State of the Empire Address
My Fellow Legionnaires,
Emperor BugsPray here. Let me speak candidly: There has been some debate amongst the development team, testers, and players about whether or not to release information to the community on the state of the project and where it’s headed. Our intent behind hiding this information is not to keep you in the dark, begging for scraps of information from your overlords. InstantAction had a tendency to make promises that they were, in the end, unable to keep. This is no fault of any one individual, but the fault of their circumstances at the time. Either way, this resulted in some animosity toward the developers, and created a sense of distrust amongst the community.
This is something we’ve been trying to avoid. As any development team knows, there are some things we think we are going to do that wont get done as a matter of resources and time. At the same time, we might be able to some things we never thought we’d do. As a community that is actively involved in the development, you have a unique perspective on what is happening compared to other communities. This perspective lends itself to some good things and bad.
The Good: You get to participate in things like Public Testing phases and see new features and content before they’re ready to come out. You have the opportunity to give your input earlier in the development process and have developers actually listen to you (despite how grumpy we can be, we do listen!).
The Bad: Everything is subject to change. Since we do listen to feedback, and since we watch and see how everything plays out, features and content will change because of it. This means that some feature you see today might be different or even gone tomorrow.
The policy up to this point was, “Don’t tell them until we’re just about to release the content, that way they aren’t disappointed if we decide against the feature or are unable to do it.” However, many of you are interested in how we’re developing the game and what the plan is for the future. So with that in mind, we want to give you some perspective on what the plan is for the future of Legions: Overdrive (oh, and some art and screenshots too)!
The Plan
When we approached InstantAction about taking on their game, we had originally intended to add content and some fun features to the game while they were busy doing other things, in hopes that they would pick up Legions again. As we were nearing release of Legions: Overdrive, InstantAction was shut down by IAC. The news was a bit scary at the time, but we thought about it and realized that it opened up the ceiling for what was possible to do with Legions. As a team, we tried to think of all of the things Legions meant to us as a game, what it was best suited for, and how we could modify it to be the great game it was meant to be. We decided to focus on a few key aspects of Legions: 7v7 to 10v10 game sizes, gameplay depth, freedom of movement, newb-friendliness, and content. Now we'll give you a quick look at what's coming down the pipe.
Custom Loadouts
Legionnaires need control over your armors and weapons - not just selecting pre-made armors, but making your own! We’ll be implementing custom inventory system so that you can tweak your loadouts and perfect your own style of play.
New Weapons and Hand Grenades
Legions is full of bread and butter weapons: the rocket launcher, chaingun, grenade launcher, and the sniper rifle (that one is a little different). Some weapons have variations that make them a bit more powerful. We want to expand those four base weapons and give you more options on how you frag your enemies. Here’s a teaser of the upcoming plasma rifle:
Overdrive Cores
Overdrive is Legions’ most iconic feature, and we are going to take it to the next level. Using custom loadouts, you’ll be able to switch between a variety of overdrive cores, each with its own powerful abilities that will help you and your teammates.
Base Assets and Deployables
Soon you’ll be able to bolster your defenses and support your offense by using base assets and deploying your own. These assets and deployables would be destroyable. Base assets must be repaired to function again and deployables must be redeployed when they are destroyed. Here's an early shot of the new inventory station model:
Client-Side Modding
There are some players modifying the game already, but we want to make this more accessible to the general public. This means you’ll be able to make changes to scripts and textures in order to fully customize your Legions experience.
Player-Hosted Servers
We’ve been mentioning for a while that we don’t want to stay in control of the servers forever. We don't believe it's scalable, and it takes away from our development time trying to manage these servers. In the future, you will see us make dedicated server hosting available to all of you so that you can run your own public and private servers for team practices, matches, pickups, or building that giant 32 player tower you’ve always wanted.
More Maps and Gametypes
As always, we’re committed to continuously expanding the number of maps and gametypes available in Legions. Here’s are some shots from the upcoming map Fallout:
Want to Know More? Tune in to Legions Live
Apcizzle just announced the return of Legions Live in the forums. We will be releasing more information and answering your questions about these upcoming features during their debut broadcast next Wednesday at 9pm ET. Keep your eyes locked on that thread for more information and updates.
See you on the battlefield, Legionnaires!
Mirage now Live
After a few days testing, the public test channel has now been closed. Make sure you're running from the live channel instead.
Mirage has been pushed to the live channel and is currently in the rotations for Hotswap #1 and shazbot.eu #1.
Asian Servers Poll
After two weeks of testing the Japanese/Singapore servers, we're now asking you to vote on which server you prefer.
More info is available in this forum thread!
Mirage on Public Test
It's taken us a while to get the public test channel in action, but we're finally using it! We've published an updated version of Mirage to the public test channel.
To access the public test channel, login with your Legions Launcher with your regular username and password. Once you see the latest news articles, you should see a select box above the UPDATE button and to the left of the PLAY button. Simply change this to Public Test, and your launcher will download the public test channel to a different directory. After downloading you can just hit PLAY to launch this. You can easily switch between the live and public test channels by changing this select box at any time.
We've launched two servers, [DE] Public Test and [US] Public Test, both of these are running Mirage permanently at the moment. So please let us know if there are any problems with the map by testing it! Once we're happy the map is bug free it'll be pushed to the live channel, and then the public test channel and servers will be taken down until we need it again.
Happy testing!
Singapore Test Server
After a week of the Japanese test server, we're now giving the Singapore server another go. This time we're using a more powerful server in the Singapore region - so please give this server a chance by fully testing it.
Yet again we need your feedback, so please remember to post in the forums with your opinions on the server. All feedback should be posted in this thread.
New US Servers
Thanks to those all the players who submitted pingplotter results from the list of test IPs we gave out 2 weeks ago. After a look at the data, we decided to go with another Chicago server provider - but on a different network!
As we were stuck for a new server name, we decided to give it an old familiar server name. Hotswap is now up and running, with the Justice servers due to be taken down in a weeks time.
New Test Server in Japan
We understand the pain that our Asian players are having with Legions, and our previous tests with the Singapore server weren't that great. To address this we're going to see if there are any other viable options for an official Legions server in the area.
Today we've launched a new test server, hosted on the Amazon EC2 cloud in their brand new region in Tokyo, Japan. This server is going to be up for just one week, after which we'll be trying an alternative. We're asking for all players in the Asian region to test this server as much as possible and give feedback to see if it's any good.
All feedback regarding this server belongs in this thread on the forums.
New North American Server Tests
Ahoy hoy!
I'm sure many of you are aware of the routing issue with the Justice servers and a portion of the community. We're looking at possible alternatives and please check out this thread and help us test possible alternatives.
Revamped IFF, Handgrenades
Revamped IFF
This has been requested for awhile now, and the Legions: Overdrive team is happy to announce that the IFF (Indicator Friend/Foe) system has been revamped. The range is no longer infinite, and players will now have to be more aware of what's approaching their flagstand.
Handgrenades
A few lucky players got to experience these 'pineapples of love' during the Fallen Empire: Legions era, and we're pleased to announce that they are now available to the masses in Legions: Overdrive. Available to all armour classes are five hand grenades. They have limited range, a bit of bounce, and can be blown up in mid-throw for combo damage against opponents (or the player himself!).
Be sure to check your keybindings and readjust accordingly (handgrenade defaults to 'F').
Also, to keep the community informed of any game changes, a change log thread has been created here and will be maintained from this point forward.
Quick Chat Returns
Ahoy hoy, Legionnaires!
Make sure to update your game client using the Patcher next time you play Legions: Overdrive as Quick Chat has returned! You'll have multiple voices to choose from and these can be chosen from the Options Menu.
Enjoy!
[Shazbot!]