Re: On track?
I am a wargamer.
I too believe in game-play over graphics.
But with recent technology we should not need to choose one over the other.
If graphics were not important we would still have monitors with a black background and green text.
The point about graphics (and sounds) is immersion.
Immersion is the most important thing about a wargame. If you can be immersed in a game you can be hooked and then we get a good game.
But the game is now 3 years over due. The graphics are circa 1996. They are obsolete. This means that only die-hard fans will buy it. There will not be a sequel.
Wargaming is a small hobby. My view is that to increase sales there needs to be an option to use whiz-bang graphics. This will attract the “maybe” wargamers and increase sales. And we might turn them into proper wargamers.
The one genre missing in wargaming, is where you have one squad and you control each man in that squad throughout a campaign. I played 2 board games- Patrol and Ambush. Patrol in particular was a good game and I hoped that 82nd Airborne would be the PC replacement.
I no longer like hexes. 101st Airborne had one innovation – points. There is a grid and men move from one point to another. This is much superior to hexes.
The other feature it needs is for players to play H2H in continous time or by PBEM in a turn based game.
As for Paul’s comment, it is clear that Shrapnel have put the game on hold to sell more profitable games – unfortunately its not a case of “taking the time to get the balance right”.
As for Tim’s comment, it seems there is still a lot of work to do. To complete it all in a month and get it released a month later – perhaps the November birthday is realistic.
I however will await the demo and then wait for the first patch of the game before putting any money up.
[ June 10, 2003, 02:39: Message edited by: Joe 98 ]
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