Originally Posted by JB44

...cutting out the bullshit...

Originally Posted by JB44

Digital Illusions signs agreement with Trauma Studios

Digital Illusions has begun collaboration with game developer Trauma Studios Inc. During one year Trauma will work on an upcoming product, together with Digital Illusions.

Trauma Studios developed the popular mod to Battlefield 1942, Desert Combat.

"We understood the impact Desert Combat had quite early. This mod kept Battlefield's popularity in place during the last year, as well as helped us sell a considerable amount of games", says Patrick Söderlund, CEO, Digital Illusions. He continues, "We have established a close cooperation with Trauma, and now we have come to an exclusive agreement with them".

Trauma Studios Inc. is a Manhattan based game developer specializing in FPS military style games. Best known for the Desert Combat MOD for Digital Illusions' hit game, Battlefield1942, Trauma started out in 2002 as a grass roots game developer and created the #1 MOD for 2002 and for 2003 (as voted on Gamespy). Trauma Studios' Desert Combat has had over 3 million cumulative downloads and consistently ranks amongst the top 3 games played online.

Originally Posted by [CNI]Ohioan

... (thus the name Trauma Studios instead of FH team guys) ...

Originally Posted by soldier_boy

:furious:

That just about sums it up.

It's really too bad but the waiting was just too long. We, my clanmates as well as all members of 4 other North American clans (representing some 150+ players) have given up on Forgotten Hope altogether. We play seriously and were in discussion to create a Forgotten Hope league with prizes for top team, provide servers as well as creating a small fund for the financial contribution to assure continued development of this modification. I have been chosen to communicate the general feeling of these members. This will be my only post as I, as well as the others, have no intention of returning to FH.

Why give up on FH?

Not only was the FH team's unwillingness to share update information very bad judgement it showed a great lack of commitment. Since the 0.5 version release showed much promise in September of last year, many players were eagerly adopting FH as a standard for BF1942. Most, if not all, were quite willing to wait for a impending release of even greater changes and additions. Unfortunately, the lack of any information for the longest time began an irreversible process. Not all people have the time as many of you here to spend on reading individual posts in these or other forums. The FH team's greatest error was not appraising the general public of quantitative progress yet filled their pages with images of their intention to achieve greater quality in the upcoming release. Although this is very noble these quasi-updates cannot replace any assurances of true development.

Yet again, the latest release of this latest update once again shows the confusing nature of the FH team and seemingly incongruent method of updating its product by confusing the people they wish to attract to their work. Although the update is quite welcome indeed it does no justice to those attempting to keep up with the miriad of updates and patches to an already cumbersome modification. Since most individuals already run version .5e it makes no sense whatsoever to release a .5b --> .5f update where a hotfix would perform just as admirably.

Far from assuming a role of unequivocal criticism, let me make it quite plain to everyone reading this that although FH is a great mod, the development methodology is insufficient, ill-organized and quite a disappointment to those seeking to support it. In our case, we were ready to provide significant support, however, in our view the FH team were unable to convincingly provide sufficient evidence of their professionalism.

Best Regards to all.

Mark

Originally Posted by JB44

Well, I'll go ya one step further there, Soldier Boy. We, as a large entity representing a company more interested in the strategic side of gaming than the action side of gaming, commissioned a group of employees to investigate the possibility of officially funding and incorporating Forgotten Hope in to an official retail release. Tentative funding was set aside for this possibility for a Christmas release in 2004. Initial talks were initiated with Patrick at DICE and he seemed receptive to the concept of broadening the demographic appeal of the Battlefield engine beyond "Quake-Doom-UT" type of play in to authenticity and the "wargaming" community. They found it very interesting.

After a two month period where various members posted here and examined the community, examined the professional progress of the project and sized up the mod as a possible retail product, the group reported back with a very negative synopsis. The kicker really came when Merciless left. That's what did in our push to fund this project and bring it to store shelves. We felt the synergistic effect between the two would be significant.

Therefore, we concluded that, with the Merciless defection and the complete disregard for customer service in the way of incremental updates, that this mod was, in fact, "Dead". In the port-partum discussion of where Forgotten Hope went so very wrong, we all agreed that there would need to be a major shift in the leadership of the mod as there must be some form of personality conflict that is causing the disarray and ultimate demise. The refusal of the team to continue to release incremental updates to bring the modification up to a "somewhere near" look of a completed project led us to believe that the people we would potentially fund and market would be too headstrong to work with a basic misunderstanding of the marketplace they compete in.
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