ORIGINAL: mattj78
ORIGINAL: Skacee
Hello,
my 2 cents. I wish to have WITP 2 as well. I will gladly even pay for it more then for Witp AE, no problem, or i will work on it within community. But this money mentality...
I think WITP is more work of enthusiats for enthusiats then anything else and money affairs should be considered as a secondary.
Without deep interest in the topic of Pacific war anybody wont work on that or play such a demanding game. Imagine to paint all those planes or ships alone. I think all in the team worked for free or just "a little donation" from Matrix for the game sales.
Best thing what could happen is Matrix or whoever owns the rights will pass those rights to a new solid, trustworthy group, community, which will update this project. Othervise many things must be done from scratch... Matrix do you hear me?
What fantastic post i agree id be happy to back it with some money like others have mentioned maybe not a complete new game but update the current version
Funding a patch or update is also a topic that was discussed previously within this forum, the last I can remember and have participated myself in was this one:
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=4957191
To sum up the most important points:
- the last serious consideration of an update from some of the devs themselves had a cost estimate of 30k$ and these were at mate rates and not industry standard rates.
- the current engine is very much at it's limits, it is not possible to add a lot of new features into it, so a large update would require to rewrite the engine. This is a process that takes a lot of time as even minor changes can lead to serious bugs and thus need to be tested extensively.
And given the amount of new features it may be even necessary to rewrite the whole engine, at this point the amount of work that needs to be put into it is similar to making a new game. Keep in mind that the cost estimate above was given for a single update only, for this you will likely will need to add several zeros behind it.
- Gary Grigsby himself said that he will never make a game as complex as WITP ever again.
And some of my own takes on the topic:
- This series of Games, that currently ends with WITPAE, was in development for over 20 years, this concludes two things:
1. The market is already saturated, people who will buy a WITP2 are mostly people who owned a previous title of the series. It is not very likely that a lot of new players will come to the game at this point, thus making a new title likely not profitable, no matter how you price it.
2. The development of a new title in the series would also likely take several years of development to make a worthy successor or to word it differently: you would need to spent several years of your work life on a project that will never return its investment. I think most professional developers wouldn't be too motivated by this prospect no matter how dedicated they are to the topic.
- Before you guys start to slap me because I talk about money: I honestly don't think that Gary Grigsby is a guy who does what he does mainly because of money. If you want to make money in the game industry, you go mainstream and don't develop niche games. But given that Gary Grigsby is also to some degree a strategist, he will tend to choose the path that is best for him and his company.
- I do not think that a community of hobbyist, who work when they feel like it and are not able to force people to work a specific way to ensure quality efficiently, as they are working for free, will be able to develop a game as complex as WITPAE in any reasonable time frame or comparable quality. (no offense)
- Giving the engine to the community to develop a patch themself is the same as giving the licence away for free, this is very unrealistic to happen. Also there is a reason why the code is not public as to prevent a gamey approach to the game. The goal of the game is to feel like you are a historic commanders at the time when making your decisions and not making decisions because the game works that way. So by trying to improve the game, you would run at the risk of ruining it for many.
Given all this I would also like to suggest the following to all of the guys here who want an update:
If you guys seriously want to see an update for the game and think you can get together the above mentioned sum, I think the best way to approach this is to come up with a concrete list of things you want to see changed, while keeping in mind the above point that the engine is at it's limits as is. So suggesting too many new features or improvements will likely make cost rise exponentially as the engine itself would need to be rewritten. After you have this list of concrete changes you want to have, you can try and officially approach matrix with them and suggest a crowdfunding campaign to finance it. Having this crowdfunding campaign going before you approach matrix with a reasonable starting sum will also likely make them to take you more seriously.
Even though there currently seems to be forming a cliff between some of the veteran players and new players in this thread, you will also likely need the support of the veteran players for this as they have much more experience with the game and long time players tend to have more credibility with publishers and developers. Also the more people you have for crowdfunding the better.
And it would be a huge help if you manage to get the support of someone who has knowledge about the engine, so that person can give you a feasibility check beforehand.
With this kind of approach you would have a somewhat realistic chance that you will see an update to this game at this point in time.
After all that said, you will need to do this as professional and organized as possible. You are not the first ones who try this, if you do it halfassed it will only lead to veteran players telling you to drop it and matrix largely ignoring you, as this is all something they have seen many times before over the years.
; Julia Child
