Posting in response to the OP and copying over what I said in the Steam forums:
While I like most of what I read above, having TW focus more on helping the RS team to get that game finished off at the expense of the transports and other vehicles for RO2 is not a good cause imo.... especially when RS is slated to be released sometime in 2013..... which sounds to me like we're not going to see any of those vehicles for RO2 until way after the release of Rising Storm sometime in 2013.
I'm really not liking that.... but I do like the clarification on the price RO2 players may face with RS.... and how those who decide not to get RS won't just get kicked off a server when an RS map loads up, which could cause a huge stink pile with the existing community.
Even still, while it's a good idea regarding keeping RS and RO2 together in the same server/server browser without having to load up two different games, it does put a lot of pressure on the community to purchase Rising Storm, especially if/when some player's favourite (yet limited) servers decide to load up RS maps at the same time.
.... maybe those players who didn't buy Rising Storm just have no interest or simply don't like RS.... yet the game is being thrown in their face to play when the maps change and then they're giving a limited selection of the game to use against other players who own the game.
Now one can either buy the game, even if they don't like it, in order to stay on their favourite servers.... or they're stuck having to hunt around again for a server they like that just runs RO2.
I dunno.... seems like we're going to step into some murkier waters by taking this route.
There's pros and there's cons to these ideas.... all of the above ideas (except for the new map.... I like that map) and it's going to be a risky/tricky balancing act.
No one wants halftracks for the current stock maps, we just want them for future ones!
You don't speak for me, so don't start.
I'd like to see half-tracks / transports on maps like Fallen Fighters, Pavlov's House, Comm's House, Barracks, Spartanovka and Mamayev Kurgan.... which could be easily implemented with a few very minor map adjustments to most.
(cleared road blocks in some areas, road blocks in others, adjustments to force transports to stay behind troops for cover and to support, as well as to travel slowly & to prevent people from using them as rockets to cap zones like in previous RO's)
It'd be very easy to do.... and with many of the custom maps from the community, they would work very well.
You do have to scratch your head at some of these decisions. They said it would take six - nine months to design these fully-rendered vehicles IIRC (sorry if that number is wrong, feel free to correct me) and so we assume (or assumed; now I'm not so sure) that they were being designed... but now they're not? Or at the very least, progress has been slowed/halted for RS?
So we've gone from working (slowly, slowly, slowly...) on much-needed LTs and HTs (especially HTs for maps like this, as has been said) to polishing up a mod which is now going to be released as paid DLC. This detracts from the quality of the unfinished vanilla product, and Yoshiro has admitted as much.
Don't you think the priorities here were a little skewed? I have nothing against the RS guys and their work looks decent, but I have no real interest in it. It was looking like an 'always over the horizon' goal for the new vehicles before, but now it just feels like it's never going to happen, and when you consider the immense periods of time needed to tweak basic stuff like map balance (important, granted) and stamina levels, how in the hell are we going to get any new vehicles ('to be released shortly after release') before the Mayan Apocalypse?
I don't have great Internet myself (wireless with wildly fluctuating speeds) so I've been holding off downloading the huge new betas in anticipation of the next big vanilla patch, but now I just feel even more disheartened than before. Many of the people posting here are quite right, even if some could have been a little less rude about it.
In short: we paid for RO2, not RS, why can't you put all your focus on this game and then shift your focus to DLC packs when it's in a more acceptable state? I think that's only fair, and sensible, and it doesn't strike me as being a particularly outlandish request.
I have to agree with you.... there have been a few decisions by TW in the past year that have made me scratch my head until it bled. Shifting their concentration off of their actual game (RO2) to help the RS team work on RS at the expense of RO2 and their already existing player base??
Great way to make an already small community become even smaller due to loss of interest and overplaying the already limited content in RO2..... I don't mean to be pessimistic, but if they keep this stuff up, there won't be many players left in RO2 to jump into RS and is again, another big risk to be taking with the mere "Hope" that it will pay off.
Jumping off to Rising Storm to help them out with a game that isn't near to release.... jumping into Killing Floor to add some extra character models (female) and weapons/etc..... and then toss us a map every several months for RO2.... I dunno....
It's almost as if they're trying to avoid RO2's vehicles and other content..... almost... I'm not saying they are, it's just how it "seems" to me.
No offense meant to TW, but I'm growing very concerned with the future of this game.
Terribly disappointed in Yoshiro's post.
A RO1 style map with no working anti tank guns, panzerfausts, or APCs? Good luck with that. Brashka?! Really?! Out of any of the maps it had to be
Brashka?! I wouldve loved to see a map that kept with the Stalingrad theme and combined arms such as Tractor Factory.
Sounds to me like RO2 is on the downward slope and is being left for dead...with all the attention and focus being on Rising Storm. You cant blame Tripwire, Im sure they have some sort of agreement with the Rising Storm team to get a certain % of the profits when its released. They probably arent making squat with new RO2 sales, so Rising Storm is probably their only way of securing a future paycheck and keeping the lights on.
It looks to me like Tripwire is focusing more on supporting user created content than actually creating new content themselfs for RO2. Which doesnt surprise me, there is little money to be made with releasing offical Tripwire made DLC for free. They dont make money paying their own team to produce new RO2 content for free...The only way theyre going to make any significant amount of money is by getting involved in Rising Storm and sharing the profits from RS sales. Having a mapping contest clearly proves that they are relying on user created content to keep peoples attention with RO2 while they work on Rising Storm.
Personally I dont expect new offical content till a few months AFTER Rising Storm is released.
Really disappointed no new tanks, APCs, weapons or urban maps are in the near future. I was expecting to see the luger, MG42, APCs and new tanks being polished by now. I feel things are going to get pretty stale and boring around here.
Once again, I agree.... and I've been defending 98% of TW's decisions on RO2 and have been playing RO since the mod days... supporting them since 2004.... but now all of this is starting to get foul in my mouth.
I've again started to dwindle my game playing time with RO2 and have been falling back to other games.... last time was between around December till the GOTY update.... where I didn't play at all cuz I was worn out on the content. One map helped bring back some interest and I spent the last little while grinding up my progression & ranks, but have fallen back to not playing as much due to over kill on the limited content.
The thing that concerns me is that I have little interest in Rising Storm and still not keen on buying it when it comes out..... something that's compounding that decision for me is that here I am with an unfinished RO2 with a huge lack of content for a very long time.
• One Map
• A game mode I don't play (Classic)
• A game mode I don't play as often as I used to (Action, when it was Relaxed Realism)
^
That's it.... with MP Campaign finally being tested, or so I'm told since I can't find a Beta server available to hop onto to try it and is only on during select times...... and now this map in the works with no known timeline to expect it being brought into the game.
And no, I don't count community made maps, regardless of how good they are. They're made by the community, not TW.
The problem is.... I'm here with an unfinished game, waiting for it to be finished as TW moves on to work on Rising Storm....
.... who's to say if I do get Rising Storm that I won't end up with yet another unfinished product?
Who's to say that once RS is released that most of TW's attention still won't remain on RS and not go back to RO2??
Can we expect that after RS is released and is pretty well complete that maybe TW will bring the RS team into the fold, increasing their resources and man power, and have both teams work equally on both games???
^ That at least would give me some peace of mind for the future.
