En guise de cadeau de Noël, Battlefront offre trois nouvelles captures d’écrans pour CM Normandy. Les deux premières consistent en un gros plan sur des blindés allemands, tandis que la troisième permet de constater l’évolution des graphismes depuis 1999.
Au passage le studio en profite pour faire un point sur l’avancement des travaux et donner quelques précisions sur un des aspects du jeu, ici les fortifications. En résumé, il ne reste plus qu’à coder le système de batailles rapides pour que CM Normandy soit terminé et coté fortifications, il y aura bel et bien des barbelés, des bunkers ainsi qu’un nouveau système gérant les tranchées. Il semble malheureusement encore trop tôt pour que le studio accepte de montrer en images ces éléments défensifs qui seront d’ailleurs achetables au début d’un scénario.
Au fil des discussion sur le forum officiel Battlefront ajoute quelques précisions sur Normandy et ses autres jeux. On y apprend par exemple qu’il y aura un module Arnhem, que CM Afghanistan sortira bientôt ou que le bocage sera un terrain à part entière. Voyez ci-après pour plus de détails. La sortie de CM Normandy est prévue vers le printemps prochain, si tout va bien.
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As you can see from the two pics of German stuff, CM: Normandy offers prepared, reinforced positions for heavy weapons and even vehicles. The graphics are placeholders at the moment, but you get the idea I think. These elements are purchasable and can be placed by the player during the Setup Phase.
On top of that, the player can now purchase and place a wide array of defensive works including barbed wire, bunkers, foxholes, and even trenches. That’s right, trenches! All of these elements follow the rules of Fog of War, including trenches. Yup!
Long time members of this Forum will recall some very long and heated discussions about trenches and what we can, and can’t, do from a technical standpoint. While people’s passionate calls for FoW trenches didn’t magically erase the technical challenges, they did cause us to adopt a new method of representing these elements.
We’re still working on final graphics for the defensive works so you’ll just have to wait a bit to see what they look like and to get more details on how units interact with them. Just know that they do give you guys the game elements you made clear you wanted back into CM. We do aim to please.
The last bone is an update on where we are right now with the game as a whole. We currently have one major game element remaining to code. Namely the new Quick Battle system. It’s designed and should go into production in January. There’s still a lot of things which have to be added, tweaked, and fixed… but we have 30 active testers working to help us with all of that now. Their initial reactions to hunting tanks in the bocage has been very positive (understatement!).
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1. By « production » I meant that the QB system will be coded, tested, tweaked, etc. starting in January, not that the full game will be flying out the doors to you guys.
2. Yes, after the dust settles from the Holidays I’ll shed some more light on the new QB system. The testers have been briefed on the essentials and all seems good so far. Since these guys want the new QBs to rock as much as you guys, their approval is extremely reassuring to Charles and I. We’re all very aware how important it is to beat both CMx1 and CM:SF’s systems. We are more confident than ever that this will happen.
3. Bocage is its own terrain type with its own terrain effects. We need to work on the graphics some more, however, so we’re not ready to start showing them yet.
4. The game’s official Title is not going to be CM: Normandy. The title for the game « Family » needs to be more inclusive of its future Modules. We will have an Arnhem Module, for example, so « Normandy » isn’t appropriate for the overarching name. However, for now we’re keeping it around.
5. NATO has been on hold for the last few months as we have been focused on CM: Normandy and CM: Afghanistan. That will change in January as we start NATO back up again. We do not know if NATO or Normandy will be out first, though we do know Afghanistan will beat both.
Another tiny bone for you…
We had no REAL idea how the testers would react to CM: Normandy in its current state. Sure, we figured they would enjoy the new setting and have fun playing with the new features. We would have been perfectly happy with that since all current testers are grizzled testing veterans. So imagine our smiles when we actually got huge, positive emotional reactions to all kinds of stuff! We weren’t expecting half the reaction we got. That’s a good sign that the basics are already in place for exactly the game you guys expect from us.