Upcoming update addressing gameplay and player feedback

We are working on an upcoming update to bring some changes and improvements to core gameplay features, and minor changes to several maps based on player feedback. These changes will improve enemy reactions and gameplay feedback to players, as well as drastically improve the quality of actions made by both enemy and friendly AI. Map updates will address progression and overall readability in Dubai, Tutorial, and very minor changes in several other maps.

For some background: As we were nearing release and playtesting with a larger pool of players outside of the development team, we discovered performance issues across a variety of hardware levels. While we were aware of performance issues on lower end systems, as well as unfortunately unavoidable problems on AMD based graphics cards, the performance issues we were seeing during these playtest sessions were both significant, and outside of those mentioned situations.

In order to prevent further delays in releasing the game, AI agents (both enemy and friendly) underwent an extensive, if last minute, review and refactor for optimization. Some core AI routines were easily optimized and we saw major performance increases. Other routines were more in-depth or the underlying performance issues would have required substantial reworking of code, and so a number of those routines were skipped or removed altogether.

An unfortunate side effect of this is that, under some circumstances, both enemy and friendly AI would appear to act very dumb. This was disappointing for our team as we placed a large focus on AI interactions and we had wanted players to enjoy a more tactical gameplay experience than found in other BUILD engine games.

After taking a break after Realms Deep and the holiday season, I have been reworking the core AI routines that broke down or caused a lot of these issues and the results are very promising. For players, the changes should not be so drastic that the game will feel like an entirely new experience, but rather minimize the instances where AI agents would go into some sort of failure state and break player immersion. Our hope is that players will be able to continue playing and enjoying the game as we intended.

Regarding performance issues related to AMD based cards, we had previously pushed an update that allowed players to disable some detail objects in maps in an effort to reduce performance issues. We are expanding this list of objects to hopefully improve this further for those players. Unfortunately we are not able to resolve the underlying issue, as the root cause of this is related to AMD’s OpenGL drivers and the way the engine handles the scene rendering. Currently AWOL is on an older build of the EDuke32 engine, and in a future update we will be porting forward to a newer version, which we hope will help address these issues.

Lastly, we will be working on a future update to improve controller support as well as support for the Steam Deck. This will require some changes to how the in-game UI is handled to support controller button icons, but this is still on our radar.

Thanks again to all of our players who have enjoyed A.W.O.L. and we appreciate all of the feedback and response!