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Hi everyone, we hope you’re all doing well in these difficult times.
It’s time to shed some light on our beta, talk about a developer Q&A, and on the mechanics we’ve been testing. We also want to detail the way in which we intend to do our playtest demo.

Beta test

The closed beta test is running at the moment. Our testers are having a good time with it. Of course we’ve found a number of issues that we need to repair, and we’re correcting them systematically.
Besides checking for errors, we’ve asked our testers to focus on certain game mechanics. This is the short list:

• medical rallying point (The rally point enables soldiers to be auto-resupplied with bandages to extend their survivability)
• new healing mechanic (Not all of the fallen soldiers can be healed any more; soldiers squashed by tanks or hit by large munitions etc. can’t be revived)
• refueling is semi- automated (refueling vehicles eliminate the need for micro- management)
• shifted war time periods to make online play better (balancing)
• many new engineering emplacements: foxholes, trenches have been added
• repair mechanics are new (no unlimited repairs)
• visualisation of vehicle component vulnerability reworked

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All screenshots in this update are from the “Partisans” SP mission

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Besides testing these, we’ve added extra MP maps, bringing the total to 16. We’ve also reviewed performance during the test which allowed for an optimization pass that got us about 20% performance improvement.


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Playtest particulars

As announced, we will add one step to our release plan: the playtest demo. Subscriptions are open! Join the test!! Click on the image below to enter the store page and subscribe as marked



Our playtest demo will happen as follows; when our closed beta ends, we will allow a first batch of players who own the basic version of CtA - or a higher version - to play a demo version of Gates of Hell for free; the content will be limited in volume and time. It is strongly recommended to read the FAQ about it first!
This may or may not be followed by some adjustments in the game, and after that we start to finalize a build for release.
We want to start this playtest in march, a precise date will be announced.
Steam will grant access at random! To have a chance of taking part,
You can request access right now on our store page.


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Community

We want to do a developer Q&A soon. Right now, we are working out the details. This may be via a developer screen share on Discord, or a livestream on Twitch (which you will also be able to follow on Discord).
For those who have been waiting for footage, here’s a bit of gameplay. This was done by one of our testers. With this footage we want to show you the look and feel of it. We hope you enjoy it, let us know what you think!

https://youtu.be/XD9MPmf10zY

Release

To us, a good quality product is more important than rushing it out, that's why we have chosen to do a closed beta with community veterans and an open beta via playtest for everyone to participate, before we set the release date in stone. Stay tuned.


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Did you know?

• For finding out how we make content, you can check the blog posts on our Company website.
• On Discord, we post screenshots & other media daily
• During the Soviet winter counteroffensive of ‘41-42, the 4th Shock Army captured the town of Usvyaty, near Vitebsk. German army groups failed to notice their lines did not connect any more
• The “Vitebsk gate” that resulted was a 20Km gap in the front line through which the red army could hand huge amounts of supplies to Partisans freely
• The gap was “open” for 8 months, until late september 1942