The Package Mountain Update

Your eyes are not deceiving you, this is a blimp dropping hundreds of packages into the world. The last few weeks have been really exciting with several large features being implemented for this latest release.

In order to keep you up to date with every tiny detail, we’ve got a changelog at the end of this post – so take a look if just want the detail.

Why Package Mountain?

Following the Payload Studio feedback from the Drive Buy Roadshow, we started working on some of their suggestions. We focused on objective visibility and readability of the task to simplify players first few game sessions.

Introducing the PACKAGE. We started looking into the delivery process again. Among the few issues we identified were the products. It was clear that the gameboy made no sense. It was confusing to players, especially as we’re trying to create a futuristic world about delivering packages.

The gameboy was replaced with the humble box, a highly readable, understandable and logical choice. Full of mystery and excitement, the classic cardboard box represents packages we all receive on a day to day basis so it has become the default delivery item in Drive Buy. Boxes in Drive Buy are called Packages and that’s what players are racing hard to deliver.

Drive Buy is fast paced and every strategic decision you make counts towards taking the lead. Having Packages spawn in rows of four seemed underwhelming when we were asking players to make a huge number of deliveries and it also disadvantaged players who made it to the blimp and had to wait for products to be dropped.

So, Package Mountain was born. The blimp now drops a ginormous amount of packages at the pickup location that forms a mountain. It looks awesome and is really satisfying to use.

All hail package mountain!

Auto Delivery

Having to hold the deliver button is now a thing of the past. Now when you’re close to the delivery zone, packages will automatically be held out and are delivered just like before, when they touch the customers. This means you can focus on driving, lining up your vehicle and sliding round corners to make the perfect delivery without disturbing your flow.

The A button (X on PS4 controllers) is now used as an alternative acceleration button to match Mario Kart. We also added shoulder bumpers to be alternative handbrake and powerup (again, like Mario Kart).

Quick Play or Custom Game

With the increase in the number of players online, we had to rethink how players get into games.

Quick play puts you into the best game available finding an open game in your region or the closest region with active players (so you have the fastest connection).

The behind the scenes smarts to this has taken a lot of development so we are particularly proud of how effective it is. Try it out!

Because Drive Buy is played best with friends we needed to make sure invites worked really well too. Now Steam invites and Discord invites are even easier to access directly from the lobby.

Refinements to Delivery Battle Game Mode

After making big changes to the package pickup and adding Auto Delivery we also made changes to Delivery Battle.

Now players always have a clear objective. Every player has their own Delivery Zones dedicated to them and there’s only ever 1 at a time to save confusion.

To help you decide which customers you are delivering to we’ve put coins above their head and further highlighted their location with alternative coloured bases. To further hit a home run with this there’s a new arrow to help you navigate to your next objective whether it’s a delivery zone or to pick up more packages.

Smashing up the place

With all the manic driving and intense rivalries playing out we wanted to reflect this in the environment as much as possible. In future there will be other environmental changes but this first pass on has made existing damage last longer across the maps. You’ll be seeing a lot of tyre marks and lamp posts flung all over the place. Look up and you’ll also notice autonomous delivery drones flying around.

Powerups Flow & Tweaks

Powerups have all been moved to major intersections on both Kingsland and Canary. The idea behind this is continuing the flow of driving- no more breaking your flow to collect a powerup and they’re now even easier to spot.

The Ice beam has a minor change reducing the frozen time from 5s to 4.5s

Changelog

Major Updates:

Quick play puts you into the best game available
Packages mountain!
Auto-delivery

Others:

Damage lasts longer across the maps
Invite players through Discord, Steam or add bots
Gave vehicles a smaller turning circle
User reporting now on F1 key anywhere in the game
Moved powerup locations to be more accessible on both maps

Tweaks

Reduced frozen time from 5s to 4.5s
Fixed stats on match results screen
Fixed some Valentino skins (edited)

SHOW YOUR SUPPORT

250 new keys have dropped, see you in the game over the weekend! Still not got yours? Make sure you’re on the list at DriveBuyGame.com and we’ll be dropped more keys next week.