Ricky Liao, Game Design Director for Delta Force, explains the new operator, easter eggs, battle passes, and more!

With a few playtests down, we’re moving at Mach four toward the release of Delta Force, and players are itching for information regarding the game. GamingTrend sat down with Ricky Liao, the Game Design Director for Delta Force. He walked us through the changes that players should expect at release, as well as possible future features.

GT: When is the next time players will be able to play Delta Force?

Ricky: Delta Force is coming to PC on December 4th or 5th depending on where you are. There is no limitation for PC players. You don’t have to wait for access, it will be immediate.

GT: What are some changes or additions players can expect for the launch?

Ricky: We have a lot of new stuff compared to how our game looked during Steam next fest. We will talk about the major new content first.

For new maps in the Warfare mode, there will be five maps by launch, which is three more compared to Steam Next Fest. We will also have eight operators in total by December 5th and there will be one more new operator compared to when the game was available for Steam Next Fest. We have four new maps in the operations mode as well. We also have a lot of new firearms and vehicle customization attachments.

We also made a lot of fixes and quality-of-life improvements that players are requesting. In the warfare mode, we have received a lot of player feedback that the character movement was not fluid enough and the gunplay was not as satisfying as the players were expecting, and we have changed that. We have five new firearms and 49 new attachments as well.

In terms of attachment stats, we made a lot of balancing adjustments. We further tweaked the stats based on the game mode they were used. In the open beta mode, the attachments will have different stats in the Operations mode and the Havoc Warfare mode. The changes of the attachments will be better reflected on the gun.

While you are running and want to cast an ability, now it’s going to be more coherent and make more sense to the players. Players will notice this while they’re trying to aim, crouch, and sprint, the movements are more consistent. Players will also no longer have their shots blocked by teammates.

GT: Can we get some details on future operators?

Ricky: For the new operator Zoya, players will first meet her in an interesting narrative cutscene in the game. Players will learn that she had some interesting past. We will leave the rest for the players to discover because we don’t want to spoil all the stories. When she’s not shooting people or doing science stuff, she’s actually a drummer in a rock band and a noisy type of friend. She is a support operator, and we hope players will like how she works on the field, like how she casts her abilities is really awesome. Players will notice that Zoya is very different in terms of support gameplay.

-As for Zoya’s Abilities- 

Trait Tactical Gear
Swift Healing: reduce healing consumables needed for Operations games and reduce self-heal cooldown in the Warfare mode.

Blinding Gas
Blinding Gas Grenades differ from conventional Smoke Grenades in that they create a cloud of special gas that causes blindness to those who inhale it.

Gadget
Adreno-Boost
Targeting teammates, injecting them with the Adreno-Boost, a neurological compound that enhances neurological reflexes and muscle control to improve overall firearms control.

“Dragonfly” Swarm System
By attacking the transmission of nerve signals, the toxin reduces their health and dizzies enemies, making it harder for them to aim and control recoil.

GT: Given the importance of the calendar from the Tactical Turmoil mode, will there be more easter eggs in the future?

Ricky: You can expect more easter eggs like that because we really love making them. There are a lot of other easter eggs in the game as well. There are some easter eggs that haven’t been discovered by the players yet. In the Operations mode, players will notice there are a lot of hidden chests behind doors with passcodes, which are very hard to find. Some of those doors will actually make beep sounds that are actually Morse code that can be transcribed into the actual password. There are a lot of ways for players to find out these passwords and we look forward to players discovering all of them. One more interesting easter egg in the game is in the map selection for Operations mode, you will notice there is a G.T.I. commander, this commander will always be there providing useful tips of the game. It can unlock a dialogue option or it can give you some really good stuff. Players really love seeing crocodiles in the Operations mode. Around these crocodiles sometimes you’ll find a dog tag, these dog tags belong to our developers. There are a lot of names to be collected around these crocodiles Shadow, Ricky, Percy. Shadow was one of the first victims of these crocodiles and we found that super funny, so we made this easter egg.

GT: Have there been any updates to the internal discussions around if and under what conditions bots are used in the game?

Ricky: Starting from open beta, in both modes there will be no bots for players. For Warfare mode, we also have an all-bot option for players. In this mode, everyone in your squad will be real players, and everyone else will be bots. This is for players to practice vehicle handling and learn the map. Vehicles will spawn much faster in this mode.

GT: Are there plans for additional call-ins?

Ricky: So there will be no new call-in versions for this version. We will introduce four new gears. We also changed the way players gain military rank scores, which is the resource players use to use call-ins. Actions that will actually help your team win the game will give you more score, such as reviving your teammates. For this new version, you need to think about how much good and how much contribution you are bringing to your team. In this new version, if you fire enough guided missiles at the warehouse on Cracked, it will collapse. We are bringing more of this feature to other maps as well.

GT: Any updates to the possibility of a commander mode?

Ricky: We have been thinking about this a lot. The way we look at the position of the commander mode with our game is, in the current Warfare mode players join the game without knowing their faction. In terms of faction-related lore, it’s not there yet. It’s like when you’re playing a board game, where you can give people different faction assignments like a dungeon master. We don’t have anything at this moment to share yet, but we are always listening to players.

GT: Any updates on being able to customize your guns in the middle of a match?

Ricky: We are implementing this in two stages. A part of this function will be available at launch and the rest will be available in a future patch. We realized during Steam Next Fest that it’s not enough that players can change weapons that are stocked in their backpacks before the game, which is not intuitive or convenient. Now you will be able to configure your weapons in the operator selection screen. So, for the open beta version, players will be able to choose their preconfigured weapons without stuffing their inventory. In a later version, we might bring the fully-fledged blacksmithing feature so players can change their weapons during the game. This also applies to vehicles.

GT: Will there be a battle pass? If there is, will it be time-gated or a permanent unlock?

Right, we will have a battle pass in our game and it’s going to be time-gated. For our battle pass, we are offering four options for the players, there’s the free version, and paying players can choose between three options. There will be one for operation players, one for warfare players, and one for both. The reason why we are doing this is that we don’t want players to feel overwhelmed by the battle pass. We want players to have fun and be happy with the battle pass. We also have a weekly cap for your battle pass progression, so you only need to play for two or three days every week, by playing this much you’ll be unlocking all the stuff for the battle pass.

To put it into hours to make it easier to understand, You need to play four to six hours every week to reach that progression cap. We feel there are other games that are super taxing with their battle pass; when we’re playing those games we feel like we’re playing for the battle pass progression, and that’s not really fun and we try to avoid that with our game.

Massive thanks to Ricky Liao for providing answers to our burning questions, and another huge thanks to Lingjin “Joe” Meng for translating. Check out the Delta Force page on the Steam store.

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