Just like Cyberpunk 2077 in 2018 reminded players of its own existence after some time of silence with a cryptic tweet, BattleBit shows it's not yet dead with a new teaser from the team!

A New Hope

The screen goes dark, and yellow text starts scrolling from bottom to the top. A title appears - Episode II - Operation Overhaul

It is a period of quietness. Oki and company went silent months ago; it's been over a year and a half since the last update. Servers are mostly empty. Only on a few battlefields are soldiers still fighting, losing hope. But in this dark hour, one individual can spark its light once again when he pushes the button labelled "Publish".

That wouldn't be a bad intro, huh?

On 15th of June, the official BattleBit YouTube channel published a new video, titled "BattleBit - Operation Overhaul: Teaser". The teaser flashes dynamic in-game visuals that hint at refreshed gameplay elements and updated mechanics. Rather than offering concrete details, it employs rapid cuts and entertaining visuals to build anticipation and curiosity for what the update might bring. Although it is only 16 seconds long, it is still a sign that the project still lives and some work is being done, hidden from our eyes. Let's take a closer look at what can be seen in it.

Breakdown

In the next few paragraphs, I will go through a bunch of changes I was able to spot on different frames of the teaser. If you have spotted something that I have missed, feel encouraged to share it in the comments section! The first thing I spotted when I stopped the video was the refreshed UI. Seems like there is a new font being used, which, in my opinion, looks better than the current one. I find it more suiting to the game, looking less generic. New icons can be seen, e.g. the ones resembling the weapons magazines, which now actually look like ones. Icons symbolising keyboard keys lost their fill and became more transparent.

Explosions are looking better, layered, more detailed and colourful than before. That is definitely a change for the better, of course, if they are optimised as well as before. On the second screenshot, we can also see a refreshed capture icon, now telling how many players of both sides are in the contested area. That is quite an important change, as before we couldn't tell exactly how many soldiers were fighting for the objective and could rely only on visuals. Player names over their head also got a new look. Arrow was changed by a small dot, and the label itself got this blurry light around it, which looks more like from Battlefield 3.

In the next frame, we can see the player shooting down the enemy soldier using his rifle scope. Kill info previously had a blurred frame around, but now it is more visible, causing the text to be more readable. It may be only my imagination, but I think the trees may also be more detailed now.

Here we can see a perspective of the helicopter's pilot. It seems like the compass lost its labels, and it wasn't present on the previous screenshots at all. There is also a representation of the heli, showing seats, and it is even animated when shooting. We can also take a look at the refreshed score section. I wonder what this green-whiteish square is in the 2/3 of the screen.

Next, we see some shooting scenes. We can see the player rushing through the doors, bullets flying everywhere. Graphics seem to look better in general, skyboxes are gorgeous, and sounds could also have been adjusted. In the screenshot above, we can see the perspective of a driver. Here, the image representing the vehicle is also seen, and it is rotating as it moves.

In the last screenshot, we can see a player dragging his fellow companion. A small icon of a hand can be seen on the latter.

To be honest, it all looks very good and promising! I only hope that SOON we will get a more detailed look at the update. Still, it is quite some we could get from a 16-second material! Personally, I hope for some quality-of-life improvements, like we could finally set the equipment outside of the match.

The gameplay was already quite good, and the things above all together with the reworked maps may bring a really good update and with it a lot of fun! I am hyped and since the teaser dropped, I think more and more of coming back to the game (and probably I would do so, if it weren't for those meddling kids!) and my friend already did. And speaking of the players...

How did the community respond to the teaser's publication?

Now, one week after the publication video was watched by over 130 thousand people, while the channel is subscribed to by only 13 thousand. It got over 6 thousand thumbs up while only around 320 thumbs down, so the ratio doesn't seem bad. Comments vary from people actually surprised to see any form of update after so long, as many of them have already given up on the game, to those that are full of hope to once again play the game they liked so much with servers full of people. There is also some mocking (like "for each month of waiting, we get 1 second of the teaser"). Surely, people have the right to feel a bit disappointed and angry, and it also doesn't help that there is still no particular date given for the update to be released. Yet, we all should remain respectful towards the developers (as well as to each other, of course), as we don't have the full picture and don't know the reasons for such a long delay.

Similar reactions can be seen on the game's official Discord server, although there is also the positive, that a bit more people became active and there are more messages than in the last weeks.

It seems also that the teaser caused a small positive effect on the player count. Before the publication, around 750 Steam users were playing the game daily in the peak moments, with a single days spiking to 800-1000. After the teaser was published, we can see that player count gained a bit, with around 900 players daily, peaking at over 1100 on Sunday, June 22nd.

What's next?

As mentioned before, we didn't get anything else than "Soon™" in the teaser's description, so we, the players, can only keep waiting, playing and keeping our fingers crossed, hoping for the best. BattleBit Remastered still have enormous potential. Suppose the developers can manage to release the update in a reasonable time, fix the communication with its community and what I think is most important, establish some stable and cyclical update release schedule. In that case, the game can thrive again.

Regaining the trust of its player base may be difficult, but examples of No Man's Sky or Cyberpunk 2077 show it's not an impossible task. Let's wait a bit more, and maybe we will see another beautiful story.