I finally got a chance to take a chill day and so wanted to reflect a little on launch and all the cool stuff that happened around it

Things have still been steaming ahead at full power with us working on the first Health patch, meetings and all the other stuff that comes with having a live global multiplayer game out in the world.

Launching a multiplayer game to a global audience has so many ways it could go wrong and we were prepared to fight a lot of fires. However, it went a lot better than we were expecting; no major crashes or problems and the game held together well!

It was definitely stressful but from a tech point of view, it went so smoothly, ha. We had really ramped up the intensity of the games development and testing over the prior 8 months. There is no doubt in my mind that the Alpha playtest, Beta playtest and technical testing were essential to the success of the launch. Having a large number of players play the game prior to launch unearthed some bad problems in a more controlled environment, which we were then able to fix-up for launch.

We only had to do one small hotfix the day after launch to fix a single bad problem that QA had found. We took this as a chance to test our pipeline for rolling out an update. Which again went too smoothly ha. We rolled out an update with no noticeable interruption to players playing the game (we didn’t have to take the game down during the update).

No rest though, the day after we did the hotfix we flew over to America for Twitchcon San Deigo. My first time in America we did an 11-hour flight and helped setup the booth.

We had a bit of a rough few days of not sleeping while we were there dealing with hackers who were causing problems trying to disrupt the game (During the same time period Overwatch got DDossed and taken down by hackers whereas we managed to stay up!). But we managed to get things under control and then were able to enjoy the event a lot more.

Loads of people came to the Team 17 booth to see/play Marauders and I had a lot of fun chatting with everyone. When people found out I was the British voice in the game, I got asked to do the “Fuck you” voice line a lot, which made me laugh.

We also had some great streamers, who were a great laugh to hang out with streaming live from our booth, you should go check them out:

SterDekie - https://www.twitch.tv/sterdekie
AquaFPS - https://www.twitch.tv/aquafps
Hexloom - https://www.twitch.tv/hexloom
OmidLive - https://www.twitch.tv/omidlive

Also shout out to:

Lettucesux - https://www.twitch.tv/lettucesux
PapaPoob - https://www.twitch.tv/papapoob
ExfilCamper - https://www.twitch.tv/exfilcamper

We also set AquaFPS up with some British snacks to do one of his food review videos. General Sam jumped in as well and it was a very fun time! Check it out:

While we were out there it was Cameron’s birthday and we managed to take a bit of time outside of Twitchcon to get some food and go see the USS Midway Aircraft Carrier Museum, which was super cool and great reference for Marauders.