Pred Report VII
Greetings Champions!
It’s been a little while since we last sat down for a Pred Report, so join us today in discussing all sorts of hot topics from Ranked Mode to Roadmaps.
Let’s dig in!
Predecessor will be at Gamescom!
Summer is here meaning that one of the biggest games industry events of the year, Gamescom, is also almost here!
Gamescom is the destination for games studios and publishers to showcase themselves, and we’re pleased to share that Predecessor will be one of those games shown off during the event!
We won’t unfortunately have a booth that you can freely visit, but a number of the team will be out and about mingling with investors, press and partners. If you see someone wearing a Predecessor t-shirt be sure to come and say hi!
For anyone unable to fly out to Germany for this event have no fear - you’ll be able to catch up on all the highlights at home! Keep an eye out for some exciting Predecessor reveals during Opening Night Live, streaming globally on August 20th.
We’re halfway through 2024. What’s next?
We’re 6 months into 2024 and a lot has happened in that time. We’ve added two new game modes and six new Heroes. We overhauled nearly every stat in the game when we added a 6th new item slot. We launched on Xbox, transitioned to Open Beta, and began rolling localisation making Predecessor more accessible than ever before.
But there’s still so much of the year still on the horizon and we believe that the best is yet to come for Predecessor.
We’re working on a brand new roadmap that covers the second half of the year, which we look forward to sharing with you all shortly after the next major content update (sometime in August).
Until then however we can exclusively reveal that the long-awaited Undertow Skins are nearly here, set to release next month alongside one of the final remaining legacy Heroes that many of you have been asking for. Keep an eye on our socials for the latest!
Summer Sales
There’s still time to grab a bargain! The Steam Summer Sale continues, with Predecessor game bundles being up to half price on Steam with similar discounts on skins in game too!
It’s the perfect time to top up your platinum reserves and grab any missing skins from your collection!
V19.1 Balance Patch
With work continuing on a number of important Predecessor milestones, we’ve made the decision to move up the V0.19.1 balance update!
Instead of releasing in 3 weeks, we’ll be pushing it live at some point next week, to ensure that our game balance is as tight as it can be for the coming month.
Why? Well the team is incredibly busy working on various milestones and features that need their full attention, and pushing out this update to you all sooner actually helps with their workflow. Plus with Summer finally here this timeline shift affords our team a little more leeway to take some much needed time away from work to spend with their loved ones.
Expect the V0.19.1 Patch Notes shortly before the update drops, including all the balance changes we’ll be releasing before the next major content drop next month.
Thank you for understanding!
Ranked Mode
Ranked Mode has been out now for around 4 weeks now, but in a very limited form.
As you know, we've tackled this game mode with care and deliberate intent. We started with the game mode being open for just 8 hours a week and on just 2 regional servers, which was understandably met with frustration by players eager to jump full-time into a life of Ranked play.
Today we're going to talk through a few of the major questions we've seen from players, explaining our reasoning for some of the decisions we’ve taken so far.
Why no NA West servers?
This is perhaps the simplest question to answer. There's simply significantly more Predecessor players living closer to our servers in NA East (NAE) as opposed to NA West (NAW) - almost 3x as many in fact!
As such running Ranked Mode on NAE benefits more players in the Americas.
As with all things however we’re closely monitoring player activity to ensure that we can be reactive to changes as and when they come up, meaning if it makes sense to explore or change different server locations we will do.
Why such a limited time?
We knew that launching Ranked Mode with just 8 hours of availability was always going to be an unpopular move. That said however it was important that we were conservative with our approach to expanding availability of the new mode.
We've done our homework on this, believe me, and spoken to a bunch of industry experts, veterans who've launched similar game modes in the past and even the good folks who worked on Paragon all those years ago. All conversations, all research and all evidence pointed to huge dangers when splitting the matchmaking queue too much, too quickly.
We understand the frustrations with such a highly anticipated game mode being rolled out so slowly, but our abundance of caution comes solely from our dedication to Predecessor, and making the right decisions for the long term health of the game.
Ultimately we'd rather go a little slower, perhaps causing a few grumbles now, in order to ensure that everyone eventually has a great game that they can freely grumble about later (though we sincerely hope to tackle said grumbling as time goes on).
So now that we've discussed the reasons for going slow, the next question is probably...
What does the data say?
If you've hung out in Discord much or followed some of our team on Twitter (sorry Elon) you'll know that we're taking a data-first approach to rolling out Ranked Mode.
What this means is that we’re carefully monitoring multiple data points to ensure that our rollout is as successful as possible, including matchmaking times, match fairness, the length of average Ranked Mode play sessions, the rate of VP gain and loss, Ranked tier distributions, and Hero balance in the competitive mode. It’s quite the comprehensive review!
But of course we know many of you enjoy a deep dive into the specifics, so let's break some of those crucial data points down a little bit more:
Matchmaking Times and Match Quality
We want to create fair matches with closely-matched groups of players. The trouble is of course is that at some point a queue can become a smidge too long to wait in, so we're evaluating the optimal target queue times for each rank and making constant adjustments to our matchmaking parameters, striving for that perfect balance of quality and speed across all levels of play.
The Rate of VP Gain and Loss
We want Ranked to be a game mode that provides closely matched solo and duo-partied players an opportunity to prove their skill and see how they stack up against the rest of the Predecessor community.
It's important therefore that we ensure our Victory Points system operates in line with those goals, and smoothly guides players towards an accurate assessment of their skills and abilities. We're measuring the rates at which players gain or lose VP and matching that movement against expected skill distributions to ensure players land in ranks according to their capabilities, but still have opportunities to rank up as they practice and improve their gameplay.
Ranked Distributions
Salute to those already on the Ranked grind! The whole team have been thrilled to see so many players really maximizing their time with Ranked, with those at the front of the pack already homing in on that prestigious Diamond range!
We want to provide opportunities for our most dedicated players to put in the work at the top, but it's also important to make sure we don't end up with a sharply split distribution between the most competitive players and those with more limited weekly gaming time. This is important not only for matchmaking queue time and quality, but also to ensure that we have a smooth distribution of players across all ranks.
Hero Balance
Our big overhaul patch, V0.18, certainly shook up the meta, and we're still in the process of bringing a few heroes and items in line with our overall balance goals.
The likes of Grim.EXE, Sparrow, Gideon, and Grux completely dominated pick and ban rates across the first few weeks of Ranked, and we want to make sure we're operating our Ranked mode with a level of balance that offers more opportunities to flex different Heroes, builds, and strategy.
The recently released V0.19 and the upcoming V0.19.1 updates are focused on bringing those outliers under control and opening up the available cast, creating a healthier playing field for competitive play.
With all these different data points to monitor and many more besides, it's an extremely layered process to successfully roll out a high-quality competitive game mode like Ranked, and in order to make it the very best it can be we need to allow ourselves every opportunity to balance each consideration fully.
What does success look like?
Success for Ranked Mode is twofold. Firstly it means providing a polished experience for competitive players, featuring effective progression and the shortest queues possible without comprising the tightest possible skill-based matchmaking. Secondly however success also means mitigating the potential impact of this new mode on standard matchmaking, which is impacted when a significant portion of our players switch game modes to play Ranked leaving longer queues and worse matchmaking for everyone else.
So far we’re pleased to say that aside from the first week or so of free-for-all matchmaking, we’re starting to see that first criteria for success being met. Queues during the hours Ranked Mode is open remain strong, matchmaking is effectively placing players in their skill brackets and we’re seeing some extremely dedicated players kicking butt on the leaderboard.
Similarly this phased rollout is meaning the impact to matchmaking for regular matches and Brawl Mode has also been minimal, with small increases in queue times during Ranked periods but not enough to cause substantial alarm or to change our course of action.
With these two perspectives informing our rollout, we’ve been quick to action regular changes to the availability of the game mode to balance this need to follow the data with the demand we’ve seen from you to increase the hours Ranked Mode is available.
Next Steps
At the time of writing this we’ve just announced Week 4 of Ranked Mode, bringing the total playable days to four times what it was a month ago, meaning players can now enjoy the mode Thursday through Sunday each week.
We’ll continue reviewing our success metrics, examining queue length, matchmaking and player numbers and, if all goes well, continue to expand availability over time.
We hope soon to expand the duration as well as the number of days available, so look out for more posts on our socials each week as we detail what changes we’re able to make.
An Update on PlayStation 4
As you know, Predecessor has been in early access development for over a year and a half, first becoming available on Steam and Epic back in 2022, and welcoming players on PlayStation and Xbox a few months ago.
Omeda Studios, Predecessor, and our thriving community of Champions have gone from strength to strength during this time, and we’re extremely proud of how far we’ve come together.
As we look ahead at the rest of 2024 and beyond — we’re equally excited with what the future holds for Predecessor.
Unfortunately though we’ve also got to share some difficult news.
We’re sunsetting the PlayStation 4 version of the game.
This decision hasn’t been made lightly, but unfortunately Predecessor’s performance on hardware released over a decade ago simply cannot keep up with modern expectations and the power afforded by the current generation consoles and PCs. We see this in our crash reports, and importantly from the substantial volume of support tickets and feedback we get from players experiencing those constant crashes and performance issues.
We’re at a point where we’re unable to push certain technical boundaries of Predecessor due to those performance limitations, holding back development of more demanding features like new dynamic maps, real time lighting and visual effects, and so much more.
Ultimately this problem isn’t one that can be solved like most others. The disparity between the PlayStation 4 version and the PC and current-generation versions will only widen as time goes on.
We will be removing the PlayStation 4 version of the game from the PlayStation Store on July 11th. Anyone who has already downloaded the game before this time will be able to continue playing until we officially close support for the game on PlayStation 4 in January, 2025.
Unfortunately due to factors outside our control we are unable to offer refunds for purchases made on the platform. Fortunately however, PlayStation already supports account sharing, meaning if you migrate to a PlayStation 5 you will find all your Predecessor data ready for you to pick up again. Account linking for additional platforms will follow suit, coming a little later this year.
Community Roundup
Dastard Drongo
MADDKATT is back at it again creating epic new stickers for the Predecessor community. His latest shows a vulnerable Drongo, and we LOVE it. Clearly the poor guy has seen some stuff, and we think he (along with MADDKATT) deserves a cookie.
Dragon’s Fortune Howitzer Skin Concept
If you’ve read a Predecessor Report before you’ll know that Diin126 is no stranger to getting featured. Recently he shared his concept are for an oriental inspired Howitzer skin, sporting ornate dragon fireworks cannons and a gorgeous red red and gold temple design. Stunning!
Grim.exe Abaddon Skin Concept
We see Grim.exe as a bit of a goofy Hero at times, but Peach has shared her vision for a far more sinister rendition, featuring our lovable robot reskinned as a menacing devil with Grim floating nearby offering demonic incantations. This deadly duo would surely cause stir on the battlefield!
That’s it for this time folks!
We hope you enjoyed learning a little more deeply about some of the recent decisions we’ve been making as a company. As always if you have any further questions please leave them over on our Discord or Reddit where we might pick them up for a future Pred Report.
Thanks for reading and have a lovely rest of your day!
- Kari, Lead Community Manager
