FileFront Forums - Given up on FH!

Quote:

Originally Posted by soldier_boy

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. Mark

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.

As further evidence that DICE was certainly in the market to bring a mod to retail, we received this fax this morning. Trust me, if FH would have just released a few updates or the community here been less brittle, harsh and downright rude .. this would have been Forgotten Hope. We were almost there. ALMOST there:

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.

A missed opportunity. This could have been some nice money for the development team and for us as a company.

Attitude : It's what makes business deals. It's what makes money.

For some unknown reason, the attitude here is unfathomable in its arrogance and complete lack of perception of what is realy going on with this mod.

You were very close. VERY close.

My advice? SCRAP IT. SCRAP THE WHOLE THING. Get the new BF:V engine and convert everything you have to that new engine and release a Forgotten Hope mod with the new BF:V graphical engine. It is logical business sense that after they go to the present with Desert Combat, they are boxed in:

DICE can either go .. futuristic Star Wars, Galactic whatever ..

or

They can revisit the original with an all-new look and feel. YOU can be that next step. SCRAP WHAT YA GOT. This phase is over. Go to the new graphical engine and we'll come look at you again in six months and see where you are.

But for this phase of development, you missed it. It just took too long with no updates. (And you might want to look in to changing leadership for a more aggressive, organized structure. It's fun, and it is a game, but it can be Big Money, as witnessed above. And you don't know how close you were to being the one in that press release.)

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