With strong player counts and a wealth of content for what is only its open beta launch, tactical FPS Delta Force has had a great start to life. Team Jade’s free-to-play shooter has enjoyed plenty of success, but with anti-cheat concerns dragging down its Steam user score and calls for even more new content, there’s still work to be done. In an interview with PCGamesN, game design director Ricky Liao tells me about how its first few weeks have gone from Team Jade’s perspective, reveals plans to explore solo Operations, and discusses Delta Force’s unsexy but crucial major strength.
Being a free PC game that’s of interest to some huge FPS fandoms like Escape From Tarkov and Battlefield, Delta Force was always going to enjoy a huge spike of players at launch. Most of the time, you will start to see the numbers drop off and settle after a few days, but I’ve been surprised and impressed by how consistent its Steam player stats have been – peak concurrent player counts are floating around 90,000 to 110,000 each day. I ask Liao how these figures, and all other aspects of Delta Force’s launch, compare to Team Jade’s expectations.
“Overall, I think it’s within our expectations, and when it comes to game stability and a few other metrics, it went above our expectations as well,” he says, via a Team Jade translator. “Because we have conducted several other tests before open beta, we were sort of educated on what to expect for this open beta. But yeah, the team’s very happy.”
Delta Force’s stability and general PC performance is something Liao is incredibly proud of – he admits that it’s not a glamorous aspect that developers tend to celebrate, as players have the right to expect strong performance from any new PC game. Nevertheless, he thinks that for a game that’s quite complex and technically in a beta state, it’s an element that makes Delta Force stand out from genre rivals.
“We know a game should look good in the trailers, but what’s more important is a game that looks good on players’ actual devices,” he tells me. “And it should run well, which is something [that’s not] very easy to market, because people won’t be getting hyped because your game is super well optimized. But [Delta Force is] super stable. You don’t have weird bugs like floating tanks or anything. This is the fundamental experience for players that is really important. This is the bread and butter – it doesn’t really get you a Michelin star, but this is something that will keep people coming back.”
As mentioned, it’s not been totally smooth sailing for Delta Force. It’s biggest speedbump has arguably been the complaints surrounding its Anti-Cheat Expert software. The kernel-level anti-cheat has raised privacy concerns, and it irked fans that it would be automatically installed with the game and would remain on your PC after uninstalling Delta Force – that latter issue was recently fixed in a patch. The initial impact on its Steam user score was pretty brutal – in its first 24 hours, Delta Force was sitting at a “mixed” score of 55%, largely due to negative reviews citing its anti-cheat. Team Jade has been pretty relentless in addressing these concerns and the review score has now risen up to 71%, at the time of writing.
Liao says that he understands players’ concerns about ACE and isn’t worried or disappointed by the fact it is largely responsible for a lower Steam score – “no review is a bad review,” he tells me. He also remains firm on his position on ACE and its ability to aggressively sniff out cheats while also being sensitive to player privacy.
“If we don’t run on a kernel level, we don’t really have the ability to detect and counter [cheat software] and this also applies to all sorts of hardware cheating tools. We have been utilizing ACE, which is a trustworthy tool sourced from our own company… We have conducted rigorous measures to ensure the safety and the privacy of users’ data. ACE is being backed and made with some of the most talented members from the anti-cheating community. And we have also invited some of the most respected and established auditing companies to conduct regular audits, to make sure that we are always on the highest level and standard when it comes to data privacy.”
Liao sees the struggles other multiplayer games have had in stamping out cheaters, and made it a core tenet that Team Jade “will not repeat such mistakes” with Delta Force.
Another area that fans have voiced some dissatisfaction with is Delta Force’s UI and UX – occasionally cluttered and sometimes burying information in menus within menus, Liao recognizes it’s an area in need of improvement. He says that Team Jade won’t be “bringing a ton of change with one simple patch” as it could be jarring for players, and instead you’ll see smaller improvements made across a series of patches.
Adding more ways to play Delta Force is also extremely high up Liao’s list of priorities, despite the game offering a decent amount of modes and experiences for a free game that’s still in an early access state. Earlier this week, I shared what Liao told me about Raids, an upcoming PvE-only mode that should be arriving in the near future.
During our chat I also asked about adding a solo mode to Operations, the Escape From Tarkov-style extraction mode. Currently, those wanting to play alone can queue up solo, but may still encounter full squads of enemy players, putting them at a disadvantage. You can always matchmake with random players, but that can be just as frustrating if you don’t match with people of a similar skill level or that are unwilling to communicate. Liao explains how testing earlier this year made Team Jade reluctant about adding a dedicated solo Operations mode, but that he’s willing to give it another shot.
“We actually did some test runs with solo Operations in our previous tests and we quickly found out that this will make the game very different from when you have a team-based queue – it will be so much more hardcore and tense in solo queue. We invited some of the most vocal players who requested this. They were super hyped at the beginning of the solo queue test, but eventually they [said] they would prefer the old time when they could play solo but in a team queue.
“We would like to apply such learning to the global version of the game, and we will be conducting a time-limited solo queue in the future. We’ll see what the reception is from the community, and if people are having more fun we might make this last a little bit longer. Or maybe not, but it all depends on how things will turn out once we make solo queue available.”
Liao unfortunately didn’t give me an estimated time frame for when this trial would start, but for those that have been requesting solo Operations support, this is definitely something to look forward to.
As well as discussing the free-to-play multiplayer experience with me, Liao also talks about the upcoming Black Hawk Down campaign which arrives in January. You can check out what he had to say later this week in a separate piece here on PCGamesN. Until then, check out our guides on the best Delta Force loadouts and all the Delta Force operators to help you out on the battlefield.
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