Developer Diary: Wages of Sin PvE Mission

Commanders!

One of the previously announced features is the Wages of Sin PvE mission and, like with the Namer, the announcement took place quite some time ago. Now, do not worry – the mission’s still coming in November, but as the earlier article suggests, it was supposed to arrive much earlier – in fact, it was supposed to coincide with the end of the Perihelion event as the mission is closely tied to it.

The reason it was delayed was the complicated nature of the map itself. In Armored Warfare, maps do not exist as separate terrain layout on which you add events such as maps and triggers. They exist in several layers and each of the layers does something different – voiceover, terrain interaction, objectives, you name it. These layers are then compiled together into what you see in the game as missions or maps. In many cases, these layers are closely tied to each other, which is why it’s not possible to simply cut away pieces of maps and create other missions or PvP/PvE maps from them.

But that’s not what really delayed the mission as we were effectively ready for that. The real reason was that, unbeknownst to us, the map part of the mission was made in a very specific way as to only work with the American Dream Special Operation (where it originated). And, as a cherry on the top, it wasn’t even made by the developers of the game, it was outsourced. In short, our attempts to make the mission work created an incredible amount of bugs that had to be squashed.

What followed were many months of investigations that allowed us a very deep insight into the workings of the game’s mechanics as many things had to be programmed from scratch. The good news is that the fruits of this labor will not only bring you the Wages of Sin mission – the lessons from it will be used in all future PvE content as well, including new Special Operations.

As for the mission itself – compared to the old screenshots, it underwent significant improvements to make it more distinct form the original operation. Especially the Perihelion camp (starting area) got fleshed out, as did the military base at the end.

There’s one feature that we weren’t able to implement though, compared to the original article – the mission will use the general AI vehicle pool (that includes everyone’s favorite Hunter) and we had to tune the difficulty and bot composition to match that. Otherwise everything is working and we are in the final polishing stages of work. Regardless, the mission will be on the difficult side.

We are planning to deploy the mission until the end of the year, presumably in November. We hope that you'll enjoy the mission even with a delay and, as always:

See you on the battlefield!