Steam Early Access Release Date

We at New World Interactive are excited to announce that Insurgency will go live on Steam tomorrow, April 25th at 11am Pacific.

What does this mean exactly? It means that the game is still in Alpha, but it will be released alongside the 15 other early access games currently available on Steam. We will be introducing our game for the first time to the impulse buyer on Steam, which will provide you all with a fresh new pool of gamers to school on the servers.

What is the status of the game? We may not have released an update in 9 days, but that doesn't mean we haven't been hard at work. Here is a list of new things you can expect to see in the update we're including with the release:

• New Battle game mode as the primary game mode for the maps District and Market. This mode is based on the Battle game mode in the mod, essentially a tug-of-war with dynamic front-line combat.
• Numerous map updates: Various map improvements all across the board. Fixed lighting and fog issues in Uprising, Market and Contact. Ministry is now playable again.
• Coop Updates: Modified AI placement and updated nav meshes.
• New sounds for AK, M16, SKS and MP40. Footstep sound tweaks.
• Fixed sway bug that would happen when the player reaches low stamina, making their weapon wig out a bit.
• New Insurgent textures.
• New SKS and AK textures.
• More weapon animation polish.
• Fixed missing sound errors and sound glitching.
• Fixed missing holster texture on Security player models.
• Sync'd player animation speeds to movement speeds better.
• Resolved issue with some of the shooting animations that caused the feet to snap strangely (IK issue).
• Fixed skybox issue where the sun or moon wasn't being emitted through the skybox. You can now enjoy proper solar and lunar blooming.
• Tweaked the HUD composition to be a little bit more minimalist and sleak.
• Tweaked movement speeds for each class.
• Tweaked view bobbing and sway.
• Made the 4x scopes consistent from weapon to weapon.
• Fixed a crash on the scoreboard accessing steamapicontext->SteamFriends() when null.
• Added convar sv_hud_scoreboard_draw_avatars to disable avatars on the scoreboard.

Before going any further I would like to address some of the recent concerns brought up by veteran forum members:

1. Why is there no one playing?

   We have had quite a low number of sales so far, and on top of that being in Alpha we managed to break the game on multiple occasions which we believe contributed to this more than anything else. We saw a noticeable decline in concurrent users (about -70%) when we broke grenades and introduced the nasty C4 server crash that took us way too long to fix. We believe that in this upcoming update the game will be in a very solid place, and that releasing on Steam will help us get more sales, more people on the server, and most importantly more feedback.

2. Why haven't you tried marketing the Early Access on your website more?

   Our strategy has been to keep early access relatively low key for the time being, as we knew we would be experimenting with different things and occasionally breaking the game. With this early access release on Steam we will only push updates that have been tested thoroughly beforehand, so you can expect to see a much higher overall quality of updates. We will also not be committing to weekly updates anymore as we've found them to not work really well for us. Instead of releasing frequent updates, we will instead release meaningful ones. Now that the game is going on Steam and we are raising our standards a bit, we will start marketing the game and get the word out to people.

Features which will be on our store page:

• Experience intense 32 player online action with a focus on teamwork
• Rack up supply points for your team and customize the game's arsenal to your unique play style
• Several multiplayer game types and game modes including the intense online co-op experience "Insurgent Hunt" and a "Realism" mode crafted by the community
• Multiple environments that span several unique settings and play styles
• Three unique player classes that affect movement and gameplay on the battlefield
• Highly immersive audio with 3D VOIP to coordinate with and track other players
• Help the development team prototype new maps and game modes
• Create custom maps and content using the Insurgency SDK
• Playable on both PC and Mac OSX and supports multiplayer cross-compatibility
• Dedicated Server Support for PC and Linux

Multiplayer maps and their respective game modes:

• Siege - Occupy, Firefight, Elimination
• Heights - Occupy, Firefight, Elimination
• Ministry - Occupy, Firefight, Elimination
• Contact - Occupy, Firefight, Elimination
• Uprising - Occupy, Firefight, Elimination
• District - Battle, Occupy, Elimination
• Market - Battle, Occupy, Elimination

The following coop maps will be included:

• Siege
• Contact
• Uprising

This is all for now. We look forward to seeing you all on the servers!