What the community is up to - Vehicles ;)

[Yoshiro]

What i want to know, why have we never seen new tanks or vehicles added after release, its already many years later and not a single tank was added that was promised to be released after launch.

Immediately after launch we ended up using our content creation team to work on optimizing content already in the game (which was not planned). After that we moved away from the planned vehicles post launch because we didn't see the community playing with vehicles. We also shelved several maps in development based on that. Then the team threw its full production time into Rising Storm.

 

[Catalavos]

After that we moved away from the planned vehicles post launch because we didn't see the community playing with vehicles.

Due to:
Lack of "tank-sized" maps.
Tank bugs (floating tanks, mis-aligned sights on T-34, getting stuck on objects etc...).
Poor reception of tank systems (Mouse turret control, insta-switch ammo).
Limited choices (2 tanks, yay!).


"Originally Posted by [TW]Ramm-Jaeger Our post-release development isn't generally based around a linear master plan, rather it's a feedback loop with the community."

This community has been BEGGING for more vehicles since launch. The forum posts proving this are too numerous to list.

 

[Yoshiro]

We base much of our future plans about what people are actually playing with/using on a day to day basis. What mods and maps that are developed and used by a majority of the player base guide much of our future plans.

Gumrak has had the least amount of players of any map in RO 2 (and the few large vehicle maps that have been made do not see much traffic either. Somebody in the Rising Storm beta last week discovered Arad for the first time during the test). So Tripwire decided to work on the largest expansion of content for any of our titles to date (Rising Storm) but the focus was infantry because that is where players were. It was a business decision.

If we had unlimited resources we would tackle everything. But we do not, so we have to pick our battles.

 

[JosephBaier]

I think the conclusion that tanks shouldn't be a priority because people don't play with tanks is mind bogglingly ______ That sounds more like Q.E.D Troll logic than a dev.

"HEY GUYS WE MADE 2 GUNS; ONE FOR THE RUSSIANS AND ONE FOR THE GERMANS...THOSE GAMEBREAKING BUGS IN OUR INF SYSTEM AREN'T ACTUALLY ALL THAT BAD AND THE LACK OF RO1 "FEELING" + SOME OTHER STUPID **** LIKE INSTA SWITCHING SHOULDN'T REALLY INFLUENCE THIS..... SO WHY IS NOBODY PLAYING THE ONLY, ****TY (don't say Arad or I'll have to call you stupid) INFANTRY ONLY MAP WE HAVE?!" -some CEO talking about a game with horrible infantry gameplay

 

[Kowalczyk]

I can appreciate the need for any decision to be based on sound economic logic but this way of alloating resources is just astoundingly short-sighted.

 

[dr. strangelove]

We base much of our future plans about what people are actually playing with/using on a day to day basis. What mods and maps that are developed and used by a majority of the player base guide much of our future plans.

Gumrak has had the least amount of players of any map in RO 2 (and the few large vehicle maps that have been made do not see much traffic either. Somebody in the Rising Storm beta last week discovered Arad for the first time during the test). So Tripwire decided to work on the largest expansion of content for any of our titles to date (Rising Storm) but the focus was infantry because that is where players were. It was a business decision.

If we had unlimited resources we would tackle everything. But we do not, so we have to pick our battles.

The reason being was that Gumrak was a terrible map with god knows how many bugs. You should have rolled out with a better map if you wanted "take the temperature" of the community.

Look at all these threads for the past several years!

 

[Kowalczyk]

Gumrak was also a pretty boring all-white snow map. Lots of servers also had tanks turned off because players hated the AI aimbot accuracy.

 

[Catalavos]

We base much of our future plans about what people are actually playing with/using on a day to day basis. What mods and maps that are developed and used by a majority of the player base guide much of our future plans.

Gumrak has had the least amount of players of any map in RO 2 (and the few large vehicle maps that have been made do not see much traffic either. Somebody in the Rising Storm beta last week discovered Arad for the first time during the test). So Tripwire decided to work on the largest expansion of content for any of our titles to date (Rising Storm) but the focus was infantry because that is where players were. It was a business decision.

If we had unlimited resources we would tackle everything. But we do not, so we have to pick our battles.

Ok, lots to talk about here here:

1. "We base much of our future plans about what people are actually playing with/using on a day to day basis. "

Understood, but if 90% of the maps are primarily infantry focused then it stands to reason that most people will be playing infantry maps.

2. "Gumrak has had the least amount of players of any map in RO 2 (and the few large vehicle maps that have been made do not see much traffic either."

Gumrak is the most boring map in RO2, period. It's only made more boring by a lack of vehicle choices. Gumrak is so bad that if it were a custom map it wouldn't be hosted on any servers, not even RGN. Aside from Barashka, it's also the only stock map with more than 2 tanks per team so at the end of the day, map design has done as much to make tanks unpopular as anything else. As for other large vehicle maps such as Arad and Yakovlevo, they're also custom maps and we all know how well custom maps have been received, "Somebody in the Rising Storm beta last week discovered Arad for the first time during the test)", demonstrates this perfectly.

Tank maps are not unpopular because they're tank maps; they're unpopular because:
A: Tank bugs, first and foremost.
B: They haven't been given the attention they deserve from the Level Design side.
C: Lack of troop transport has kept maps small. Small map+ 2 tanks per team = no fun.
D: (Seemingly) overpowered AT rifles. Completely hilarious implementation of HHL-3.
E: Limited tank inventory

3. "So Tripwire decided to work on the largest expansion of content for any of our titles to date (Rising Storm)"

Great decision and another GOTY. Kudos!

4. "...but the focus was infantry because that is where players were."

See answer to #1 above.

 

[LugNut]

We base much of our future plans about what people are actually playing with/using on a day to day basis. What mods and maps that are developed and used by a majority of the player base guide much of our future plans.

Gumrak has had the least amount of players of any map in RO 2 (and the few large vehicle maps that have been made do not see much traffic either.

So, it'll just be Apartments V2 moving forward then?

 

[Kowalczyk]

Looking forward to Apartments of Danzig 3, should be a great game!

 

[morticore]

Certainly Appartments feels somehow incomplete without ISU-152 or other stuff like that

 

[Yoshiro]

Post

1) We understand that and take that into account.

2) Take Gumrak out of the equation. We observe people leave servers when Arad (remeber this has been a stock map for a long time now) and Barashka come up. And many servers do not go to tank maps still.

3) Thank you

4) See answer 1

The main problem appears to be a catch 22. There is the cry for more content (lets call it X in terms of cost). But WAIT! We won't play that content even if you develop it because we do not like the tank system. Remake the tank system (lets call that 5X in terms of cost and does not include any new content). Also we want that content now.

This is where we currently stand. 6X dosh needed to proceed but we don't see player counts that make us feel like that would be successful. We are hoping that will change after this upcoming update.

 

[Yoshiro]

So, it'll just be Apartments V2 moving forward then?

You are more likely to see things like Bridges and Myskovka when it comes to infantry maps.

 

[Drecks]

I personally am a big vehicle nut, and I love the work that they are doing. The first time in the beta when I saw an Sdkfz-251 roll up on Arad2 and a bunch of Germans pile out and start attacking the village I got chills. It felt like something missing from RO2 was now there, and the game instantly felt that much more like "RO" to me. You can thank the vehicle mod team for inspiring that, and the hard working programmers, artists, and level designers of both the vehicle mod team, TWI, AMG, and from the community for making it a realization.

Very amusing that it took over 2.5 years and loads of forum topics, "whining" players, requests and community efforts to make you realize that with trooptransports "something missing from RO2 was now there " and got you the "chills". With transports added from release this game should have had a larger playerbase and a more diverse gameplay and maps all along. We all knew that all along.

We have this expression. "Beter ten halve gekeerd dan ten volle gedwaald."
That suits well. Translated it says "It's better to turn around halfway, then to get lost completely"
Now halfway could be read 3/4 of the road here.

 

[TrOOper]

Ive been on this forum for a long time...i would swear i have seen hundreds of posts wanting more vehicles and troop transports. The troop transports were especially needed if we were to ever see larger, combined arms maps.
Even a community group was started to supply what the community was asking for.

After reading TWI`s responses, im left a bit stunned.....certainly with the way they look at things, it is a self fulfilling prophecy. They dont see people playing on Gumrak, so they think the community does not like tanks and tank maps.....had Gumrak had troop transports and opened buildings, you would have seen it played a lot.......

These types of decisions made by TWI are the reason we only have around a thousand people on average playing during primetime hours.....

The next self fulfilling prophecy will be that there just isnt enough money to continue to support Ro2.......

 

[[TW]Ramm-Jaeger]

We have this expression. "Beter ten halve gekeerd dan ten volle gedwaald."
That suits well. Translated it says "It's better to turn around halfway, then to get lost completely"
Now halfway could be read 3/4 of the road here.

We have an expression in America - don't judge a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins. I man up and admit it when Tripwire makes mistakes. My apologies for the buggy release of RO2, and the subsequent years of abuse I've taken from the community for that are well documented. But we made things right by our customers, fixing the launch issues and polishing up the game. It wasn't always as fast as people wanted, but we did it as fast as we could with the resources we had.

Since the launch we've applied as much resources as we could afford to adding new content for the game, prioritizing things by what we feel the community wants the most but also weighed against what we can afford to spend for content that would be given away for free. We would have LOVED to have shipped the game with the 20+ vehicles we originally planned in early development, and we would have loved to have added a ton of vehicles post release. It's not that we didn't want to, it's that we didn't have the resources to do it. So coming back after the fact and saying "see Tripwire, we told you it would have been a better game if you had just done this from the start!" really isn't constructive or useful. We KNOW adding a lot of additional content would make our games more awesome. We also know we would have went bankrupt if we had tried to make the game a lot bigger than it was when we shipped or put our whole team on making free content.

I know it is easy to sit down at the computer and type up posts on a forum complaining or second guessing decisions made by Tripwire. The view looks very different when you have 50 employees and their families to keep paid and fed. After the GOTY edition release I feel fine that we did right by our customers, spending a million dollars to fix up the issues with the game we launched. The only thing I feel obligated to provide the community are the featured listed on the game box or store page, which you can find here:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/35450/

Anything else we provide beyond that is a free gift to the community. Every feature request, every vehicle request, anything - if it wasn't a feature listed on the store page, you're asking for a gift from a developer. Coupling those requests with insults only demotivates the developers and makes it a lot harder for them to give those requests consideration.

 

[Extension7]

Anything else we provide beyond that is a free gift to the community. Every feature request, every vehicle request, anything - if it wasn't a feature listed on the store page, you're asking for a gift from a developer. Coupling those requests with insults only demotivates the developers and makes it a lot harder for them to give those requests consideration.

This really stood out me, makes me realize why a lot of developers tend to keep their mouths shut because 3 or 4 years down the line people will still whine when you said that you'd try to get 2 new tanks and transports in the game 4 or 5 months post release.

I appreciate your work you do TWI I really do, albeit slow to come out, it always caters to us in a nice way. Even though I don't post much or play RO2 as much anymore, it makes me glad to see you poke your head on here and defend yourself.

 

[Catalavos]

Correct me if I'm wrong, and this is not to ruffle feathers, but I seem to remember that both the Pz III and T-70 were both specifically mentioned on either the official Tripwire HOS page or Steam page but they no longer appear there now.

 

[Fafnir_6]

We've got a nearly complete T70 model we've offered to share with them, a Panzer III, and even some other vehicles if they are interested.

Oh man...Tell me its a Pz III Aus J1.


Cheers,


Fafnir_6

 

[=GG= Mr Moe]

Correct me if I'm wrong, and this is not to ruffle feathers, but I seem to remember that both the Pz III and T-70 were both specifically mentioned on either the official Tripwire HOS page or Steam page but they no longer appear there now.

Not ruffling feathers, but just answering Catalavos's question: Just last week, 'vehicles' were still mentioned on the Overview section/Coming after release paragraph at the bottom: Red Orchestra 2 Heroes of Stalingrad Overview

Since then, its been edited out. In fact, they seem to have taken out anything that mentions tanks and vehicles, I actually quoted it here in this thread on April 4th (also posted below):

-------------------------

I'm not going to support any 'vehicle' DLC aslong as the tanks and APCs that you still promise as free "after release content" aren't in the game.

Has it always said this on the overview page? I mean since before and at release time?

"New vehicles: We will roll out new vehicles for the game, including new tanks as well as armored transports."