Welcome to our twenty-third developers update for Call to Arms! We will use these updates to keep you posted on the progress of the development and features.
The development is in full swing and we are progressing very well. We have reached the last quarter of the development and the game release is in sight. We have set up internal milestones in support of the release preparations. This means, we are clearly prioritizing each task to finish the game in a timely manner without making any compromises on the quality we want to achieve.
While the programming team is currently focusing on the 3rd and 1st person mechanics and soon on the new in-game UI. Our team of artists is already working on the new factions to reduce the waiting time after release!
For 3rd and 1st person, we are working on a multitude of changes. We just introduced high quality 1st person human hand models and different damage depending on body areas, as a next step we will be working on improving the animations. Further improvements will include weapon blow back effects, breathing mechanics, slow walking in zoom, new scopes, hit direction feedback, commanding squad members in 3rd person and many more features that improve the whole ground battle experience!
Scopes and sights vary on the type of weapon you are using now. If you are controlling a soldier, a decent vignette effect will also highlight the more accurate aiming and slower walk speed.
Some humble words
First of all, we are very grateful for the support we have received over the many months since we started the development of Call to Arms. The feedback has been extremely valuable to us and we are excited to see how the game is finally shaping up and is becoming a new and fun experience for everyone. Unfortunately, we still have this regular amount of reviewers complaining about the free version, microtransactions, Season Pass without playing the game at all, or reading the available information about these issues. Therefore, we would like to address this once and for all: the purchased editions of the game did not turn into a free game. The game is still up for sale. Maybe the time of demos is so far away by now, that some forgot that it’s actually a good thing if you can try a game out before buying.
Are we milking customers? No, we are adjusting ourselves to the reality we all live in. A reality in which the grand majority of developers are struggling with the flood of games on all platforms, with exploding marketing and development costs and with completely oversaturated markets. A reality in which last year almost 1000 people lost their jobs in the German games industry alone, while we were still hiring people and paying our team on time. If we don’t learn to adjust ourselves, then we will be just another name on a very long and sad list of studios. Sometimes this means radical changes, as we have seen with Call to Arms lately. However, these radical changes increased the player counts by 5 times and increased our profits to a level where we can continue to dedicate all of our resources to the game, which ultimately results in a much better game for everyone.
You can be with or against change, but you can only decide between more and better games of that type with a different business model or no further type of these games at all. So, let us work together on making this a success story for many years to come and focus on what is important: a great game!