Commanders!
The Tiger Claw PvE mission is amongst the oldest PvE missions in the game, but it’s also one that’s only ever been intermittently available over the years – and there’s a good reason for that. From missing voiceover to visual and objective problems, it has never quite worked right and making it available has therefore always been seen as a curiosity at best, an opportunity for players to explore an old piece of content before it would inevitably disappear again from the game due to its plethora of issues.
Well, no longer. We have decided to give it a fresh coat of paint, fix the bugs and make it available again – this time, permanently. But let us start from the beginning.
As the first step, we overhauled the map’s visuals. The terrain, while visually looking okay (for the most part anyway), had plenty of technical issues. And it’s not just the classic problems such as stones with missing collision models. The navmesh grid was all wrong. A little explanation here – the terrain in Armored Warfare is covered by a layer called navigation mesh – an invisible set of waypoints used by bots to orientate. If this grid is implemented incorrectly, bots tend to get stuck on really strangle places such as in the middle of the field or so (even correct implementation doesn’t completely prevent bots from getting stuck, mind you, but that’s another story). So we fixed that.
The visuals themselves were also overhauled – not in a dramatic, major way that’s easy to spot, but by changing a lot of smaller details to make the map look more natural. A stone here, a patch of dirt there – and it all comes together in a different picture that looks the same at the first glance, but is more pleasing to the eye.
And then there were the issues that you, the players, would report with each session on the map. Here’s what we fixed (in no particular order):
- The map now has an English voiceover – curiously, the Russian one has always been there, which was extremely strange for a map that has its roots in the Obsidian Entertainment era, but the reason for that is sadly lost to time. But the English script was there and we used it to make a working version
- Fixed the player respawns – in the middle of the mission there’s a bridge you must capture, and dying beyond this point will allow you to respawn at the bridge, not the start of the map
- Secondary objective timers were fixed (these would fail randomly without any indication of remaining time)
- Bots would spawn in inaccessible areas (right at the start across the river), we fixed those
- Bots would also spawn across the bridge during the mid-part of the mission and would immediately get stuck on the bridge and block your progress, we fixed that as well
- There were also issues with friendly bots spawning and doing nothing (despite being actually set correctly), we removed those as they would bring nothing constructive to the mission anyway
- A lot of smaller visual bugs in the village
And that’s it, commanders. We hope you’ll like this return of an old piece of content. We’re looking forward to showing you more things we are working on and, as always:
See you on the battlefield!
