Welcome to the lovely month of September! The end of the year is approaching, Autumn is just around the corner and even Christmas is coming sooner than you think (better prepare the gifts already!).
Today, we want to take the opportunity to announce our new development partner, our roadmap until mid of next year, and shine a light on our current team. Let’s dive right into it!
Welcome to the team, Black Sheep Studio!
Earlier this year, the fantastic French team at Black Sheep Studio took on the challenge to perform an extensive code review, going through the entire codebase of Railroads Online. And yes, they actually checked out every single line of code!
We felt right at home with Black Sheep which is why we now put the ink to paper and created a co-development partnership going forward! Our new friends will support the existing Railroads Online team from a technical perspective.
Speaking of the team…
Some of you repeatedly asked us how exactly the development process looks like currently and how big the team even is. We prepared a handy little graphic for you which hopefully answers a few questions:
As you can see, the entire team of Railroads Online consists of three different parties, all with their own unique roles and responsibilities.
These parties are:
The RO Development Team
Lead by Keume, they are from a development perspective responsible for everything content-related as they work on models, new features, research, and more. In addition they also manage the communication on Steam and Discord. Our moderators Goku, CaptainChooChoo, Kitsune and Sandy are happy to assist you in any matter and help with reporting bugs and feedback.
The astragon Entertainment Team
As a publisher, they organize marketing beats and host events like gamescom, tackle all communication efforts like public relations and social media, take care of sales, and also create stuff like announcements, screenshots and trailers. In addition, the producing team helps with guiding the project, backend works, localization and miscellaneous tasks. They are the direct contact between development and publishing and coordinate everything that has to do with builds, updates and QA together with the developers.
The Black Sheep Studio Team
Black Sheep Studio was founded in 2003 by veteran game developers and has been developing games of any style, any genre or complexity for more than 10 years; providing a wide range of services related to game development, such as complete game development from design to release, co-development or porting a game to another platform. They’ve cooperated with several well-known publishers in the past.
Black Sheep will be responsible for all technical work, stuff you can’t see at a glance. Their focus in the near future will be on refactoring while also providing programming assistance. In addition, they will improve the general UI of the game and take care of performance improvements and more at the same time.
Our new development roadmap
YES, it’s finally here! As our cooperation with Black Sheep begins, we have set up a little roadmap for ourselves which the teams will work on over the coming 9 months. Of course, even more stuff is planned and be assured that we’ll announce more about that once we can!
On the official Trello roadmap, we laid out seven big updates which are the following and are focused on quality of life and mechanics:
Anniversary Update
The Tutorial Update
The Wiki Update
The Map Update (feat. The UI Update)
The Spline Update
The Loading Screen Update
The Rights & Alerts Update
You can check out the Trello for more information as we have already put in a few bullet points as a sneak-peek 👀
However, this is not all! In parallel, we’ll introduce much needed bug fixing and performance optimization updates in both single and multiplayer – while also releasing new content pieces, including vehicles, industries, vegetation and even more surprises. More details about that will also be announced as soon as we can!
And that's it for today! Have a good time in the valley and never stop shaping the world of Railroads Online ❤
Your Railroads Online Team
(PS.: We're working on a patch for the password session issue and hope to be able to release it soon!)
Months ago, during alpha testing, we posted an article about changes brought to the game based on your feedback in the big alpha survey.
Time flies by quickly, and today we are back with the second article of the series, this time to show you how your feedback shaped the game after the beta!
Disclaimer: Same as in the last article, we will not be going over every question in the survey, but will highlight only the most interesting facts. Enjoy the read and watch out for spoilers below!
Overall Score
What could be better than to begin the article with the overall rating you guys gave us?
A total of 5000+ players have taken the survey, and they rated Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader 4.3 out of 5!
This is almost the same result as the last time (alpha was rated 4.35). But considering this time the amount of people taking the survey has increased tenfold, a large number of them way less familiar with the universe, it looks like we’re still going in the right direction. Thank you for the recognition! Of course, this result is not a reason to sit idle, and we’ll discuss why below.
Reactivity and Convictions
One of the most frequent complaints in the survey was the insufficient reactivity of NPCs and companions to the Rogue Trader’s biography, doctrines, and convictions. There were also concerns about the conviction tags often feeling off or missing altogether. Well, that makes sense - a significant chunk of these reactions were not in the game yet! We’re already busy adding these reactions as this article is being written. Same goes for convictions - the tag placement was a draft done shortly before the beta launch, and we’re carefully working on all dialogues to tag them correctly.
We’ve also paid additional attention to scenes where a lot of you wished to see specific reactions. For example, quite a few people really wanted to be able to interrupt some of Idira’s heretical speeches in front of outsiders, and we’ll let you do this now!
Tutorials and Lore Glossary
Over 50% of you found our newly introduced tutorials useful, and the only negative criticism about them was, well, that there’s not enough of them! We are happy that they seem to be working well and will add more tutorials for various aspects of the game as we continue development. Some of them will even receive short explanatory videos.
The lore glossary appears to be quite helpful as well: almost 90% respondents told us they were actively using it! A curious note: these numbers appear the same even for the respondents who claimed to be deeply familiar with the universe. Checking our knowledge of the Lore, are you? :D
Difficulty Curve
There’s a lot of curious data here depending on the choice of difficulty. Overall, it seems that we’re on the right track, although some players on normal difficulty reported that there could be a bit more challenge. We will be carefully tuning the encounters with that in mind, especially in the later acts of the game, where player power may currently grow a bit too quickly.
Doctrines
Among the doctrines available, Marksman was an undisputed leader in all aspects. So much that we are considering lowering its potential a bit. Don’t panic though, we’re not removing the already iconic Shoot on the Run!
Adept, on the other hand, appears to be the least popular, with the most common complaints being lack of visible impact and difficulty in understanding its mechanics. In the beta this doctrine also suffered from a whole spectrum of bugs, which made the abilities even more confusing. We will be fixing these, tweaking some abilities, and reviewing the confusing and unclear descriptions.
UI
The UI seems to overall be well-received both visually and mechanically, with three exceptions:
Levelling UI. We’ve received a lot of feedback that the window was too small, there were way too many options in a single list, no way to compare the skills, and it lacked any sort of recommendation system, which led to massive timesinks every time you needed to level. Lack of respec options was often mentioned too. We will be addressing all of these issues! Here’s a glimpse on one of the menus we are currently working on:
Cargo/Loot UI. In the feedback, we’ve seen an overwhelming demand for proper drag&drop, scrolling, sorting, searching, and categorization. We haven’t been sitting idle and this UI is receiving a significant update. You can have a sneak peek of the changes yourself:
Targeting UI and ability formulas. Crit chance, cover benefits, visibility of the target, and buffs/debuffs were not always obvious. Formulas in ability descriptions and combat logs were confusing, and damage numbers were often way off the expected values. We have fixed these incorrect values, made the formulas shown as values by default, and increased visibility of icons and lines of sight.
When selecting targets for a ranged attack or ability, you can now also press TAB and hover your mouse over the hit chance or buff/debuff icons to get detailed information about them:
Reputation and Profit Factor
We’ve seen a fair share of confusion on profit factor, vendor trade, and reputation systems. A lot of people didn’t figure it out at all throughout their playthrough, and others were confused about how the profit factor value was calculated.
Not only will we be implementing a number of tutorials to help you figure out these systems, but we’ve also put a lot of work into making the UI more clear and self-explanatory. Profit factor will also now be visible in the colony screen:
Cutscenes
Looks like you guys generally enjoy our approach to cutscenes! There were only two significant points of feedback that attracted our attention:
Desynchronized or incomplete/weird-looking animations. All of these problems are being worked on and should be solved by release.
Impossibility to skip cutscenes, which was especially painful when a cutscene would happen just before a difficult fight. We don’t want to make you suffer yet, so we’re adding an option to skip cutscenes!
Ground Combat
Ground combat has received a solid 4.2 out of 5 in the beta, which is up from 3.94 in the alpha. This demonstrates steady progress, and there are only a few things we still would like to look at, such as the frequency of encounters in some zones and certain battles that tend to drag on too much or don’t feel original enough.
Space
For space combat, we are at 3.7 out of 5, up from 3.4 in the alpha. Progress is visible, but there is still a lot to do. A lot of people were frustrated by the lack of tutorials, so of course we’ll be putting that in! We will also fully implement officer post management, which was turned off for the beta, squash some bugs, and put in some additional effort to improve the variety of encounters.
Space exploration was rated 4.1, up from 3.9 in the alpha. It is a good result, and after a bit more polishing, it looks like we’ll be in the right spot. An interesting observation is that an overwhelming amount of players explore everything in the game, no exceptions.
Colony management is at only 3.4 at this point, which is far less than we would like to see. We will be putting in tutorials, improving the UI, tweaking numbers, offering more interesting rewards and adding reactivity to colony events and decisions. We will also remove the necessity to personally visit the colony to claim a reward - it was a quite popular demand.
The global map is at 3.93, which is decent, but it could be a bit better. We will be adding tutorials, upgrading a few visuals, adding more text-based warp encounters (many of you found them repetitive), and tuning the number and frequency of combat warp encounters.
Locations
Overall, it looks like we completely got rid of the ‘not enough grim darkness’ problem reported back in the alpha. It appears that the amount of weariness and despair added to the locations turned out to be just right, and such feedback is almost fully absent in the new survey. In fact, “just the right amount of grim darkness” is a very popular answer in the open feedback section!
The most popular locations (remarkable 4.42 and 4.41 out of 5, accordingly) were the Prologue:
and the Electrodynamic Cenobium:
Other popular locations included Eurac-V:
Inquisition Shipwreck (is this because you guys love papa Nurgle?):
and the Adeptus Administratum Palace:
Locations from the dark city of Commorragh were less popular, hovering around the score of 4. To an extent, it’s to be expected - they were still largely a WIP in the beta. In addition, in the first few days of the beta, there was a bug that allowed you to skip most of Act III by taking the wrong portal, which left many players confused. We will continue polishing and improving those locations as we prepare for release.
Companions and Narrative
Just like the last time, Argenta raked in all the praise, nominations, and awards! Who would have doubted that it would happen?
Unfortunately, same as the last time, the least popular companions are Jae and Idira, although the gap isn’t as big this time. We are already implementing a number of further tweaks and improvements which will make them more interesting and unique both mechanically and narratively.
We’ve also received a lot of feedback about a certain betrayal taking place in Act III, players pointing out that it was unjustified or unexplained.
Partially, it was caused by the fact that some content and reactivity that would make it clearer wasn’t yet in the beta. However, we see a clear urge for a better explanation, so besides adding the missing content, our narrative team is giving that event some additional attention.
Conclusion
And this marks the end of the article! We hope you enjoyed this little insight into the development of the game.
Once again, we thank you kindly for participating in the survey and helping us to shape this game so it can become even more fun, entertaining, and lore-accurate. It is an honor to have such an engaged and passionate community!
And as a final parting gift, here are some interesting stats from the survey:
Good Conduct Medal (No Team Damage) [750 Score] Legion of Merit (Save 10 Friendlies) [250 Score] Gallantry Cross (Deal 7,000 Damage) [250 Score] Vietnam Service Medal (Receive 7,000 Score) [250 Score]
[Server]
- Fixed bots sometimes not respawning - Autoteambalance is now done with bots instead of moving players (mp_autoteambalance_bot 1)
[Weapons]
- Rifle grenade now work like grenades with a fuse timve - M79 and M203 deal less damage with a smaller radius - Added suppressed variant of vz. 61e
[Miscellaneous]
- Removed some shaders which were compiled with earlier shader compiler - Fixed game timer was too transparent without background
