We had our convention this past weekend which gave us the chance to speak with players in person and talk about the future of AH. We’ve been thinking about how we were going to move forward and came to some conclusions that we decided to announce at the convention.
The main news is that we have decided to put Combat Tour on an indefinite hold. The reason for this is that we have decided that it is better to steer our development in a way that allows us to implement our CT developments first as part of the regular game.
The way we’ve been going has been like trying to fight a two front war with only one army. It’s stretched us too thin and has hurt our overall level of productivity. It also has handcuffed us in a lot of our development decisions by forcing us to indefinitely postpone a lot of other things.
Our biggest obstacle with CT is in breathing life into it to make it fun and immersive. While a basic structure is there, there’s a ton of detail work to be done to reach that end goal. Without it, it just has too much of a cardboard cutout feel that’s not going to engage players and hold their attention for long.
What this all means for now is that we are going to focus on core game development. We’re going to pull the CT AI mission system and redevelop it for use by CM’s in scenarios and special events. We’re working on new terrain upgrades in both the technology and the art used. We want to implement a character animation system. We want to bring back the old 8 player H2H but expand it both in the number of players and with additional gameplay capabilities. There’s a lot of systems in the game engine that are dated and in need of overhaul.
In hindsight, this is how we should have approached it from the start. This will keep us heading in the right direction while getting improvements out to our current players and speeding up our development. It’s really a chance to reboot our process to get back to our old development cycle that saw things moving at a faster pace.
