Hello everyone,
In last week's Dev Brief #221, we focused on some of the main topics and issues that emerged following Update 21.
This time around, we wanted to take a look at several longer-standing issues that continue to be raised by the community.
Some of these have been part of Hell Let Loose discussions for a considerable amount of time, and we know that players want greater visibility into whether these issues are known, what the team understands about them and what is being done to improve them.
For this Dev Brief, we’ll be covering:
As with our previous Community Feedback update, some of these are complex issues without a single cause or immediate solution. Where that is the case, we want to be transparent about what we currently know and where investigation is still ongoing.
The development team's focus is currently fully on Update 22 which will be dropping just next month in November, however, as always your reports and feedback are essential to us and our ability to resolve issues in the game, so please keep continuing to provide feedback to us where possible.
First up is the FPS drops issue. We have been continuing to investigate the reports of these severe temporary FPS drops, which became considerably more prominent following Update 21.
Affected players have described periods where performance can fall dramatically for several seconds before returning to normal, with reports coming from both PC and console.
Since our previous Dev Brief, we’ve made progress in investigating this issue. Our QA team has now been able to reproduce the type of temporary performance drop players have been reporting, which gives us an environment where we can capture and analyse performance data.
That said, we have not yet been able to identify the root cause of said issue. The team is currently carrying out targeted performance tests to isolate different potential factors and determine what is contributing to these drops.
This issue remains one of our highest-priority performance investigations, and both QA and programming teams are actively working on it.
We’ll provide another update once we have more concrete information to share.
We know the Level 1 issue has been a particularly frustrating long-standing problem for Hell Let Loose players.
When this occurs, a player can temporarily appear as Level 1 after joining the game, preventing access to previously unlocked loadouts until their progression data correctly reloads.
This is an issue we have investigated previously, including adding additional logging to help us understand when and why it occurs. However, it has proved difficult to consistently reproduce internally.
We initially believed crashes may have been one of the main triggers, but community reports show that the issue can also occur following regular game launches, map changes and between matches. That additional information has been really useful and helped us broaden the scope of the investigation.
We want to reassure players that this remains a high-priority issue for the team, however, it is also a significant complex issue that requires dedicated engineering and QA time rather than a simple individual fix.
We are therefore looking to dedicate more time to investigating and addressing the Level 1 and loadout issue as part of our wider quality-of-life and bug-fixing work going into 2027.
We don’t want to overpromise a solution or date before that work has been completed, but we do want to make clear that the issue is known and has not been forgotten.
Crashes and freezes are another area where there is not one single underlying problem.
Different crashes can occur for different reasons, which means reports that appear similar from a player perspective may require completely different fixes internally.
A significant proportion of the crashes we currently see however, particularly on console, are related to memory usage.
With this in mind, memory optimisation is therefore one of the areas we have been actively working on for our next updates.
For Update 22, optimisation work is underway across maps including Juno Beach and Smolensk, covering both runtime performance and memory usage.
Some of the memory improvements being developed are global changes and should benefit the game across multiple maps, while others will be specific to individual environments.
That does not mean every crash will be resolved by these changes. Other crashes have different causes, and we continue fixing individual stability issues whenever they are identified and reproduced.
If you experience a crash or freeze, please continue reporting it to our Support Team. Information about your platform, map, what was happening immediately beforehand and whether the issue is repeatable can be extremely valuable when investigating individual crash types.
We also want to distinguish the severe FPS drops discussed above from another long-standing performance concern: microstuttering.
While the two issues can sometimes feel similar, they are not necessarily caused by the same underlying factors. The severe FPS drops currently under investigation can last several seconds and have become particularly noticeable since Update 21. Microstuttering, by contrast, refers to much shorter, intermittent hitches that players may experience while moving through the world.
Some of this behaviour is related to the challenges of managing Hell Let Loose’s large, detailed maps within the game’s existing engine architecture.
As players move across the battlefield, the game periodically has to update how the world around them is positioned and processed, and this can result in a brief hitch.
There are ways we can reduce the impact of this through optimisation, including reducing and grouping the number of objects that need to be processed within an environment.
However, this is not an issue that can be fully resolved through a single conventional bug fix, given the complexity of the game’s underlying architecture. This makes ongoing map and performance optimisation particularly important, and it remains an area we will continue to focus on.
We’ve also recently seen reports of stuttering or performance drops specifically when aiming down sights.
The team previously addressed a significant ADS-related performance issue, so we’re interested in understanding whether these newer reports relate to that previous behaviour or represent something different.
If you are experiencing noticeable performance drops specifically when entering ADS, please continue reporting them and provide as much information as possible, including your platform, map and weapon being used.
Hit registration is another long-standing topic that we regularly see raised by the community.
It is also one of the most complex areas to investigate because what appears to be a hit-registration problem can result from several different factors.
These can include:
For example, a player experiencing an unstable connection may see their client represent an action differently from how it is ultimately processed by the server.
Hell Let Loose now displays network warning indicators when connection quality deteriorates, so when reporting hit-registration issues, it is particularly useful to let us know whether any of those indicators were present at the time.
There are also deeper technical limitations associated with the current game architecture that mean there is not one individual “hit registration bug” that can simply be fixed.
What we will continue doing is improving the systems surrounding it.
Our ongoing optimisation work on server, map and general performance will help make communication between client and server more stable and predictable, which will in turn improve the consistency players experience during combat.
We know how important confidence in gunfights is to the Hell Let Loose experience, so this remains an area we will continue monitoring and improving wherever possible.
One of the most useful things that we hope will come from these Community Feedback updates will be the additional detail players provide after we highlight an issue.
For many of the topics above, reproduction steps and specific examples are significantly more useful than simply knowing that an issue exists.
When reporting an issue, please include where possible:
The more information available to QA and development, the easier it is to isolate common factors and investigate.
Thank you to everyone who continues to share feedback and detailed reports with us.
We know there are further long-standing issues that we are currently reviewing internally, including VOIP reliability, visual and audio effects, network desync, Tactical Map behaviour and other UI and gameplay bugs.
We won’t necessarily cover every reported issue in Community Feedback posts. Instead, we want these updates to focus on areas where we can provide meaningful information from the development team, even if they aren’t able to give you a specific timeline for when certain areas will be addressed due to technical limitations.
Just know that we will be continuing to review every piece of your feedback and will share further updates in due course as development progresses.
We want to thank all of you for your continued support, and cannot wait to share more information about Update 22 which will be launching next month in November with the inclusion of Lake Balaton and a brand new vehicle type… and we’ll see you on the battlefield.
Catch some of the latest videos from our HLL Creators:
https://youtu.be/V7vgrxo0LvA?is=ie9_mXpLn7WYZMFO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKqe_BRNmQg