Battlefront a mis en ligne quelques captures d’écrans illustrant le futur module en cours d’élaboration pour Red Thunder. Module qui n’a pas encore de nom et suivra le parcours de l’armée Rouge depuis la Pologne jusqu’à Berlin.
Pour plus d’informations sur ce module, pour lequel aucune date de sortie n’est connue, voyez le communiqué suivant et le site officiel de la série (site qui va d’ailleurs bientôt être entièrement refait). Au passage sachez aussi qu’une série de patchs pour l’ensemble des jeux dit CM 2 arrivera aussi prochainement, peu après la sortie de CMSF 2, fin juillet si tout va bien.
A lire également notre article Combat Mission – Red Thunder : AAR Tankovye Desant.
Communiqué
CMRT Module 1 Bones
I think it’s the right time to give you Eastern Front nuts something to chew on. So here’s a couple of bones for you!
Although CMSF2 and CMFI Rome to Victory (R2V) development has occupied our time over the last year and a half, we’ve managed to do a few other things at the same time. The one you’re all interested in is the first Module for CMRT. Let me tell you a bit about it.
Module 1 (name TBD) picks up where the Base Game left off in Poland. Follow the Red Army across the border into the Third Reich’s home turf and eventually straight into Berlin. The Module will contain:
– Waffen SS, Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine, and Volkssturm forces as well as the progression of standard Heer formations
– Soviets didn’t change much after Bagration because, well, they didn’t need to! Plus, it would have been very disruptive to do so. However, there’s still a few new things we can give you to play with. The big one is the Lend Lease armed tank forces sporting Valentines and Shermans.
– New Regions that are tailored to the different battlefields fought over in the final months of the war
– Winter terrain, graphics, and weather effects
– New terrain to better portray the area generally, but also its ruined state
– Massive Berlin map
– 2 Campaigns and a bunch of stand alone battles
– Oh, and some crazy late war German stuff that nobody ever cares anything aboutSounds pretty cool, doesn’t it? We think so ;) When will it be available to you? As always we have to be vague about it, however we’re very sure it will be before the end of the year. We’ll know much better after CMFI R2V is out the door, which happens after CMSF2 is in your hands.
Now onto the visual portion of the Bone…
Update on Engine 4 patches
Patches for all five existing CM2 Families are coming right on the heals of the CMSF2 release. This is a lot later than they should be out to you guys, and we are very sorry for it, however we feel realistically that’s the best we can do at this point. That’s the short answer for you.
The longer explanation is the nature of CM2 has thrown us a bit of a curveball that requires us to change the way we patch. In hindsight we should have figured this out months ago, however with our plates as full as they are we didn’t see where this would end up until recently.
Since the very beginning of CM1 we pretty much worked on one game at a time. We’d fix things for the next game, make sure they were working fine, release that game, then patch the previous game. That worked fine up until the five Family Game Engine 4 Upgrade came out and we now had to make sure that fixes worked equally well for five games all at the same time. Given the complexity of CM2 games there’s a lot that goes into making sure we’re not putting out a bad patch and having to go right back into patching again.
The primary problem is with a dozen or two fixes queued up, the chances that a fix might not work correctly, or in fact cause a new problem, for one or more of the five (soon to be six) games is pretty good. Especially when you consider that the Game Engine code is always being worked on, which means we have to make sure brand new code doesn’t mess up things for older releases. That’s a lot of work for our testers.
The solution we came up with is to cut down on the complexity of any one patch. Instead of having dozens of fixes in one patch we’ll keep it down to the bare minimum, release a patch fairly quickly, then let some time go by and patch another modest number of fixes, and repeat as often as needed. It’s too late to adopt this strategy now, so we have to wait until CMSF2 is out the door before going through the patch process.
OK, I can hear some of saying that an alternative solution is to put out « beta patches ». Sorry, no. As soon as gamers are given something that is called « beta » they start thinking they are beta testers and wanting to have their 2 cents of input on everything. Not just stuff we’re trying to fix but stuff that isn’t even broken. This creates entitlement that we can’t possibly live up to, which means we get slammed. In short, we try to do something good and get treated like bad guys. No, that’s not a road we want to go down.
There you have it. The long explanation of how we got to this point and our plans for addressing it in the future.
Steve
