Bloodhunt: What changes to expect before the game’s release?

Hello Bloodhunt community! Thank you to all participants who took part in the closed PC playtest! We’ve reviewed nearly 2400 survey responses and identified the following topics that are important to the majority of our community.

Here’s a small selection of some fantastic things that happened during the game testing, and we hope you’ll enjoy them!

It truly gave us an idea of our game’s readiness and confidence that everything is set for launch.

Overall, the reception and feedback have been exceptionally positive, but we would like to draw your attention to some points that, in your opinion, could be improved.

Since we are very close to the game’s launch, some of these issues may not be resolved by launch, but we will do our best to include them in upcoming updates, as we always strive to improve Bloodhunt for our players.

Balance and Issues

When it comes to game balance, one thing that stood out was the Ventrue ability – Enforcer.

Firstly, we identified an issue that caused problems with hit registration in certain scenarios.

This scenario was related to weapon reloading, where under certain poor network conditions, bullets in the next magazine couldn’t damage players. We have partially addressed this issue for the game’s launch, but we couldn’t fully fix it. Instead of delaying the game, we intend to address the issue in an update shortly after the game’s launch.

Given the above, we believe that this issue exacerbated the perception that the Ventrue ability – Enforcer is too powerful.

We would like you to play the game again with the partial fix available in the upcoming game’s launch build and let us know if you still feel it’s a problem.

Additionally, we know from experience that when new weapons or characters are introduced, almost every player wants to try them out, creating the impression that everyone is using them simply because they are genuinely good. Moreover, it takes time to learn and adapt to a new archetype and its abilities, so we want to give our players a chance to discover and explore the counters and metas that emerge in Bloodhunt thanks to new content.

It also takes time to collect and analyze gameplay data, which we use to confirm your and our own thoughts on what the next steps should be when it comes to game balance.

In short, we want to give it a little time before we start changing values, as we prefer to make changes in small steps rather than too early and aggressively, which, as we’ve seen, can have an even more negative impact on the overall game balance.

We hope that our somewhat different approach to game balancing will lead to more enjoyable experiences for most of our players.

Respawn Locations in Bloodhunt Mode

Some of you felt that the respawn locations in Bloodhunt mode were too close for comfort, as it often seemed that freshly killed players could return very quickly and re-engage with you in battle.

During the closed PC playtest, our players shared numerous ideas on how to improve the game, such as:

• Making it more apparent when someone respawns on the map through visual and audio cues.
• Spawning players with lower-quality weapons.
• Allowing players to choose respawn points that are far from the action.
• Some of these are easier to implement than others, but we will explore different solutions and see what works best.

Additionally, we noticed that the ability to get an extra life from a specific NPC after being defeated once may not be entirely clear to most players. Since this mode is designed more for entertainment than competition, we may see players playing a bit differently once they understand the dynamics of this mode.

We’ll delve into this further in the future when we have time to implement and conduct several internal gameplay tests to determine what works best and what’s possible with how we’ve designed the system.

Matchmaking

During the closed playtest, we initially focused on getting players into matches quickly, which sometimes led to some of you ending up on servers outside your regions. We then shifted our focus to higher-quality matches, prioritizing location over speed.

Of course, doing this correctly can be challenging depending on the time of day and the total number of active players. However, we will adapt to our player base, and currently, we feel we’ve learned what will work best at the game’s launch.

During early access, we didn’t see significant demand for servers in Australia, resulting in long wait times for players in that region due to server population taking quite some time. To expedite the process, we used Singapore servers to gauge the acceptability of the gameplay experience, hoping to reduce waiting times.

The results of the closed PC playtest were somewhat mixed: players were satisfied with the ability to find matches quickly but felt noticeable lag.

For the launch, we want to attempt launching the game in as many regions as possible, and we hope to see an increase in regions with low player numbers so that we can justify keeping these servers in the network.

For launch, we will run servers in the following regions/countries:

• EU
• West US
• Central US
• East US
• Brazil
• Australia
• Singapore

Of course, we will monitor player numbers worldwide and adjust server locations to best meet global demand for the game.

Crossplay

Finally, we’d like to share some additional feedback we received outside of the playtest, mainly concerning the ability to play in the same group with friends through crossplay, rather than just against each other in Prague. While we can’t make any promises at the moment, we want to confirm that we’ve heard your feedback. The ultimate goal is to enable playing with each other on all platforms.

Thank you! We’d like to thank you once again for your feedback and ideas to improve Bloodhunt. Honestly, it means a lot to us, so thank you! Thank you so much! As always, you can also find us on Discord at discord.gg/Bloodhunt.

Until next time, see you in the twilight!