Under New Management, pt. 1 blog - Nocis

It was recently pointed out by a dedicated gamer on our cosy forums at www.eternal-silence.net that we have been very secretive on the dev team, and that there was really no reason for this.

As a result of this, I have decided to start a blog. I don't know if anyone will read it, but this way I'll be able to give any interested gamers a view into what we're doing that can't quite be placed in a news update.

Sometime last year, the last team members of the old ES development team dropped the project in favour of bigger and better things. After the release on steam, and a number of patches, they slowly lost interest. They were satisfied with the gameplay and the content. However, we had all seen the immense influx, and the following efflux of players with the steam release - we went from all servers being filled, to one server being full once a day.

Headprogrammingczar and I decided that it was a shame to drop this awesome game on the floor. We love the game ourselves, and the dedication of the ES community stands as a testament to it's awesomeness. So how come there aren't anymore playing it?

We had a very long discussion about this, and decided the steep learning curve of the game was the primary problem. Often new players would download and try out the game, only to quit and delete it after a few rounds, because they didn't stand a chance in space combat versus experienced players. While new players always have a problem taking on the veterans, the kind of complete domination ES Newbies experienced just isn't fun. We (the veteran players) have all been there, and we've all used different approaches on how to learn the game. One visit to the forums will yield tons of articles and tips and tricks on how to play the game, including youtube tutorial videos and keybind set-ups. The problem is that the large majority of new players don't want to read through tons of articles, just to be able to try out a new game.

We decided to remedy this by doing two things:

1) An in-game tutorial. The best way to learn how to do stuff, is to just go ahead and try to do them. This is of course difficult if your average life span in space is 5-10 seconds. A playable tutorial solves this problem. We decided upon the HL Hazard Course approach - a series of maneuvers that teach the basics of the game, instructed by a helpful, cute female voice. One simple click from the menu will take you to a 3-part tutorial, which will equip and prepare you for the hardcore action that is Eternal Silence. You will learn how to do evasive maneuvers, how a hardcore game works and when to use the gunship. At the moment, part 1 of the tutorial is in testing, and work on part 2 will commence in the coming week.

2) More focus on the FPS/infantry gameplay. All new players have experience from other first-person shooters that is easily translated into Eternal Silence. The Control Point(cp) maps are therefore an easy and obvious entry point for new players. We therefore decided to set about improving the FPS experience of ES by adding new weapons and abilities.

Apart from that, we're still building upon the game, with new maps, new audio and visual prettiness and much more. We know how awesome a game experience Eternal Silence, and we will continue to work on making it easily accessible for new players. And while I still wont spill all ze beans, I will make sure you guys have a better look into what's the haps at ES Dev.