Plan and go could work if they'd implement some sort of AP mechanism, say your merc has 100points, order him to run for cover then unload a clip then hit space and the action begins, then once the commands are executed the game returns to a halt again. Could be viable Iíd say but still I have my serious doubts about. It is all about making money for the stockholders not for the guys who actually do the coding, so fingers crossed and hope for the best.

Ps:

Shadows of Chernobyl is a very mod friendly game and one of the games I still enjoy playing. However Call of Pripyat was a weak, dumbed and watered down "customer" friendly piece of ....

hey, have any of these "dev" s....d f...s ever played tabletop warhammer? because this game si almost 25 years old now and the comunity is still growing! and there is no realtime involved in it - just pure imagination which by the way is far more important than any 3d graphics engine.

take a look

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/content/article.jsp?categoryId=2200008&aId=6900041a

Please someone again post this for me in their forum.

------------------
Ok bitComposer,

(by the way, I'm letting someone else quote this because I don't accept your policy of forcing me to accept a spam newsletter I don't want. AGAIN a great sign of competence from your public relations section.)

I'll try it more rational this time, but don't expect me to stay calm. If you keep talking like a politician instead of making clear statements, expect to be loved as much as a politician.


Who is 'we'. The entire company? The developers? The marketing guys? The forum moderators? I simply don't believe that NOBODY responsible saw this coming, so either use 'I' or state who you are speaking for.



First of all. You don't have the intention to 'modernize' anything. You are completely changing it. Removing line of sight or fog of war or whatever you wanna call it, isn't a modernization. It's a radical change and completely changes gameplay and make night fights as well as weather effects, not talking about 75% of the game items obsolete.

Turning turn-based into real-time-with-pause is not a modernization. Realtime is decades old, so is realtime with pause. It's been tried in dozens of ways since the early 90s if not earlier. So don't tell us anything about modernizing. Jagged Alliance 2 was already a hit when some of the first biggest RTS games were out.

And about the discussion... sorry for telling you this but... WHAT DISCUSSION? I see a hell of a lot of people hating you for what you anounced and 99% of them totally disagreeing or outright hating the proposed idea. I see the ENTIRE COMMUNITY, not a part of it, but all of it, being totally mad at you and telling you to either immediately drop that idea or kiss their dollars goodbye.

Do you really fool yourselves into thinking there is even the hint of a discussion going on ANYWHERE on the web? We hate it.. all of us. So forget about a discussion. We're happy to help improving the game, we're in NO WAY ready to destroy its principle gameplay.



If you ask people what they want, PROMISE them a remake that will stay true to the original, and then spit them in the face by making the exact opposite, and then ignoring the reactions for several days... Well what did you expect?

If someone kicks me in the nuts I'm not polite with the guy anymore. You, dear bitComposer, NEED US. We don't need you at all.

You want OUR money. The game you propose (impose is actually better as someone already wrote) is not needed or wanted by ANYONE here. So how about you think about your way of treating US first? We don't owe you anything at all before you deliver. NOTHING. You however owe us a great deal. Without our loyalty and constant love put into this game your oh so precious IP would be worth zip.



Oh, so the input was useful but the insults are not wanted... Well let me tell you something:

You GOT the input. Pages of it. A LOT of people put a lot of heart into posting ideas, really trying to help and really believing you are a company who is actually interested in working with the community for a change. Well guess what. You took the input, threw it in the thrashcan and did what you were originally doing anyway. You didn't listen to one word that was spoken here unless it aligned with your original idea.

THAT'S where the insults started. So guess who is responsible for escalating this?



You obviously were ready to listed, but not to accept and think about. You listed and rejected EVERY SINGLE INPUT that has been given here. Even now you don't comment a single one of them. All you did here was telling us to behave and then continue telling us that you'll proceed as planned.

And you honestly expect anyone here to give a fu** about your company after this display of ignorance and arrogance? Who's your puplic relations guy? I think he may be overpayed. Uh gosh, sorry, personal insult again...



Again... who is 'we'? Optimizing, by definition, means taking what is there and polish and fine tune it until it works even better. You are not optimizing the combat system of a hit-game, you're trashing it and build something completely new. That's not optimizing, that's rebuilding.



Tell me... Has ANYONE in your marketing or management EVER taken a look at Monkey Island Special Edition? HAVE THEY? Oh wow the game was so crappy and so badly received they just HAD to redo the second game also. And guess what they changed... THEY KEPT THE CENTRAL GAMEPLAY ELEMENTS, UPDATED GRAPHICS AND SOUND AND LEFT THE GAME AS IT WAS. And guess what.. THAT'S what made it successful.
Oh yeah, they couldn't sell it for 50 bucks a piece... but who in your company is kidding himself enough to actually think you can sell a Jagged Alliance 2 remake for more than what god damn LUCAS ARTS! took for Monkey Island SE??? Who do you think you are?



First of all... turn based made JA2 special. Line of sight and night fights with special weapons and items made JA2 special. The planning stage and the thrill of not knowing made JA2 special. Only then came the quests and the roleplaying aspects (which I 99% expect you to cut down to 'modernize it' too)

Then... Have you planning people every taken a look at what the Civilization designers did to MODERNIZE it? They changed it to hex-field, just the most traditional setup for classical turn based you can even find.

And now that one of the biggest hit titles of all time took a concious decision not to remove turn based but to intensify it (the problems with the game was the AI didn't keep up with the change, not the change itself, and it still sells like crazy)

you are telling us that a contemporary title cannot be turn based? Have you totally lost perspective? Again... WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? Is a small fish like bitComposer now coming along and telling the big players what sells and what doesn't? Are you totally gone mad??



You have just gotten a shi*load of constructive citizism in the form of "This will not work". People have told you what the market is like, what the target audience is like, presented you examples
of failed companies taking your road, of games that didn't work out, of games that took a diffrent route and DO work etc etc etc.

You didn't comment on ANY one it. Neither did you comment on the situation that you made the ENTIRE fanbase mad at you and lost thousands of potential buyers and hundreds of sure-to buyers in the process.
So don't tell us to give you ANY more input before you don't tell us what the fu** is going on there and why you keep ignoring us.

If you honestly think you can continue on this path and get ANY kind of cooperation out of us you're so mistaken it's even funny.

I for one know what German game companies are like, and most of them have no knowledge about market, no idea how to make a project go within schedule or budget, let alone both, and most of them crash and burn before they even start to make any profit at all.

I don't know what you think you are. Nobody out there even knew who you were before you aquired this IP. Nobody gives a **** who you are if you screw this up. And nobody out there will ever care if you all end up losing your jobs. Welcome to the business.

The only fun in this job is to create something that makes a small group of people really love you for it. To create something that has value and stands out. You had an ultimate chance to achieve just that by just updating the graphics and sound, doing not much else and by doing that keeping the budget at an alltime low. Nearly the entire community would have bought the following JA3 blind then, no matter how crappy it was, even if just as a modding platform.

you have blown that chance. BIG TIME.

No cookie for you I'm afraid. Trust me... if you follow this path, in 5 years nobody will even remember what your company's name was.
The only thing a few people MIGHT remember is: Oh you mean the guys that screwed the entire JA2 community back then by producing a crappy remake...

As I've missed out on a coupla months worth of postings , I have obviously missed this . Or is this in the dev's forums and you want to spout off in ours ? Or are you letting us know whats going on with this game ? My opinion is the game has to remain tb . End of story , or I will not be buying Reloaded . No nighttime , line of sight ? Ha Ha, as Nelson would say ! ( That's Muntz , not Horatio )

The main debate is over there, at the revived www.jaggedalliance.com. But that forum is the worst piece of sh*t, registration is half in german and buggy. So we owed it to our people to have a decent discussion here.

But if you want to follow directly the debate, head over there, they are going past 20 pages of rioting fans. Kinda entertaining to watch. Here's the direct link:

http://tinyurl.com/3ynp5l7

PS: Used tinyURL, thx for suggestion

I'm starting to think the "decision" to abandon TB and LoS might be a marketing ploy. We could argue endlessly about the pros and cons of TB/RT, but from what I gather here and in other forums, removing LoS makes no sense to anyone.

By the way, since when do publishers want to decrease game length by "[speeding up] battles with large numbers of fighters which seemed like they would never end in the original game"? If anything, they would be interested in increasing game length by adding features like LoS.

Maybe I'm getting a little desperate here but I'm not going to believe what they have announced until it is part of a beta/demo version, or at least confirmed by some independent magazine or web site.

Use Tiny URL i had the same problem even in the bitComposer forum, posting a link to another thread ^^

Since DLCs? Since repetitive games coming out in numbers up to 5, just to add fancy additions to the name later, in order to serve you another one with the same aroma (Call of Duty, e.g)? Since the goal of the game devs/pubs is to make you finish their game asap, so you could spend your money on their next one?

Seriously, dude, you sound like you have been in a jail in North Korea for the last 5-6 years (no offense, I'm sarcastic a bit over the edge lately, hope you don't mind - hope you understand).

Nah, I think they just don't have a good TB engine. So their question was more "would you mind if we took your good old JA2 and serve you this b/s that looks so kewl?". That was the point of the whole debate they started.

Well... they found their answer.

What I find most aggravating about this is more than the fact that they want RTwP. It's the idea that they have the nerve to think that they can remake one of the greatest games of the genre better than its creators, adding "modern" whistles and bells. That they are smarter than a) game's creators b) modders c) community so they can trample on everyone and just do as they wish.

Well they'd better be ready to spend the millions Bethseda did to promote the F* crap because with such attitude they won't go far. They haven't seen a web riot yet.

^
ahh, the delusional vocal minority of teh interwebz...

There are web riots? I... I didn't know!! Is there a subscription or something where I can sign up? Have shotgun, will travel.

Edit: Is there a way where I can see my old posts on the bc forum? There are now 22 pages and I forgot where mine was.

Great speech!
Wish bc will read it and think again... there is still a chance....

Dear Staczo,

the impression Bit Composer has been giving away thus far leads me to beleive in quite the opposite. I can already with very high probability claim that their future relations with the community will be far from successfull, the community input will be minimal (I dare to say zero) and the game development further determined by the company head executives.

I don't wanna jump to conclusions with my latest statement, but do you really have the feeling the company cares about the current JA community? Let's go through the checklist:

• JA2 Remake - failed, due to taking out the heart of the game
• Community management - failed, due to obvious roll switching, so that they are the 'victims' (Quote from their response to the JA-ommunity: However, we are shocked at the way this discussion is being conducted in the forums.)
• Public Relations - failed, due to one of the worst PR-Campaigns I have ever seen (just read their latest JA: R news-announcement)
• Resources and experience needed for taking such a complex project - failed, obviously (Immature, small dev/pub aiming for the piece of market that is already pretty overcrowded? Not likely to bring some success)

Contact me when they (or anyone else, for that matter) prove me wrong.

"The Jagged Alliance series achieved numerous awards and is considered to date as milestone in the genre of real time strategy"

This is a quote from the features page for JA:Reloaded...Yeah,now i'll definitely preorder it...

My stuff / my posts ?

Yes lisac,unfortunately i will agree with you... chance is too small(what they rethink) ...
We are really unlucky ones(JA community) - the guys who buy our JA didn't really play it(I'm 100% sure NO ONE from BC didn't EVER played JA2(maximum two guys managed to go out from omerta and stated-"yes i've played this REALTIME strategy!"(look at their first page)))-so if they even rethink it will be bad game.

the worst is what when they will start selling this crap game it will BE THE END for JA-nobody ever will buy ja license - because BC completely dishonored ja name!!

the only chance - BC deciding to stop it now,and will sell ja license to good hands(or gift it to sergey wildfire popov for christmas)

and don't compare ja and fallout-in F was only one merc in vats, in ja - 6mercs+/-,so GO&PUKE sorry PLAN&GO/VATS will not work in ja, and as for me i dont like vats,dont want to play F3 again,will not buy F3 dlc,F newVegas and any F game until it is not turnbased.

BC reminds me Maddog, who always stated -"I love myself!" and BC saying it loudly,with the same stupid intonation , "eating all the bugs on their way" and " feeling taste of their own brain in their mouths'!

I'm very disappointed in game industry and decided to stop playing comp/console games, will play Monopoly city!

Not necessarily so , perhaps then we might steal the license ....

The most active post on their whole website is a topic where people are taking a massive dump on their crappy design decisions. Not a good sign. Every dev wants to be a big boy like Blizzard but they don't understand that massive game success doesn't come from design it comes from marketing. Jagged Alliance Reloaded isn't going to grab anybody on the outside because chances are they never would have heard about it. You can't NOT hear about crap like Call of Duty Black Ops unless you live under a rock. The only people interested are the folks in the niche. And now they have pissed the niche off.

LOL I've just read more closely their press release / description of JA2:R on the homepage:



Way to shoot yourself in the foot, BC. One day you admit JA2 was one of the greatest games of its genre and what makes it special its exactly the blend of TBS with RPG, next day you drop one of those. What's next? Too many mercs, lets make it IMP only? Replace dialogue and interactions with movie cutscenes? You rock.

guys, how about we don´t argue about unlaid eggs?

Hmmm, I am looking, I can't find anything. I checked "Nachrichten" but that looks like it is for PMs. "Einstellungen" are the preferences. Forum goes to the main forum list and Home goes to their Web site.

I would like a list of all my posts on their forum so that I can go back look at it and see who replied. (You know, what we have)

I haven't even bothered. I registered and have a 'name' wooooo. If they are even considering abandoning turn based I'll wait until an at least semi competent developer comes along to waste any time talking to them. I've already seen what happens when you let the lunatics run the asylum.

Dieter, hi!

I registered at the site but as there´s not much to read over there, I´m kind of stuck here in the pit (in a good way). But - just click on the profile/profil button below your post. You´ll get a list with your posts. And a link to all posts, displayed on one screen. So, not through the settings but in the post itself. It´s kind of backwards...


Cheers!

You joined with scorp on some smelly ja side?

Here is some good picture:
Image 1
Image 2

Ah, I will try it out, thanks my man!

I have never played a plan and go game so i know next to nothing about it but from what i have read it sounds kinda the same doesnt it? your merc spots an enemy the game pauses and you issue orders or am i missing something?

Nope. Sorry. Does Not Ring A Bell.

OHOHOO, there is a world of difference and a world of unsolved problems with this system,I suggests you read all the post in this part of the forum called the (no)FUTURE, where Bears explain what RTwP is and the posts from BScomposer in which they have no bloody idea what they are going to make in the end.

It is basically thing of taste, who likes what, but I say again like all the true fans before me:
IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE JA2 CAUSE IT IS TURN BASED, GO AND RAPE SOME OTHER GAME THAT IS RTwP, LEAVE OUR GAME ALONE!

I downloaded a demo for Brigade E5 to see what the pause and go system was like.....screw pause and go.

Go to their website and tell them. Send 'em e-mails. Tell them you and all of your friends do not want what they are slanging.

Totally agree. Game comes out and BC will either make their money and we will have a game we either like or can't even stomach, or something in between. Brigade E5 I thought sucked, hated the system, and Hired Guns I liked ok, but I was at the end in like four hours over two days, so that also sucked. Also was so blatantly unfinished it was laughable. I still play Vanilla and see new stuff now over a decade later. Still think it is best game I ever played. If it isn't like the original, then we just keep playing the original, right? I have so much crap to do in my personal life at any one time, I doubt I will ever experience everything JA2 mods have to offer. particularly considering that Vanilla is still so replayable ten years later. If BC drops the ball, then we don't have to play it. End of story, no?

It's been a long time since I checked back on here and this news really upset me. Maybe this video and the added exposure can help BC realize that they're straying from the path to financial revenue. Why not sign the petition while you're at it.

Crucify me, I am all for real time with pause. You can do all the micromanagement you wish, it is not hectic at all, you can take your time to plan. I quite liked the way the did it in Brigade E5. Brigade E5, of course is utter crap. Buggy, no story, no flair, ridiculously small maps, just awful.

But turn-based games have their downsides. You can volley ball equipment around. You can let all your men shoot out of the same window. You can take down one target, then switch to the next, because you don't have to assign targets in a realistic way.

That said, I am every bit as mad at Bit Composer as you are. Taking away the fog of war, and then calling it "more strategic". Modernizing would be better graphics, better AI, destructible environment, better light effects (torches, individual light sources), weather, vehicles on the tactical map, some way to check line of sight (doesn't have to be first person view) and, of course multiplayer (strategic multiplayer, mind, cooperative or not, but quick tactical battles against each other is far from innovative).
Fog of war is what the computer does best. Better than any boardgame or tabletop game. And taking away the fog of war is taking away the atmosphere.
Modernization? I don't buy it. And I won't buy the game either.

I have been following some of the debate here and on the official site, and I am not too confident that they will pull it off to satisfy the existing community.

But that is not the purpose. The purpose it to relaunch the franchise and make a new community. They are trying to do what was done with FallOut3.

When that was being developed, the old community forums were spewing over with all sorts of profanity for what Bethesda was doing to the series, and vowing that the franchise would crash and burn if they didn't stick to the old recipe.

Sadly I think some fans/communities delude themselves into thinking that without them, there will be no game. Fact is that we (the remaining fans of the old franchise) are few, and whether we buy the game or not, doesn't really matter.

What matters is if they can somehow make the game appealing to new fans ... who MIGHT have heard the franchise name mentioned before, and might have played the old games, or might not.

If they can get the mainstream players interested, then they get the success(money) they want. Then they will have resources to do JA3.

I somehow doubt they will be able to copy the Fallout3 success. Mainly because they are much smaller than Bethesda and can't market the game as aggressively as they did.

I love TB games, and I miss them alot. I hate the battlesystem of newer games like DA from Bioware etc. But I am also a realist, and one of the reasons TB games are few and far between, is that most gamers hate it, and find it very boring.

I also read some comments about the stupidity in the video (which I haven't watched yet). That it looked stupid that they shot at each other from a few meters with complete misses. To be fair, there are plenty of that in JA2 also. How many times haven't we had one merc turn a corner, shoot once or twice at an enemy and move back into cover, and then have another merc turn the same cover to take the enemy out ... without the enemy ever taking an action (since he spent all his APs)??

I think I could live with Real-time/Space (is that Plan&Go system??) IF I get a good tactical overhead map. It is annoying having the camera hovering over the shoulder, and then you struggle to mark some enemy, because he is obscured by something else (been problems in Mass Effect and Dragon Age), and that when you go into real-time, that the merc AI is not just sitting there being shot to pieces, just because an enemy appeared and I did not set an action for him.

I will still reserve judgement until something other than alpha screenshots and vids starts appearing.

Okay, but i think Fallout3 will be at least two levels above Jagged Alliance BIA.

So the success of BIA will be much lower. And here is the thing, the new community will be much smaller just like in Hired Guns or 7.62, basically nothing to make profit.

For a success like in Fallout3 First they would need something like the Unreal3 or Crysis2 Engine to bling bling all the casuals. RTwP is no casual genre and to assume it will be is just dump.

After playing UFO: Aftershock/Aftermath, a real-time system with pause doens't sound bad at all.

Especially if it works like they advertised it...the action lowchart would truly make complicated plans possible by the looks of it.
And they are right about one thing: turnbased might be fun (for those of us whole like it anyway), but it does allow cheesy tactics that would make little sense in real time...

True maybe it's not bad. But speaking as someone who does not like RTwP. I want TB because I like it, and it is core to JA. Play E5 and 7.62 for RTwP but please leave JA alone for the people who like TB please?

And as for the last part. You mean it wouldn't be realistic? If you want realism turn you computer off. Or play flight simulator.

This was not to attack you. But yes maybe the system is good. But I don't care, I want a TB JA. I've played E5 and found it boring and Dull. Also (I've posted this on the JA forums as well) show me a RTwP where you use two full squads in moving combat. After I've seen that I will agree that the system has potential. (Up to now, I'm still being ignored.)

See... you hit hte neail on the dead here. What is integral to JA2? What is the core?
It will be different things for different people.

Don't get me wrong - I LOVE TBS games.
The old UFO, UFO:AI, WH40K: Chaos Gate and JA2 are among my favorite games of all time.
And I do know that feeling when a franchise changes the specific style you're looking for (example: Dragon Age 2)..I can understand the rage and dissapoinment.
But such are always best judged when you have something concrete to work with....like a finished game.

Truth be told, I don't think no pettition can change anything - the game is too far in the development phase..and pettitions are not bloody likely to change anything anyway.




Strawmen argument. There are levels of realism and things can and are more or less real compared to other things. Even a fantasy title can be more or less realistic than another. It's a not a binary 0/1 thing.
If you are againt realism, then why are all the realistic additions to 1.13 so popular?

Alright I'll admit defeat on that one.
It's just that some one the BC forums said "RTwP is more realistic" (no quoted directly ) And I really HATE that line. I don't care if I can jump out of a airplane and survive landing without sending the character femurs into orbit, as long as it's fun!

And I've seen some more of the limitations they're putting into the game.



And just the complete disregard for the ones opposing their ideas. And the "positive reviews" which are a Joke focusing on things that should only have secondary priorities like graphics and PRAISING them.

But I'll give it a chance don't worry. I'll download it and buy it when it turns out good. But I think I can't hit shift+del fast enough. I'll probably burn the HDD to be sure it's gone.

I'm not sure yet if I even want to waste the bandwidth to download this ... this ... thing.

Well stated.

Where did that "no more aiming" stuff come from?

We saw the aiming shown in the gameplay video.

From the gamersglobal.de 'preview'. No more increasing aim levels, just point and shoot.

Take that with a grain of salt. Plenty a previews get all sorts of things wrong, or word them inaccurately, thus giving you a completely wrong impression.

Well according to the video. you can only select the desired body part to receive lead. but other then that....

Guys, have anyone here played a never released game Alfa: Antiterror? I had a chance to try the beta and the game used this system:

1 turn = 30 seconds (could be changed)

So you planned your waypoints for next 30 seconds and pressed play. You was not able to influence those already executed turns.

And it actually was fun. It was very realistic and it was challenging.

I think the developers of JA: BIA should have used this system instead.

sorry but such a system sucks imho. its like watching a movie consisting of 30 second clips. if it has to be a real time game the approach the developers took is far superior to the way alfa antiterror did it

Well, I actually played it and it was thrilling and you had to plan carefully. But that is just my opinion. Nevertheless I prefer the classic TB system to anything else.

well, if you are looking for turn based Jagged Alliance Online (not done by bc) may be an alternative. Now it bein browser based there are limitations in there as well (and I am sure we will get all kinds of flames raining down on us for that), but at least it is more like the classical JA.