Greetings, Survivors!

It is a pleasure to be back and writing the Resistance Report once again. You know I try my best to prioritize them, but sometimes things get hectic all of a sudden and I have to focus on other things. Who am I kidding, things are always hectic, but sometimes more so than others.
These last few weeks in particular, though, our devs and I engaged in what is known as the Great Summer Break™. This is a time each summer when we put in our vacation days and spend valuable and well-deserved time with our families and recharging before we get back into the fray.

I myself took two weeks off to spend time in nature and play Diablo IV. I even got bored once and made cookies, highly recommended! It’s super easy and worth it. Here’s what some of the devs have been up to:

Audio Designer Peter enjoys the view in Tromsø, Norway.

Lead Producer Tommy relaxes near some waterfalls in Croatia

Hard Surface Artist Joachim looks at the sunset on the way to Finland

QA Lead Calum admires the flowing waters of Dunkeld, Scotland
Something about game devs and fleeing to the forest as soon as they have some time on their hands. Anyway, now we’re all back in full force!

I’m sure you have many questions about what we’re working on now.

In our quest to improve performance across all platforms, we decided to release a Public Test Branch to bring our chances to a wider audience and have a faster fix time before we fully release them. Many of you decided to download this test branch and play on it, which we are immensely thankful for. Even just the backend statistics showed us many things that weren’t visible on a smaller scale and contributed to us fixing them.

A special thank you goes out to those players who played on the PTB and contacted us with in depth reports on the issues they ran into. This is going the extra mile that makes our job so much easier and improves the experience of everyone else!
As the PTB is not needed at the moment, we will be changing the password to access it, which will revert everyone who is still on it back to the public branch. Of course we’ll let you know if we decide to reopen it in the future!

There are still some kinks to iron out with our latest update, the August 2024 Update. We’ve detected some crashes and other bugs that previously slipped through the cracks and are working to resolve them before releasing the update to consoles. That process is well on its way, though, and it shouldn’t be long before our fellow Survivors on PS and Xbox will be able to enjoy the improvements we’ve made including the bug fixes we’re working on right now.

The optimizations are of course not the only thing we’re doing right now. Work on the next update has already begun and we’re making great progress.
Of course, it’ll be a while before we can really talk about it, but I can tell you now that we’re cooking up some things that a lot of you have been asking forö. I can’t wait to talk about it!

We’ve also noticed that it’s been a while since we had our last community contest, so keep an eye out and join the Discord server[discord.gg] to see when that’s happening again. Your creative muscles shall be stretched!

That’s all for today’s Resistance Report. The Swiss German word of the day is “Schläckstängel” (pronounce this with an American accent: “Shlackshtangle”). It means lollipop and as a 10 year old, this German doctor laughed at me when I asked for one.

Cheers!
Carni, Community Manager