oculus Quest. We are incredibly proud and happy to provide players with a great action experience and we are very grateful to Oculus for this recognition. Of course we'll want to grab similar titles on all platforms next year as well!

Finally, we wish all of you, your friends, your family, and everyone else a very Happy Holiday Season, and however you celebrate it we hope you are staying safe and healthy. We've got a lot in store for 2021, so keep looking Onward!

We know it's cold out for most of you: Stay Frosty!

Hello everyone!
Over the past couple of months we've seen Onward grow as many new players have joined our ranks. On top of that we've recently brought back custom map support for PCVR, and introduced it on Oculus Quest. Now, the holiday season is fast approaching and we've recently seen the launch of some exciting new technology. A perfect time then to celebrate a successful year for Onward, and to do that we're launching a community contest where you all will be able to compete for eternal glory, and spectacular prizes.

We will be awarding prizes in the following categories:

• Custom (Snow/Winter) Maps (3 prizes)
  
• Fan art (1 prize)
  
• Fan video (1 prize)

Custom (Snow/Winter) Maps
This category will be familiar to those of you who participated in our last community contest: creators will compete by making new and interesting maps for Onward. We'll be giving away prizes in three categories: overall best map, best PC map and best Quest map. Because we encourage creators to create maps that support all platforms, any map that supports both PC and Quest versions of Onward will compete in all three categories. Maps that support only one platform will only compete for that category. As a twist we've added a theme to the custom maps competition this time around: all maps submitted for this contest must have a winter setting!

If you're new to creating maps for Onward, go to the Onward Custom Content Guide to download the Onward Custom Content SDK for Unity and make sure to read the Rules For Content Submission on the Onward Custom Content Guide. All entries must abide by these rules.

• Submission deadline: Thursday January 21st
  
• Prizes:
  
  • For the best cross-platform map: 1x your choice of either an NVidia RTX 3090 video card or an AMD 5950X processor with a high end motherboard
    
  • For the best map on PC: 1x your choice of either an NVidia RTX 3080 video card or an AMD 5900X processor with a high end motherboard
    
  • For the best map on Quest: 1x your choice of either an NVidia RTX 3080 video card or an AMD 5900X processor with a high end motherboard

Fan Art & Videos
We always enjoy seeing the creative side of our community, and there's a lot of creative talent going around! We want to encourage and reward those of you who put your talents to use, and so we've added two new categories. For (aspiring) videographers we'll be giving away a prize for the best fan video, and we're also giving away a prize for any other form of fan art that catches our attention. Pretty much anything goes: from a drawing or painting to a music piece: catch our attention and you can win yourself a nice upgrade for your gaming system.

• Submission deadline: Thursday January 3rd
  
  
• Prizes:
  
  • For the best video: 1x your choice of either an NVidia RTX 3080 video card or an AMD 5900X processor with a high end motherboard
    
  • For the best fan-art: 1x your choice of either an NVidia RTX 3080 video card or an AMD 5900X processor with a high end motherboard

How to enter the contest
For all categories

• Join the Onward Discord to stay up to date on any announcement we may make during the contest submission periods. This is mandatory if you want to be eligible for any prizes.
  
• Send an email to contest@downpourinteractive.com with the following information:
  
  • Which category you are joining (Maps, Fan Art, or video)
    
  • Your Discord username

For map creators

• In your email, include all the information listed above, and also:
  
  • The name of your map
    
  • The category/ies you wish to compete in (cross-platform, PC, and/or Quest)
• Make sure the email address you use to submit your entry to contest@downpourinteractive.com is the same email address you use to submit your map using the Onward Custom Content SDK.

You will receive a response from us as soon as possible to confirm your entry and the details on how to submit your entry or entries.

Submission deadlines & winner announcements

• Fan art: Sunday, January 3rd
  
• Videos: Sunday, January 3rd
  
• Custom Maps: Thursday January 21st

We will announce the winners of the Fan Art and Video categories on Monday January 11th, and the winners of the custom map category on February 1st.

The Fine Print

1. All participants must join the Onward Discord
   
2. Any participant can only win one prize, but they may submit as many entries as they want in as many categories as they want.
   
3. Submissions for this contest must be original work, created after the date of this announcement.
   
4. Submissions may not contain any material which is subject to a copyright or trademark owned by another person or entity than the one submitting the work.
   
5. Submissions must not break or encourage breaking of any laws of the United States of America.
   
6. We reserve the right to remove any person from this contest and/or reject any submission for any reason without prior notice.
   
7. Downpour Interactive will, at its sole discretion, select the winners of each category of the contest.
   
8. When the winners for each category are announced we will send them an email to claim their prize. If the prize isn't claimed within one week from the date of this email, that person will have forfeited their prize and we will award it to the next best entry.

Hello everyone!

Another month passed, and it’s time for our monthly update on the development of Onward! Since our last Sitrep we’ve released two major patches: 1.8.5 and 1.8.6. Update 1.8.5 brought us specular maps for the weapons so that they catch light more realistically, custom maps to enjoy and improved support for haptic devices, to name a few. Onward 1.8.6 was an iterative update to improve on the foundations that 1.8.5 gave us, and to address a good number of bugs. We’re still investigating reports of some new and existing issues, and if needed those will be addressed in a patch before update 1.8.7 drops. We’re hoping to drop 1.8.7 just in time for the December holidays.

The most noticeable change coming in with Onward 1.8.7 will be the game’s audio system, which will be completely overhauled for this update to bring you a more immersive and AAA quality audio experience. To do this we have replaced the Unity audio system with Wwise, which gives our sound designers a lot of great tools to make the audio sound like you are really on the battlefield.

In terms of improvements you can look forward to directional voice quality, improved (ambisonic) ambience sounds, improved reverberations and high dynamic range settings. On top of that actions will have more audio feedback, and we’ve improved the general audio quality as well. It’s hard to convey changes in the audio quality through text, but we’re very impressed with the results so far.

Aside from the audio improvements we’ve been working on something else we’ve received a lot of feedback over the last couple of months: smoke grenades. We’ve changed the smoke grenades so that they’re no longer directional, but instead form a sphere of smoke around the grenade: these types of smoke grenades are easier to use in game because of their predictability. We’ve also managed to remove the blinding effect encountered when looking at the smoke through a scope due to a series of performance optimizations.

On to the re-release of Onward’s various maps. we’re working to release an improved Snowpeak map in the next update, and to follow that up with the Abandoned map. As a special preview we’ve included aerial top-down shots for Abandoned and Snowpeak below so you can get an idea of what we’re working on. Jungle, which we had hoped to release with update 1.8.6 last week, will need more work based on the feedback we’ve gotten from our Unit 51 player feedback group. We’ll be taking our time to get it right, rather than release a map that doesn’t meet your expectations and our quality standards. Also on the topic of maps we’ll be announcing a new community mapping contest with prizes later this week, and we’re excited to see what the map creators will amaze us with. If you’re interested in learning how to create maps for Onward, check out the Community page on our website.





We mentioned the Unit 51 playtest group a bit earlier. Unit 51 has been doing a great job providing us with feedback and catching some nasty bugs that had slipped by us. As a result, we’ll be looking to expand Unit 51 with new players in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for that announcement on our Discord and social media.

That’s it for this month, until soon and stay frosty!

Hello everyone!

We’re excited to share Onward 1.8.6 with you! In this patch we’ve focused on two key areas: first, we worked to improve gameplay and graphical issues we’ve seen players run into such as for example people appearing to jump around if they have a poor internet connection, players spawning near you in social game modes and some performance problems a small portion of PC players ran into after the last patch. Secondly, we’ve fixed dozens of bugs all across the game, the highlights you can On our website.

In the previous patch we delivered some of our previously announced features earlier than we had expected, those included improved support for haptics devices and custom content. We’re still working on the next set of major new features, including the game audio overhaul and the Shadowmask feature we shared a preview of in the September Sitrep. In that timeline we had anticipated the Jungle map to be released in this patch, and although we got close we got some valuable feedback from Unit 51, our playtesting group, that made us realize we want to change our approach to that particular map.

We’ll be giving you an update on our overall progress on new features later this week. For now we trust you’ll enjoy Onward 1.8.6, and we’ll see you on the battlefields!

Onward 1.8.6 s available now and will download automatically.

Hello everyone!

We have just released an update for #OnwardVR. v1.8.5.2 solves two issues for PCVR users: we've temporarily disabled depth of field while we investigate related performance issues, and we've addressed a bug that could cause graphics settings to not apply correctly for some users.

We advise you to double check your graphics settings when you play Onward after applying the patch.

Hello everyone!

We’re very excited to release a major patch with Onward 1.8.5. This update has been long in the making and features a metric ton of fixes and tweaks that we know many of you have been waiting for. Some highlights:

Support for Quest 2 with improved graphics
Playing Onward on the Quest 2 you will enjoy an improved level of detail bias, meaning you’ll encounter less noticeable transitions or ‘pop in’. All new for both PCVR and Quest 2 are the Support for Specular Maps on weapons which improve the weapon visuals.





Custom Maps
We’re very pleased that we’ve been able to include Custom Maps in this update, instead of having to wait for update 1.8.6 as we had originally anticipated. Over the past couple of weeks We have collaborated with several map creators to make sure there are several maps available to play on both PCVR and Quest.

Improved support for Haptic devices
For those of you who are looking to take their immersion to the next level we’ve added support for bHaptics body haptic devices on both PC and Quest. We’ve also added support for the ForceTube to the Quest version of Onward - it was already available on PCVR.

Social Game Modes
When we last switched out the rotating social gun mode we had received a lot of feedback asking us to allow you to play your favourite social game mode (Gun Game, Specops or One In The Chamber) at any moment you want. With update 1.8.5 that is now possible.

Improved visuals for PCVR
Update 1.8.5 brings several improvements to the game’s visuals for PCVR. Aside from the specular maps we mentioned above, we’ve made improvements to the visuals of the Downfall and Suburbia maps. Bazaar and Quarantine have had revised lighting to be more faithful to the 1.7 representation of the maps. The PC maps are getting model overhauls, effects additions and more that will continue as time goes on.

The full list of changes is available on our website

Onward!