It’s been just over a week since the launch of Chivalry 2’s House Aberfell content update and we’re thrilled to see that our community have been enjoying the new map, the Highland Sword and the patch’s many other additions and fixes!
Last week our development team streamed on patch launch day over on the Epic Games Twitch channel. If you weren’t able to catch it, you can still watch the stream over on their channel. We were also featured on the Xbox channel last week, and you can watch that stream here.
You can follow our own new Torn Banner Studios Twitch channel for regular livestreams (once a more or more) as well!
Here’s a summary of what you missed:
Raid on Aberfell Environment Art Deep Dive
Special guest James Arkwright, Lead Environment Artist for Chivalry 2, joined us to talk us through the development process of making a new map, and specifically what it was like to work on The Raid on Aberfell. Below are a few screenshots of the map while it was in development alongside the finished map as you can play it today.
Aberfell was born out of the idea to create something very different than any of the other maps we have done before. This includes location; which was inspired by the Scottish Highlands, as well as new objectives such as stealing peasants and pigs. Oink oink!
One of the greatest challenges when it came to creating the Aberfell map was the sheer expanse of wide open space that the map has. In many of our previous maps we’re able to rely on buildings and tight corridors to create spaces to congregate players and move people around the playing field. These existing methods were not available to Aberfell which has no giant castles or natural player funnels. Giving players cover from archers when they have to cross large open areas was also a difficult challenge, and much iteration time was spent making the progression of the map feel natural.
The development team iterated repeatedly on the way the village was designed, creating multiple access points and peripheral paths. Curved boundaries were used to funnel players back to the objectives, and key landmarks like the ships, trees, and market were used to keep players in the right areas and prevent the map from being too symmetrical.
Aberfell’s most difficult area to work on was its penultimate area, featuring a large section of elevated ground. This is the first map to introduce vertical gameplay, with players fighting while also having to climb or descend the side of a mountain. The combination of players changing vertical height, jumping from various heights, as well as rocks intersecting all of it made for a difficult game design and artistic endeavor.
We expect to have more deep dives into Chivalry 2’s development processes in upcoming livestreams. We hope you enjoyed this one and look forward to them more in the future!
Dev Reponses to Top Issues
While the team played a bit of Aberfell on-stream with the community, we also talked a little about the hot button issues the community is talking about currently.
Team Balance improvements:
- Included in the House Aberfell update was a change to the way that team swapping works. With this improvement, players are prevented from team stacking and swapping to the winning teams to avoid losing. We’re pleased to say that we’ve noticed a positive impact since this change went live, but it’s something that the team continues to keep a close eye on.
Competitive events:
- We’re seen that the community has expressed a desire to host more community events and tournaments and it’s a goal of ours to make this process easier. We’re aiming to introduce an Event Moderator role for the community to be able to better host and moderate these competitive events with less hands-on attention required from official moderators or Torn Banner devs. We hope to flesh this out further in the future as well to make the process more streamlined.
Top issues on consoles:
- We’re aware that players’ desire to change FOV as well as having more options for control schemes are a top issue for the console player community. It is on our radar! We definitely hear the community concerns here and these features are something we’re actively looking into feasibility for.
What’s Coming Next for Chivalry 2?
We’re bucking down for our next update which we’re calling the Reinforced Update (2.5). The main features of this update are bringing cross-platform parties to the game, as well as bringing the server browser to console players. We know players have been eager for these features since the launch of the game last summer and it’s finally happening! We look forward to sharing more information with you as we get closer to releasing this update.
The majority of our team is now focused on development of our Biggest Update Yet (2.6 – official name not yet revealed) coming in 2022. We aren’t ready to talk about this update yet, but our team is excited to blow people away with it.
You can always stay up to date on the bigger items the team is working on at the Chivalry 2 Road Map. And don’t forget: for help be sure to visit the Chivalry 2 Knowledge Base and Support Site, community discourse – Discord, follow us on Twitch, and read all the latest news on our Social (Twitter & Facebook).
