Wild Bill Wilder Posted November 1, 2000 Share Posted November 1, 2000 Graphics can always be improved, just like any other aspect of any game. That is progress. We've come a long way from Atari 2600 and the future is as limited as man's ingenuity. I love the graphics. I look forward to the improvements. Isn't that what these "Mods" are all about? ------------------ Wild Bill Lead Tester Scenario Design Team Combat Mission-Beyond Overlord billw@matrixgames.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IntelWeenie Posted November 1, 2000 Share Posted November 1, 2000 Why do I never notice misspellings until someone quotes me? <BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Maximus: A game (or series of games) is rated for their quality. Hell, I wouldn't mind going back and playing Three-Sixty's V for Victory series on my old original 386-33. My friend and I used to have a ball with those games, especially the Veli-Lukiye version. Hell, we still talk about one hot-seat game we played. Where he as the Russians thought he had me beat after encircling the city and taking several hexes into the eastern edge and then my SS reinforcements finally show up and decimate entire stacks of Russian units.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> I LOVED the entire series (Gold-Juno-Sword being my favorite), but I can't remember when it was last loaded on my hard drive, let alone when I played it last (when was the last time you played it?). Anyway, the longevity I was referring to has more to do with marketable things whereby a company can continue to make money from a game through the releases of upgrades, expansion packs, continued sales and the like. BTS (or anyone else) won't get any more revenue from a game that is bought and played for 10 years by one person than a game that is bought and played for only a year then tossed. (not that I ever would! !) WRT the V for Victory series, I think it is a good example of what BTS should try to do. The game engine remained pretty much intact throught the series and there were small improvements made with each new release. IIRC, it came out sometime in 1992-3 (can't find my floppy disks to check!) and had a total of 7 releases, the last 3 being marketed by Avalon Hill. (Utah Beach, Velikiye Luki, Market Garden, Gold-Juno-Sword followed by Crusader, Stalingrad and America Invades) They ended up with 7 potential sales from what was essentially the same game code. Since I don't see BTS making too many changes to the game engine (since it's so good and really IS the game), they need to provide some other reasons for buyers to get the newer releases. True wargamers would buy CM2,3,4 just to get other troops in other theaters, but what about the non-grog customers? If someone else writes a game that plays similar to CM but looks a lot better, BTS will lose some sales no matter how much better CM is under the hood. Like I said before, I think this is something BTS really needs to take a long, hard look at since their continued development of the CM series is tied very closely to their continued sales. Making a great game look better is one way of ensuring continued success, especially since the graphics engine is one area where there is most room for improvement. Just MHO. ------------------ Cats aren't clean, they're covered with cat spit. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Big Time Software Posted November 1, 2000 Share Posted November 1, 2000 OK folks, time for the official word and then I'm going to lock this up so we can move along to something else. We have always said, and always will say, that Combat Mission will improve graphically as the hardware allows. Anybody that played the Beta Demo, then Gold Demo, and the latest version of the full thing should know darned well that we mean what we say. CM will likely NEVER be cutting edge since we will most probably always have to make some compromises for time and hardware limitation concerns. But CM will certainly get better looking each time we make a release. As for the minimum target card for CM2 will be a 16MB card, 32MB recommended. You hardware bigots (that is a long used term, so I only repeat it here ) that upgrade everytime some hardware company sneazes have GOT to remember that 90% of the people out there do NOT do this. Most people are also using systems that are at least 2 years old, if not older. Hell, even WE are generally using systems that old (Charles just traded in the computer he programmed CM on, and it was about 3.5 years old at the time). Therefore, unless we plan on losing a large percentage of our customer base we have to target Combat Mission for the likely most common setup for the day in which we release it. And I can tell you that it will not be some hopped up 800MHz PIII with a 64MB card and 512MB of RAM. That sort of system will most likely be a significant perecentage, but the sub 500MHz systems with a 32MB card will be the norm. Systems less than that will most likely be roughly equal to those with the faster set ups. People will 1GHz systems and highend 3D cards will be about as common as those with lowly P200s and 8MB cards. As for marketing CM and getting the most number of sales... I think you guys should leave that to us to worry about. We have been in the busines of making wargames for about 8 years now and are doing a damned fine job of it I might add So I have a feeling that we know a lot more than anybody else here does and therefore will most likely do a better job staying in business than some people appear to give us credit for. In short, we know what we are doing so relax and enjoy playing what we produce Steve Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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