Breathtaking

[Liljagare]

I still like how it looks, and it seems like fun, but keep wondering how similar it will feel to Battle For Middle Earth it will "feel".

[Ryan Zelazny]

I'm going to go a bit off topic here with my rant, but it's all to do with our release date postings and the story behind them so here we go...

I have to give a thanks to all our fans who have stuck with us and watched DoF grow as we've built it. We started this in November 2001 and even though our staff and our game has changed, a lot of the fans who have joined have stuck around and really made us feel great about what we do. Without your support our jobs wouldn't be as rewarding as they are.

With so many release dates posted and gone you've come to notice a trend and that's "push back, push back, push back". This trend is because of a few factors, number one us being a young developer, this is our first title and so it's been hard for us to get off the ground. We started like you guys, on a forum talking about games and we decided to make one (well, the founders did anyway, I joined afterwards). But we've done pretty much the impossible, atleast what most major developers and publishers think is impossible, we've designed a fun, good looking game that can compete with theirs with basically no budget. We started with 0 and we got some lucky breaks due to the diligence of our team and especially our producer, Konstantin and programming director John. They turned a bunch of kids who wanted to make a game into a fully incorporated developer.

Even with a success story like that, that deteriorated a lot of the progress in our game. We had to become realistic, and this is something that sucks to hear and it was really hard for us to admit it, but in 1 title we can't do everything we want. This has been our second hinderance, we wanted to do so much that when we branched out and tried to do it, we ended up harming the progress of the core game you see emerging. If we wanted to do everything else you would be expecting a 2010 or even 2011 release, and the longer we took the worse we looked in the eyes of publishers. So we ended up having to bite the bullet, cut things out (3 other factions), add things in (mmorts, xbox 360 version) and put together a schedule that can make us both profitable, yet something the fans could really enjoy.

However there are a lot of positives that have come out of this predicament. We've made mistakes, ones we have learnt from so that continuing on we can make a great game and do it in a timely fashion. We will have proven we can design games, games that not only can compete with existing big budget titles, but that can set standards within the genre.

Darvin is correct, you can expect to see DoF on shelves in 2009, and no one could be more excited than us developers. To know that you've toiled away for X many years, some ranging all the way from the full 8 to perhaps 1 or 2 just gives you a great sense of accomplishment. We can only hope that we live up to your expectations, and for all the things you've missed in DoF that we planned to add, or some of the great suggestions you've given us that we'll do our best to work into DoF expansions and DoF 2.

[fyro11]

Bravo! *Clap...clap*

*Looks around* Hey! Am I the only one here?

No, seriously though. I can fully understand the amount of effort such an endeavour would need. I'm sure many other past efforts have failed as well, so bravo once again.

[nickson104]

indeed bravo... brilliant speech sounds professional too... are you the spokesperson? well after reading that i actually feel quite special to be a part of this community, i dont think there is any other community that can compete with this one in many aspects

[LiTos456]

12/21/2012

Hell Yea