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[Game] Did nobody like Mare Nostrum?

What I don't get is why CC didn't get more attention... it was totally integrated into RO so it's a real shame.

Ardon was a masterpiece.

CC was the best of the three big mods imo. Lots of cool new maps and features and everything was playable and well balanced.

Noone seemed to really be to interested in romanians and baby tanks though. I'd still love to play one last time on ardon with 50 players, it was a really fun map. Same with Chisnau.
 
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I should begin by saying I love both MN and DH and have friends working on both. So having been on both Mare Nostrum and Darkest Hour at the beginning this is just one bums opinion on why MN didn't take off;

Firstly I think the long development time frame from announcement (afaik Burning Sands was the first total conversion MOD announced for RO) 2006 to the first beta release in 2008 and the steam release Dec 2009 was far too long. By the time we had released MN 1.4 the RO player numbers had fallen off. The people who were left were either playing DH or Danzig 24/7 :D

For many of us it was the first large MOD we had worked on. So in many ways it was a learning tool and a lot of things had to be made a number of times. (Just check the MODdb bottom page to see how many models and ideas didn't make it) Also as you can imagine during the three plus years a lot of people came and went during that time however there was a hardcore small group (PyschoSam, Xendance, Waddler, Susi, Bobjoel, Case, Drax, JC etc) who managed to stick with it and help drive us forward. Without such effort MN would have never seen the light of day and would have ended as just another uncompleted good idea.

Towards the end we tried a number of things to try and boost player numbers in MN such as the Burning Sands Tournament (BST) that never really took off with great numbers. I guess the RO player numbers had fallen off by that stage and most people had gravitated to Darkest Hour as their MOD of choice. Although we are very grateful to the people who helped try and kick-start the tournament and create the MN fight nights as well.

I don't think the maps in MN were our problem. We had a lot of talented mappers, (Xendance, Rex, Moe and SaveTheJets etc). These are mappers who know what consitutes a good RO map. For example Xendance won the Red Orchestra custom mapping competition and was picked up by Rising Storm. So the calibre of our map team was pretty high.

So how did DH end up doing as well as it did. Well firstly it's fairly obvious that the Western Front is more appealing, whilst working on the early DH trailers and websites I went for a Band of Brothers / Brothers in Arms populist approach (From the music, to the font and red line used on the DH text to the overall look) just because that's what we thought people wanted. If you look at Rising Storm now you can see a similar approach taken with the show the Pacific, unintentional or not. That's not to devalue the approach only pointing out what sells. Secondly I think a lot of realism clans jumped on DH, the large 1:1 scale maps and units appealed to them and thus the servers were hosted and player counts kept up which is something MN didn't have as much of. When people connected to MN to see empty servers it wasn't appealing whereas DH managed to keep populated servers via this approach.

So the majority of us at MN have moved onto In Country: Vietnam. We aren't deterred by the failure of MN to attract players. We have learnt the biggest lesson, 'don't take too long' and 'listen to what people want'. So that's why we have started work on ICV so early. We don't want to release two or three years after the release of RO2. We want to be in there early attracting the players. So if you are interested in ICV jump on our forums and post in our ideas and suggestions thread, we want to hear what YOU want from a MOD.

If you read this without falling asleep have a cookie :p

** Burning Sands on MODDB
** Campagna Italiana on MODDB
** Story of Mare Nostrum by Susi
 
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CC was the best of the three big mods imo. Lots of cool new maps and features and everything was playable and well balanced.

I recon CC was a well thought out setting and a shrewd release.
It had everything in place it needed to be playable and interesting, with enough new features, and no feeling that anything was missing or had to be added later.

MN was difficult in this regard as the larger scope ment there was more work needed to feel that it was complete - for example there was a mass of armour types needed and even when there was a lot added you still felt there was a lot more stuff needed, and yet with limited resources the mod had to decide between padding out the content it had or moving forward into other areas to offer variety.

Remember the plan with MN was to move through tunis, sicily to mainland Italy. This would have satisfied the guys that are only really interested in the war that the US was involved in, the German players that are interested in a heroic defense with powerful armour. The mod would have had something for everyone.

I believe with more maps and armour, the western desert was the ideal all-out tanking theatre and Italy would have made a fantastic CA setting - it's a great shame it was not to be.
 
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I should begin by saying I love both MN and DH and have friends working on both. So having been on both Mare Nostrum and Darkest Hour at the beginning this is just one bums opinion on why MN didn't take off;

Firstly I think the long development time frame from announcement (afaik Burning Sands was the first total conversion MOD announced for RO) 2006 to the first beta release in 2008 and the steam release Dec 2009 was far too long. By the time we had released MN 1.4 the RO player numbers had fallen off. The people who were left were either playing DH or Danzig 24/7 :D

For many of us it was the first large MOD we had worked on. So in many ways it was a learning tool and a lot of things had to be made a number of times. (Just check the MODdb bottom page to see how many models and ideas didn't make it) Also as you can imagine during the three plus years a lot of people came and went during that time however there was a hardcore small group (PyschoSam, Xendance, Waddler, Susi, Bobjoel, Case, Drax, JC etc) who managed to stick with it and help drive us forward. Without such effort MN would have never seen the light of day and would have ended as just another uncompleted good idea.

Towards the end we tried a number of things to try and boost player numbers in MN such as the Burning Sands Tournament (BST) that never really took off with great numbers. I guess the RO player numbers had fallen off by that stage and most people had gravitated to Darkest Hour as their MOD of choice. Although we are very grateful to the people who helped try and kick-start the tournament and create the MN fight nights as well.

I don't think the maps in MN were our problem. We had a lot of talented mappers, (Xendance, Rex, Moe and SaveTheJets etc). These are mappers who know what consitutes a good RO map. For example Xendance won the Red Orchestra custom mapping competition and was picked up by Rising Storm. So the calibre of our map team was pretty high.

So how did DH end up doing as well as it did. Well firstly it's fairly obvious that the Western Front is more appealing, whilst working on the early DH trailers and websites I went for a Band of Brothers / Brothers in Arms populist approach (From the music, to the font and red line used on the DH text to the overall look) just because that's what we thought people wanted. If you look at Rising Storm now you can see a similar approach taken with the show the Pacific, unintentional or not. That's not to devalue the approach only pointing out what sells. Secondly I think a lot of realism clans jumped on DH, the large 1:1 scale maps and units appealed to them and thus the servers were hosted and player counts kept up which is something MN didn't have as much of. When people connected to MN to see empty servers it wasn't appealing whereas DH managed to keep populated servers via this approach.

So the majority of us at MN have moved onto In Country: Vietnam. We aren't deterred by the failure of MN to attract players. We have learnt the biggest lesson, 'don't take too long' and 'listen to what people want'. So that's why we have started work on ICV so early. We don't want to release two or three years after the release of RO2. We want to be in there early attracting the players. So if you are interested in ICV jump on our forums and post in our ideas and suggestions thread, we want to hear what YOU want from a MOD.

If you read this without falling asleep have a cookie :p

** Burning Sands on MODDB
** Campagna Italiana on MODDB
** Story of Mare Nostrum by Susi

Its unfortunate to hear that MN never took off (I like the Northern Africa setting), but I'm happy to hear that lessons were learned and can be applied to ICV which I'm very excited about! Good luck guys, I know I'll be playing ICV :cool:

P.S. I want my cookie :p
 
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For me the reason for not playing MN was that it pretty much felt like regular RO in a different setting.

So rather than play MN which is a nice mod with some nice maps, I could play regular RO which is more polished and got more good maps and more people playing it.

One of the things I like about DH is how it feels difference for better or for worse you decide yourself. But at least its a different experience than regular RO.
 
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For me the reason for not playing MN was that it pretty much felt like regular RO in a different setting.

So rather than play MN which is a nice mod with some nice maps, I could play regular RO which is more polished and got more good maps and more people playing it.

One of the things I like about DH is how it feels difference for better or for worse you decide yourself. But at least its a different experience than regular RO.

I know where your coming from there (although i was still happy to have the Ro feel in a completely contrasting environment with different armies and weapons), however i think there might have been changes to the gameplay/feel and new features were it not for the fact that the team were busy making basic content.
After all, it appears DH only started making additional changes once it had a large enough amount of content and was well established.

DH had a loyal support enough to see it past the difficult early days and give the devs the motivation to carry on with extra ideas.
 
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I liked the concept of MN but I though the presentation of it was terrible. One of my biggest gripes was the schizophrenic nature of quality among the art assets.

Example, some of the guns look great whilst others look terrible (the SMLE ugh, that model was so bad it wasn't funny). This and the lack of local servers running it stopped me playing it much.

DH is ok, overall quality is a lot better, however there's not much choice of places to play it for me. Of those limited choices I really don't like the people who play it at all (like those 29th ID ****heads). So I kind of steer clear of it totally.

CC I really liked, for one it integrated with RO totally which meant there were lots of people playing it on day 1. It also had good quality in maps, models and sounds across the board. I also loved some of the additions to gameplay (like AT grenades :D), strangely interest just seemed to tail off in it really quickly which in my opinion was a shame.
 
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Mare Nostrum was good. It seemed to get large amounts of players in bursts. Some of the maps were God-awful balance wise but were somehow still fun to play (the Amphitheater map comes to mind).

Carpathian Crosses was perhaps a perfect mod for Red Orchestra. It really needed more support from TWI though--they needed to release it as an update or some such for Red Orchestra due to its integrated nature but no one ever really moved to do anything--which is a shame because even the useless mess of Darkest Hour ended up with officialish release on Steam. I'd say that CC's integration was part of its own downfall. People would join a server running CC but playing a stock RO map. The map vote came up, people voted for Ardon, then those without CC installed ended up downloading the entire mod for the next three hours and simply quit and found a new server. CC was polished, balanced, showed a lot of care and effort in the uniforms, weaponry, sounds, and features they added. And the maps themselves were amazingly well thought-out.

I miss CC and I've been upset ever since it died that something as terrible as Darkest Hour took its place. I may have some slight biases though. I was banned from a DH server on day one. We were all discussing the mod and the quality of the maps when I presumably aroused the ire of the mapper responsible for the map we were playing. The map was ugly, the textures were simplistic, the layout was schizophrenic, the objectives made little sense and had no flow, the buildings hovered over the roads (there were no sidewalks) and the map itself didn't even look like a real place. The ensuing fight led to my banning from that server. I have played DH for almost every major release since and while the map quality has gotten better it's still not close to CC sadly.

But, if it's said that people get the government they deserve, then Darkest Hour proves that players get the mod they deserve.
 
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