Echo VR Dev Log | Echo Pass PTS #2 and Community Feedback
Highlights
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Hello Echo Units,
RAD_Tyrana here. First and foremost, I wanted to thank everyone who participated in our January Public Test Server (PTS) for the Echo Pass. We received a lot of information and feedback which is going to help guide us towards the upcoming launch. Overall, the response to all of our changes and new content was overwhelmingly positive and we’re really excited to share this new content with you and prepare ourselves for a lot of great content in the future.
With this update, we made a massive number of changes and want to ensure to our players we will continue to uphold the integrity of Echo VR. Some of this may come through various iterations, but we take your feedback seriously. Our player base has grown tremendously over the last few years, with all different types of players joining us and we will continue to do our best to create content and systems that work for everyone.
Diving into feedback, we had a few core things we wanted to address based on feedback from the community:
• Readability of Shaders in the Arena
• General Readability of the new Chassis
Before I hand these off to some of our designers who have been tackling this feedback, I wanted to quickly talk about our design pillars for the Echo Pass and all the changes we have made.
1) Reinforce Player Expression Across the Game
- This is a core pillar that we’ve really wanted to tackle over the last few years. Player expression is important to help players feel unique and allows them to represent themselves however they want, which is especially important in the VR space. This is a tough goal, since we’ve been locked into the Orange vs Blue paradigm for years. We are taking a big swing with these changes and wanted to make sure that everyone knows we’ll continue working on this not only for the initial launch, but with continued iterations throughout the year.
2) Create a customization system that provides more options for players with improved longevity
- Another tough pillar that we wanted to reach was to provide a new set of options that, in time, will have a drastically higher value than players previously had for customizations. While we know some users loved having their pink pants and yellow helmet, it conflicted with a lot of other versions of customization we wanted to accomplish. While it may feel “thin” right now, these new methods of customization have a much stronger lifespan compared to our old systems. We will continue to build on this content with the Echo Pass and other new systems that we have in the works.
It is an exciting time for Echo VR and we can’t wait for everyone to see what else we’ve got coming up for the rest of the year. I’ll go ahead and hand this off to two of our designers who have been tackling feedback from the PTS
RAD_Chimera:
Hello Echo Units! RAD_Chimera and RAD_Monstah reporting in. As Tyrana mentioned, we’ve taken in all your feedback from the PTS, and have been working hard on readability improvements in the Echo VR. Let’s get right to it.
Shader Adjustments
RAD_Monstah:
As many of you have likely noticed, the changes to customization have had consequences, both good and bad. On the more positive side of things, we feel that customization is in a very strong spot. Yes, we’ve lost a bit of the nuance but, to echo Tyrana’s sentiment, we do feel that we have put the system in a better position, allowing for what we feel to be a more streamlined experience, and ensuring that we can provide a more consistent cadence for future offerings. As to the negatives, well, yes — with us making a bigger push for individual expression, we did lose a bit in terms of team identity. This is where the shaders came into play.
Since the last round of PTS changes, however, we have spent a great deal of time tweaking the system, in hopes of better maintaining that middle ground between being able to show off your hard-earned cosmetics, and being able to tell who is actually on your team. With that being said, we are intending to move forward with the following:
- Rift/Rift S — We will be utilizing an outline system, rather than shaders, as we feel that it is the more optimal solution for the problem described above. With outlines, we will be able to provide distinct visuals for team identity, without obscuring individual characters. As with the shaders, expect that we will continue to iterate on this system, as necessary, per feedback from the community.
- Quest/Quest 2 — When we launch Echo Pass, we are intending to utilize an improved version of our current shader system that we feel does a much better job at accomplishing the goals that had been set out. It is also worth noting that, for Quest 2, we will be working to move the outline system over as a replacement for shaders, so expect that as a post-launch update.
Arena Nametags
RAD_Chimera:
This update also brings with it a change to player nametags in Arena matches. While our previous nametags were streamlined to reduce visual clutter, they weren’t very helpful when it came using them for team identification. With this update, we’ve switched up the shape and hue of the marker to improve visibility and make tags reinforce player teams more clearly. These adjusted markers should make it much easier to tell your teammates apart from your opponents at any range during a match.
Chassis Adjustments
RAD_Monstah:
With all this work being done to help with general readability, we’ve also been keeping an eye on some of the more specific edge cases that have been called out and, as such, have worked in some improvements to the Meteor Rex chassis. While the issues did prove to be a bit more prominent on the Quest, we still took this opportunity to update both versions, and you will find that the colors have been shifted in a way that we feel better suits the environment, and clashes a bit less with some of our other indicators. Simply put, colors should feel a bit less saturated, and should hopefully read a lot better during matches.
Alongside these changes, we were also able to work in some adjustments to the emissives that are currently being utilized for the Meteor Rex. For the most part, we simply sought to break up some of “tougher to read’’ areas on the chassis — namely the chest and arms. However, our artists were also able to work in a few additional updates that I am genuinely excited about, and hope the rest of you will feel the same way.
Competitive Settings
RAD_Chimera:
Finally, in addition to all of our readability improvements, we’re also happy to introduce Competitive Settings for Private Arena Matches. Enabling these settings will put all players into the base S11 chassis, tinted orange or blue according to their team, and disable shaders. So for competitive players who want to really level the playing field, you can set up a private match, enable Competitive Settings, and play using our previous color-coding and chassis to differentiate teams instead of the new shaders.
RAD_Chimera:
And that’s everything! Thanks so much for sticking with us for this writeup. We appreciate all of your feedback in this process, and are working hard to ensure we make the best version of Echo VR for all of our players.
Our next PTS, these changes included, goes live on Tuesday, 2/16/2021 and will run until Thursday 2/18/2021! As always, please submit any feedback you have, and we’ll see you in Echo VR
Known Issues
- Users are not able to see any of the equipped customization options of users who are already present when entering the Lobby.
- Shaders and outlines persist after activating them and leaving a private Arena match.
- Sometimes, the Badge/tag of some users remains visible while playing through an Arena match.
- Some users lose collision of the entire chassis except the boosters.
- The application may crash during transitions.
- Occasionally, equipped Bracers do not appear on the Chassis when spawning in the Staging Area of the Lobby.
- Players’ Chassis do not display outlines in Combat.
