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