The future of MOW franchise.

[roptor90]

Hello all MOW franchise players and Best Way, DMS developers.

I think the time has come to tell or ask when will be this franchise at level where it should be ?
Since 2006 and Faces of War title which came out that year the highly anticipated changes or features did not occurred. One of those are better AI, current day GFX , optimization and considerable community growth. Even in newest title which is MOW:Assault Squad 2 shows that these particular things only stagnates or grows very negligibly.

For how long further we will get over and over recycled titles under label "Men of War" with no major changes ?
Since Faces of War the newer franchise titles feels only like over-priced DLC`s, charged patches and charged mods.
(Men Of War 2009 was the explanation how should Faces of War look like back in 2006)
More or less exactly like Call of Duty. Loosing amount of playerbase is nothing for CoD branch but what if you have small and limited playerbase like MOW ?
Who will play it then ?

The question is why Best Way and DMS do not work together ?
How about licensing one of the AAA engines today like Unreal engine 3 or 4, Unity or Cryengine and making finally a full fledged title rather doing pathetic "sequels" like recent Red Tide, Vietnam and Condemned Heroes which nobody plays anyway ?

Take a lesson from Tripwire.
"World War II shooter Red Orchestra 2 has done well by developer Tripwire Interactive: within two days of launch, revenue exceeded what its prequel made in five years, and sales have broken all company records"
Why did not they just "updated" the Unreal Engine 2.5 a bit and made new content to it ? Would that make even a sense ? What has Red Orchestra 2 more compared to RO1 gameplay-wise ?

Question for Dmitry Morozov and Chris Kramer.
Morozov what exactly is that MOW PVP version on GEM3 engine ? It will be like Assault squad or some kind of game like that ?
What are the major differences between GEM2, "GEM2.5" and GEM3 ? Any advancements in AI and optimization perhaps ?
We will see Nuclear Union someday ? From videos and screenshots it looks absolutelly like shrunken RTS/TPS version of Stalker/Metro 2033/Fallout...
Instinct did you really withdrew yourself to personal greed and money rather community which supports you and your motto "games are our passion"? It seems so...

For both Morozov and Kramer:
When we will see Best Way and DMS back to action ? When we will see Men of War 2 which should be the real "spiritual successor" of this franchise ?
Call to Arms is not the answer to this thread and either never will be "spiritual successor" what shows even the current funding numbers http://www.digitalmindsoft.eu/products/call-to-arms

Because things must simply go forward with this great franchise.

[roptor90]

If we go a bit off-topic for this time and look back to past everyone who plays WW2 RTS games must know Blitzkrieg franchise by Nival, last game came out in 2007.

Now 7 years later
Blitzkrieg 3 as F2P with SP campaign microtransactions...
It will use licensed Unity engine not their own updated Enigma engine anymore, why ?
Good question, do they have spare money to update and develop own engines and games also ?
What for if there are at least tens of equal ones and perhaps a lot better ?
Every developer must know that its long and expensive process which costs large amount of time and money. Sure that engine license cost money also but if you have good and capable developers what Best Way and DMS are and time to developing game-content only the final results can be really remarkable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fZgsyvri-A

[roptor90]

Further observations from this site:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013...-call-to-arms/

Instinct you were asked about it even by Rock, Paper, Shotgun the question was:
"Is it still using the GEM engine? Isn’t that engine getting a bit old now? How much can you actually improve on it?"

You answered it there but the toughts about it are:

You have 1 person which is responsible for programming according to credits from MOWAS2.
You have "sixteen times the level of detail" compared to what ?? Soldiers Heroes of WW2 from 2004 ?
The today visual standards are absolutely elsewhere for example most noticable change like paralax/bump mapping was curent 7 years ago.
In other words what you curently do with this obsolete middleware engine is only chasing the competition better said time. The year where you actually stopped at the moment is year 2005-2008... Today is 2014 and the competition stands not on same place of course.

[GrimReaper]

Time could be wasted elsehow, you got few valid points there but as you probably know, everything is only about $$.
AAA engine does not mean everything, you must have developers which does not see everything with eyes similar to $.$ and want to learn.
Not sure about Best Way and their plans but about DMS and Instinct he probably believes that visual fidelity and quality is everything and it will keep "working" for the future.

License of any AAA engine today costs a lot from budget, the updates to GEM2 are just few grain drops compared to that. Do you really think that DMS or Best Way will license it ? Don`t be naive please.
Best Way have their own GEM3.
GEM3 seems to be a bit more advanced compared to GEM2.5 but in overal they are both obsolete.

In conclusion your thread is only desperate try to change the reality in right meaning, sad but true...

[roptor90]

AFAIK Unreal Engine 4 and Cryengine have "Engine-as-a-Service" (EaaS) program. I think minimal subscription period is half-year or one year not sure. This contains current build and all the further updates to certain engine.
Its probably the best way how to lose a unnecessary role of (obsolete aka GEM) engine developer and focusing the developement on game content only.

Closer look:
Unreal Engine 4 for $19 per month. In addition to the monthly subscription fee, you also agree to fork over 5 percent of gross revenue resulting from any commercial products you build using UE4.
https://www.unrealengine.com/register

Seems really expensive... But perhaps UE3 could match.

Cryengine monthly subscription fee of 9.90 USD/EUR per user and royalty free.
http://cryengine.com/news/crytek-ann...ervice-program

Both engines can fit perfectly for indie studio with few people (developers).

If Best Way and DMS with help of 1C really licensed one of this engines and co-developed Men Of War 2 ( MOW was perfect ) it will mean new beginning or restart of whole franchise and for 99% it will bring new people surely.

[hunsnotdead]

Im guessing theres simply not enough money to be made here anymore. RTS as a genre had shrunk quite rapidly since the golden age of early 2000s, and В тылу врага like games were always geared towards a niche crowd, so the potential audience is simply too small to support an AAA quality game.

Also 1C Publishing isnt doing well at the moment, they are barely doing any publishing work at all. Last few years saw nothing other than some cheap King Bounty expandalones, some cheap MoWalikes, and constant re-releasing their back catalogue from 2002 to 2009.
I doubt they even have the financial power to fund a true AAA game project.

They even stopped backing their Stalkeresque Nuclear Union game(which was to be their first unique IP since forever) developed by Best Way, and afaik that put Best Way in quite a predicament, now they are trying to greenlight Battle of Empires : 1914-1918 that looks like nothing more than a MoW modification, a desperate attempt at recouping from losses 1Cs Nuclear Union brought them.

[roptor90]

Indeed, seems that 1C does not know how to invest money corretly thus unique projects which has even future ( like Men of War franchise ) are severly neglected.
But how they managed to get Unreal Engine 3 with RO2 under their "wings" then ?
As for DMS and Best Way why they keep wasting money for updating dead GEM engines ? Its absolutely pointless even 4A engine is miles away forward compared to GEM3.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4A_Engine

[hunsnotdead]

1C is also a software distributor in the CIS states. Red Orchestra 2 is developed(and outside of Russia published) by Tripwire Interactive.

There are a lot of 3rd party engines they could license, sure, but they are not developing some random casual RTS, the series strong points(like phisics and destructibility) are made possible by some proprietary code that would need to be rewritten from scratch. At that point they might aswell write a brand new one.

They are wasting their money on dead GEM engines because they dont have money for that brand new one. Game engine development takes a lot of resources, its MUCH more cost effective to rewrite some minor parts and keep using the old one.(duh)

[roptor90]

Originally Posted by hunsnotdead

They are wasting their money on dead GEM engines because they dont have money for that brand new one. Game engine development takes a lot of resources, its MUCH more cost effective to rewrite some minor parts and keep using the old one.(duh)

Wait, there is a huge difference between full engine license (not necessary) and mentioned AAA EaaS license (current build plus all updates) and classic commercial SDK license.
Speaking about cost effectiveness the winner is EaaS always...
There is no need to further code writing if you already have it.

For example like this: https://forums.robertsspaceindustrie...ails-on-damage
And as for better optimization which GEM lacks since forever:http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-relea...2014mar19.aspx
And as a bonus http://www.tweaktown.com/news/34866/...its/index.html

I think it can be investition even for the future.

[GrimReaper]

Originally Posted by hunsnotdead

RTS as a genre had shrunk quite rapidly since the golden age of early 2000s, and В тылу врага like games were always geared towards a niche crowd, so the potential audience is simply too small to support an AAA quality game.

Soldiers Heroes of World War 2 was more or less arcade, remember the time when Tiger II could be owned by T-34/85 frontally?
But after SHWW2 things went very awkward, Face of War was like alpha/beta version of Men of War. Assault Squad 1 basically a mod to MOW (with more "realistic" armor penetration system and signs of polish)
Call to Arms will be more arcadish but i am afraid it will not alter the situation about MOW franchise which is more than miserable.

Originally Posted by hunsnotdead

Also 1C Publishing isnt doing well at the moment, they are barely doing any publishing work at all.
I doubt they even have the financial power to fund a true AAA game project.

No surprise, they should stop wasting money on pointless titles and focusing among other mainly on MoW franchise.

This increase in communication sees the on-screen unit count climb from the usual 50-70 units, to around 5,000 units. These 5,000 units aren't just mindless pieces of robots on your screen, but they can be AI- or physics-driven entities.
http://www.tweaktown.com/news/34866/...its/index.html

Seems interesting.