Gray Zone Warfare dev rolls back patch and admits 'we didn't trust our community when they reported performance issues'
Gray Zone Warfare has rolled back its latest hotfix in response to players who said it was tanking their performance. Hotfix 5.2, originally deployed yesterday, was meant to address a handful of quest bugs and improve rubberbanding. Soon after its release, players started sharing clips of heavy slowdown and crashes they weren't getting before.
Madfinger Games was quick to pull back the patch and restore our precious framerates, but according to CEO Marek Rabas, the issue could've been solved sooner if they'd listened to players.
"We messed up mostly because we didn't trust our community when they reported performance issues," Rabas wrote on Twitter. "We couldn't reproduce it on our end, and after checking every commit, we were sure none of the fixes could affect client performance. This was a big mistake; it turned out to be a wrong merge, and unwanted changes were propagated to the hotfix branch. We have multiple branches, not only for the game but also for Unreal Engine, etc."
It's unclear if Rabas is saying players reported issues with a test build before the hotfix went live to everybody, or if they simply should've reacted quicker to the hotfix as it released yesterday, but either way, Madfinger will be taking reports of performance drops more seriously from now on. As it should—the open-world extraction shooter is not particularly performant in ideal circumstances. Its choppy framerate on even decent hardware was one of our chief complaints with last month's early access release.
This is how it plays after Hotfix 5.2 pic.twitter.com/RexDwkaWJlJune 4, 2024
"So, lesson learned the hard way" Rabas continued. "We will always trust our community from now on and improve our pipelines to limit these problems. Please excuse us; we will do better next time."
Those bugs will certainly be re-fixed before the release of Gray Zone's big "Patch 2," which Madfinger said is "just around the corner" in a recent blog post celebrating 900,000 copies sold.
"This success ensures our long-term commitment to Gray Zone Warfare, ensuring the game will continue to improve and evolve over time. We are excited to bring you new content, enhancements, and experiences as we journey forward together," the post reads.