To our players,
We’re excited to have you join us for our Early Access test on May 27th. At this time, we want to discuss some of what you will be seeing in the game and how that compares to the full game you will experience when Armored Warfare launches later this year.
To start our test off, we will begin by offering only Tiers 1 through 6 of our vehicles. We're still doing some balancing on those higher tiers and will be introducing Tier 7 in the first major update and then adding Tier 8 in the second major update. By focusing all of the gameplay into the low and mid-tier vehicles, we can collect a lot of statistics that will help us evaluate vehicle balance and performance. Once we are ready to begin analyzing the higher tier vehicles, advancement up to Tiers 7 and 8 will be rolled out to you.
The version that will go live on May 27th has not received all of the optimizations that we have planned to improve your performance. These early days of Early Access will be focused on improving stability of the backend servers as well as your clients. In order to do that, we have to leave in a certain amount of pre-optimized code because it is easier to debug and get diagnostics on code that has not yet been fully optimized. We do have a lot of performance improvements that we are testing internally and we will be rolling those into upcoming patches. Some of them may land as early as the first major update and by the second major update we expect to have significantly improved performance for a wide range of machines.
You will also not find all of the progression and customization mechanics we have been developing in the first Early Access build. In addition to stability and reliability, we are also focusing on the core match mechanics and basic progression systems. When we feel that we have collected enough data to guide our future improvements, we will begin to introduce additional features.
Among the features that you can look forward to, we will be introducing some visual customization options as early as the second major update in the form of decals that you can apply to your vehicles. Later on, we will add the ability to alter the paint scheme of your vehicle with a number of unlockable camouflage patterns that can be applied.
Both the Crew and Commander systems have not been updated since the last round of Alpha testing. We are working on new improvements to these systems and what you see in the game now is only a temporary system to get by until we are ready to reveal the full feature.
Other new mechanics coming include a few more unique vehicle class mechanics, including the Support Shells for artillery units. There are additional maps coming in the next few major updates after the EA launch as well a new map mode being added to existing maps.
Finally, we do have one major feature regarding vehicle customization and upgrading that we have not announced yet. We call it the Retrofit System and we look forward to revealing all about this system in the very near future.
By getting in on Early Access so early, you will be getting a first look at many of the core systems of the game. But you will not see the whole game just yet. We have an exciting summer ahead as we continue to introduce additional features and content with each major update.
We look forward to hearing back from you on your experiences in the Early Access. After the EA phase launches, please let us know what you'd like to see more of or learn more about and we'll be happy to see what we can do to address it.
Thank you for getting involved in Armored Warfare. We look forward to countless exciting battles ahead.
-Obsidian
