Over the last few weeks, we’ve been using these Community Updates to take some of the most commonly reported issues and requests from across the Hell Let Loose: Vietnam community directly to the development team.
Since our last update, Patch 1.4 has gone live, bringing another 200+ fixes and improvements across the game. This includes progress on several of the issues we’ve previously discussed, including persistent Recon and Flare markers and distorted Proximity Chat.
Alongside those fixes, we’re continuing to investigate reports around stability, audio, spawning and player inputs, whilst also keeping track of the features and improvements you want to see in the future.
As always, please continue sharing your reports and feedback. The information you provide, particularly reproduction steps and details about your platform and hardware, continues to help the team investigate problems and identify fixes more effectively.
Stability continues to be one of our key areas of focus.
Patch 1.4 includes a targeted fix for one specific crash associated with large amounts of blood and decal effects. During internal testing, addressing this issue resulted in a considerable reduction in the crashes associated with that particular cause. This issue was not specific to AMD hardware, meaning players across different hardware configurations should benefit from the fix.
There are still other causes of crashes that we are actively investigating, and further stability work remains ongoing.
Status: Further Stability Improvements Ongoing
We have two separate audio topics to update you on this week.
Firstly, we have some positive news regarding the distorted or robotic voices that players have been experiencing in Proximity Chat.
Working alongside Epic Games, we’ve implemented a fix in Patch 1.4 for the main issue that could cause another player’s voice to remain distorted or robotic for an extended period of time.
There are still a small number of edge cases where a brief echo or stutter can occur, particularly when another player is speaking at the same time as an interruption such as opening a menu or leaving the game. These instances are separate from the main Proximity Chat issue and will continue to be worked on.
We’ll continue monitoring VOIP following Patch 1.4, so please let us know if you continue experiencing prolonged distorted or robotic voices.
Status: Main Proximity Chat Issue Fixed in Patch 1.4
Separately, since Patch 1.3 we’ve received some reports relating to wider game audio issues, particularly from PC players. These reports include gunfire and explosions sounding muffled or echoey.
The team is actively investigating this issue, and several developers have also been able to reproduce the problem internally, which is helping us identify the underlying cause.
If you are experiencing this issue, please continue reporting it and include information about your platform, audio device and audio configuration wherever possible. Plus, we have seen reports that forcing the game into stereo has resolved some players issues so do let us know if this fix works for you too.
Status: Under Investigation
Persistent enemy markers from Recon Planes and Flares have been one of the most frequently reported issues since launch.
We introduced several improvements in Patch 1.3 while continuing to investigate reports of markers remaining on the Tactical Map after the Recon Plane or Flare effect had expired. Since then, we believe we have identified the underlying cause behind the main issue and have implemented a targeted fix as part of Patch 1.4.
Based on our investigation into how the issue was occurring, we believe that this should address the persistent markers players have been reporting. However, as always, we’ll continue monitoring reports following the update to make sure the fix is behaving as expected.
If you continue experiencing Recon or Flare markers remaining on your Tactical Map following Patch 1.4, please let us know.
Status: Fix Included in Patch 1.4, Monitoring Reports
We have also been tracking a collection of reports relating to spawning and deployment. These include Garrisons and Outposts occasionally not appearing as available spawn options, instances where players are unable to spawn, and reports of Commander abilities becoming unavailable during a match.
These reports have been flagged with our QA team and an older issue displaying some similar behaviour has been reopened as part of the investigation.
This is an area where additional community reports can be particularly useful. If you experience spawning or deployment becoming unavailable during a match, please provide as much information as possible about the game mode, map, faction, role and what happened immediately before the issue occurred.
Status: Under Investigation
We’ve continued to review reports around keyboard, mouse and keybinding behaviour, and there are two separate areas we want to clarify.
We are aware of an issue affecting some players where keyboard input can stop responding while mouse input continues to work.
Our investigation has identified this as an issue related to the Epic Online Services overlay. Epic Games are working on an update to the underlying EOS SDK to address the problem.
In the meantime, affected players can press Shift + F3 to open and close the Epic overlay, which should restore keyboard input.
Status: Awaiting Epic Online Services Update
Patch 1.4 also contains another significant round of fixes relating to keyboard and mouse bindings. This includes improvements to remapping mouse inputs and several remaining cases where keybindings could behave incorrectly or fail to persist as expected.
While we’ll continue monitoring reports following the update, we expect Patch 1.4 to put keybinding functionality in a significantly better position, with a small number of additional fixes already being worked on for future updates.
Status: Multiple Fixes Included in Patch 1.4
Alongside the issues above, there are several other areas we’re continuing to monitor based on your reports.
Some players have reported a short freeze or frame skip the first time certain weapons, effects or assets are encountered following an update.
This behaviour can be related to shader and PSO caching. The game performs shader compilation in the background during startup, but changes to individual assets or effects can occasionally require additional PSO data to be regenerated.
This is an ongoing process as content changes between updates, and the team will continue working to minimise instances where required shaders or effects are missed during caching.
We continue to see requests relating to Helicopter controls, including inversion settings, separation between Pilot and Door Gunner controls, mouse handling and broader control customisation.
Patch 1.4 contains some changes to Helicopter control behaviour including adding of inversion settings, but there are still remaining areas being reviewed for future updates.
If you are experiencing a specific Helicopter control issue, please continue providing details about your input device, control scheme and the exact behaviour you would like to see changed.
We have also seen occasional reports from players who are only able to see a very limited number of servers.
Whilst we will continue monitoring these reports, your Crossplay settings and active Server Browser filters can have a significant impact on which servers are displayed. For example, disabling Crossplay does not create a general ‘console-only’ pool. On PlayStation, disabling Crossplay means you will only see PlayStation servers, while the same applies to other individual platforms.
If you believe servers are missing from your browser, we recommend checking your Crossplay setting and active filters first.
Patch 1.4 represents another step forward, particularly for some of the issues we’ve been tracking previously through these Community Updates.
The main robotic Proximity Chat issue has now been addressed, we believe we have resolved the underlying cause behind persistent Recon and Flare markers, and another significant round of keybinding and gameplay fixes are now live.
At the same time, work continues on stability, the reported audio issues, spawn and deployment problems, and other community reports.
Thank you again to everyone continuing to report issues, share feedback and tell us what you want to see from Hell Let Loose: Vietnam. We’ll continue taking those discussions directly to the development team and will be back with another Community Update soon.