Interview with Blackmill Games, developer of Isonzo
Feature
Discussing the new "Caporetto" expansion and the development process for Isonzo
A more elegant weapon from a more civilized age. That kind of wraps up my main questions, but I just had one or two more on the side. This isn't specifically tied to the update, but I'm just kind of curious: When I was browsing around in the steam discussion forums, looking, you know, just for things that the community was curious about, I saw some players discussing the possibility of a map voting system. Is this something you guys have discussed at any point during the development of Isonzo?
Jos Hoebe:
I think before we did not do that, because our roster was relatively condensed, as a result of how we designed offensives. So the map maps are part of offensives, so playing on the first ones actually influences the outcome of the others. Basically, there are groups. So if you wait on one map and the other flank, then you get more reinforcements as an attacker in the final sector. So we have to we have three of those three, you cannot break those up easily.
So now that we add more offensives, it basically becomes something that's up for discussion again, because otherwise, you would have to go through the entire criminological cycle of all the maps, which is why we now have seven maps. And they take about 30-40 minutes each. So you can imagine that that will add up over time. It's definitely something we're considering, that after at least three offensives, players might be able to vote for the next offensive, or restart a defensive, or something like that.
Dan L:
That sounds awesome. That sounds like a good compromise. Just one last question: When I was playing, you know, with various friends and all that, I noticed that, when the player is joining a match, custom or otherwise, with a friend, the system tends to arbitrarily split players up onto different teams, even if you're kind of in a pre-queued lobby and there's enough room on your team. Are there any plans to make playing with friends or other pre-formed groups a little easier when jumping into a game?
Thomas Jager:
Yeah, it's a bit of a tough one. We actually do have a bias to placing players in the same team not only in the same team but also in the same squad I believe definitely on the same team. But there's also auto-balancing, and balancing in general, to keep into account, and I think if you have the choice of like 30 servers, that are you know, 60% full, as opposed to 90% full, and you join one of those, you can pick one that has that happens to have three slots on the same team available.
I think I think it's an interesting challenge, one we have worked on before in development, and have also worked on more recently, but there are a lot of moving components, so it’s still something we’re looking at.
Thanks to Jose Hoebe and Thomas Jager for participating in this conversation. Isonzo is available to purchase now on Steam, Epic Games Store, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series S, and Xbox Series S.