'83 - Quality-of-Life Patch #1

Today we're excited to release our first post Early Access launch Quality-of-Life patch, including hundreds of bug fixes, changes and improvements to nearly all aspects of the game. Patch notes are available below, but first a quick message from the team in regards to bots and why we're not planning to add them to '83.

Bots

Let's talk about bots,

We've read your feedback about them, both in favour and against the addition of bots to ‘83.

Our stance has always been that we're not going to add bots, and today we want to talk about why it's not straightforward from a technical perspective, and why there's no quick solution to add them.

Bots need defined navigation for each map and variant, which is a tremendous amount of work to complete even if we had bots available.

Creating AI bots is difficult especially when you want to make them capable of perceiving of a player and then engage players fairly without feeling like terminators. Any bot has to be integrated into directly into our core game systems to build out systems which tells bots how to see or hear players, define what the bot should do when it sees and how to "forget" that player is there, when to shoot and when to reload etc.

Players in '83 also have to occupy a squad and a role, so the bot needs to know how to do this and whilst they can all be simple riflemen they still need to allocate to a squad correctly.

All of this takes a lot of development time and effort and can still cause a lot more bugs and crashes and ultimately without a lot of iteration, the output can be pretty terrible: bots that instantly know where you are; will shoot at you instantly with high accuracy; can chase you to the ends of the earth etc.

In short, bots aren’t a switch we can flip, and right now our time is best spent improving the core player experience.

Quality of Life Patch #1 - Changelog

TL;DR Changes

• A whole host of animation improvements; especially 3P anims with equipment items and particularly featuring MP5SD ‘slap reload’ (Thanks Jonathan)

• Scope visuals and performance improved for M21 and SVD across a range of GPU settings

• Extensive changes to UI readability and function

• Players can join Steam friends

• Addition of static commander radios at key points on maps

• Numerous gameplay tweaks and balance adjustments across all maps; especially Fulda-NATO

• Fixed players occasionally being booted to other servers on server travel

• Multiple VFX and audio adjustments to increase immersion

• Tank and vehicle damage rebalance/adjustments

• Extensive adjustments to improve GPU fidelity and performance for low settings

• Hundreds of art bugs fixed (clipping, floating, textures, metrics etc.)

Gameplay

• Fixed joining via Steam friends not working

• Fixed weapon blocking often blocking you from firing in times when you shouldn't be getting blocked

• Stopped commander ability line strikes (creeping barrage etc.) from being seemingly adjustable (the UI would move, but the barrage wouldn't)

• Commander fuel resource reduction to 200 in Assault maps – recharge at 35 per minute

• Fixed commander abilities seeming stuck on becoming commander (seeing valid strike marks) but still having to wait on a new mark in order to actually call a strike (for example, p1 is commander, leaves a mark, p2 takes over, sees p1's mark but still has to wait on a new mark to unlock the abilities)

• Fix for "suicide" damage type not being used as it should be. Properly resolves killfeed bug, as well