SO HOW DID THE ALPHA GO?
By Jeffrey Kaplan
Overall, it was a tremendous success.
We went from complete stealth mode into a studio announce and game announce to running a public Alpha Test all within the same month. We were also lucky enough to build a community of gamers who are as passionate about The Legend of California as we are.
Highlights: The game played well, people had fun and engagement was through the roof. The average tester in the Alpha played for 9 hours… which is kind of crazy, in the best way possible.
But was everything a success? Well, no.
We came up very short on our concurrency and performance goals for the Alpha test. Even pre-Alpha, our internal stress testing revealed that our concurrency goals were too high. To make for a better Alpha player experience, we tried to lower concurrency caps to 45 per server. On some highly impacted servers, we lowered the concurrency caps even further to get performance back during the Alpha playtest. The end result was that there was often a lot of lag, the number of players per server was much lower than we planned for and there were noticeable “hiccups” whenever someone new would log in.
I’ll let Tim or one of the engineers expand on why things were not performing up to par and why we didn’t catch it in our internal testing. Lots of it had to do with the total number of unique players per server and not just the concurrency per server.
Our Alpha Testers were the best. They were so gracious and understanding. Shockingly, I didn’t read a bunch of feedback about the lag or performance. Our testers mostly just had fun taming California, building their ranches, defeating bandits and… well… getting owned by boars.
So what are we going to do about it?
Our original plan was to take the feedback and learnings from this Alpha test, go “heads down” for a few months and then host a Beta test. However, our game currently doesn’t hit the level and quality of performance for a modern, high quality, multiplayer experience. So we’ve made the decision to keep the game in Alpha at least for one more milestone.
The entire team has prioritized and is now focused on performance improvements (client, server, graphics, physics), bug fixing and polish over new feature development. I can’t give you an exact date for the next Alpha Playtest. If you were invited to the last playtest, you’ll be invited to the next one. If we can, we’ll try to get additional folks in, too. This test will actually be fewer people with fewer servers. On a related note: 69% of our Alpha invites were direct through the Steam signup. We pulled our initial invites from our Friends & Family signups and a handful of creators that applied. We wanted to make sure servers were stable before turning on the big Steam invite faucet.
Don’t worry! A Beta Test is still happening. The Beta will include a larger pool and will also feature more content than the next Alpha Test. The next Alpha will be light on new content because the main focus is getting the game to run better.
Ok, enough about testing and performance…
What are our thoughts on the gameplay coming out of the Alpha Test?
Things that worked well. The game played as we expected it to play. Even though our concurrency cap was lower than we had desired, we don’t feel like we’re too far off. There were thriving communities on each of the servers with lots of chat, collaboration, trading, etc. We don’t want to slam too many people on a server anyway. Our world is supposed to feel vast and unexplored. We don’t want a ranch on every acre. But we do want thriving communities of players.
Tutorials. It’s unlikely that we’ll build a “traditional” tutorial experience for Early Access. But our “Tutorial Tip” system seemed to do a good job guiding players through the basics. We did notice that some players “missed” that the Challenge System (Press J) provided additional progression guidance. We’ll need to smooth this out so that it’s more noticeable to new players.
The Building System. We learned a lot about the “building system” by watching how players interacted with it. Lots of work has gone into this system, but it obviously needs much more development before it feels polished and intuitive. This area of the game had a lot of bugs, exploits and awkwardness that we’d like to clean up. It was still impressive seeing some of the cool creations that came out of Alpha.
Overall, we’re looking to offer you more choice in the system and to truly maximize creative expression for those who want it. For those who don’t, we want the prefab buildings to look great and function well. One issue that we were hoping to address for Beta is the placement of buildings on uneven terrain and the way in which those buildings blend into the environment. In this Alpha test it was common to struggle with placement and/or have a pretty harsh blending between the building’s blend shape and the natural terrain.
Enemy Strongholds.For the most part, the Enemy Strongholds played well. There are some tuning adjustments we want to make to a few individual Strongholds (for example, Alta Mesa feels under populated to us). We already have two new medium-sized strongholds being worked on concurrently. These may or may not be done by our next Alpha but will most certainly be ready for the Beta test. Eventually, we want to replace the “duplicate” large stronghold on all seeds with a unique one. We currently have 7 large strongholds but spawn 8 on each map. The real dream is (beyond Early Access) more than 8 in the pool and then having unique sets of large strongholds per seed.
Mining. Mining was good, but not yet great. The design team wants to revisit some mineral requirements for crafting along with mineral distribution. The art team wants to do a lot of work, especially on the player ranch mine. We want to make sure there’s a distinction between the “local” and “express” elevators to make things less confusing. The vast majority of the mining rooms in the player mine are what we would call “designer art”. I think we’re all excited for the art team’s real pass of these. Some features we want to try to get in for Beta: hazards in the mine, enemies in the mines, and building/placeables in the mine. These were actually our priority before we shifted over to performance. Mining and the mining system is really cool right now. But it’s only a fraction of what we think is possible in this game.
Hunting. Hunting and animals were mostly well-received. There were some awkward bugs with animals behaving oddly, looking “stuck” or leaping in awkward and unpredictable ways. Luckily, mid-alpha we also solved the bug that was causing all animals to disappear. Apologies for that one.
PVP. We didn’t see as much PvP happening as we were hoping for. This wasn’t surprising for a couple of reasons. First off, the lower-than-expected concurrency caps meant that there were just far fewer players crossing paths with each other. Another reason, most new players weren’t familiar with “how” to engage in PVP (PVE zones vs PVP zones). Additionally, because Alpha was so small, we knew most players would be reluctant to engage in PVP. Our World Event system, we realized, needs an update to function better as this was affecting the draw to PvP as well.
Outside of our Alpha, we have noticed that the community at large is very interested in PVP only servers. Without committing or promising this outright, we’re very interested in the concept of trying to get a PvP ruleset server in place for our Beta Test. We’re in active discussions about designs for this, so we’ll see if it can make the priority list for features. Again, no promises.
World Events. Currently we have a number of what we call “world events” internally. These include: Caravan Defense, Outpost Defense, Legendary Grove, Salvadore (the rare vendor), Contraband Caches and the Outlaw Crate. We love World Events and want to add more someday. In this Alpha, the World Events were essentially on the same frequency “table”. This means that if the system decided to spawn Salvadore, it couldn’t create a Contraband (PvP) event at the same time. In the future, we want to have a more sophisticated scheduler for these events which would allow us to layer events. For example, we could keep PvP events at a high frequency while keeping something like the Legendary Grove a little more infrequent.
I could go on and on about the things we learned and the things we want to fix. We have a long list of cool ideas for new content, systems and features. Hopefully this gives you a general idea of how the team felt about the Alpha and the types of things we’re going to be focusing on for our next milestone. As much as we wanted the next milestone to be Beta, we think it is best for the game and our players if we don’t rush things. We’re a super small team (34 people) and on a limited budget. We basically get one shot at this so we want to get things right. We’ll need all of the luck and support we can get to succeed in Early Access.
