Hello everyone, time for an update!
We want to thank everybody for their useful input on the previous blog.
It helps us improve things every time, so keep it coming and we will take it all in.
These days mark the 75th anniversary of one of the most significant battles of the course of recent human military history.
So, 75 years after the fact, you can start re- enacting this historic battle and find out just why so much work has gone into it.
At the moment, about two thirds of the 3D modeling tasks related to the battle are finished and we are underway with scenarios and maps. As with every game, this proves to be quite a task but we are moving ahead as planned.
To commemorate the fact that the end of the battle is 75 years ago, we want to show you some progress that typifies the type of fighting that took place inside the city.
The fierceness of the battle and the circumstances under which it was fought led to horrendous casualties; The Axis suffered 628.000 total casualties and The USSR suffered 1.128.000 total casualties. By the end of the battle, many soldiers were suffering from illness and lice and were hardly capable of fighting.
We cannot model the lice and the illness, but we are working hard to make things rather realistic. As mentioned earlier, we’re working on maps and these have many buildings and wrecked buildings that players will want to use in- game; that’s why we want buildings to be usable and interactable also when they have been ruined. Check the screenies below.
HD link
Here’s a generic building with multiple floors:
HD link
You can see from this screenie that we intend to show the city in a rather damaged state. We want to offer you a battleground that looks and feels like the gates of hell and which is usable right down to almost every little corner, just like the real thing. We think that because of this, gameplay will feel more realistic. As you may know, the snipers played their part. Messengers did their dangerous job too. Engineers tried to lay phone lines all the time. Can you make yours survive? Will you know how to “hug the enemy”? Will your supplies reach you or the enemy? Can your artillery bomb the right spot?
Some rather iconic names from the battle will appear in- game, such as Pavlov’s house. Modeling these is quite a task because every bit that is known about them should be modeled correctly of course. In fact, Pavlov’s house was remodelled over two times already as we kept digging for documents about how it really looked. This is our “Fallen fighters square” (the map that you guys elected a while ago):
HD link
We have planned some more Stalingrad maps, more about those in a later blog.
Did you know?
- Pavlov’s house was named after the Soviet army sergeant that first occupied it with his men.
- When surviving Italian troops arrived back in Italy after the battle, the Fascist regime tried to hide them from public life as their appearance was considered too shocking.
- The Romanian R-2 tank, of which about 84 were serviceable at the time of Operation Uranus, was almost identical to the German Panzer 35(T) as it came from the same Czech production line in 1938. The battle proved that this type had to be relegated to training duty. Some 77 had been either destroyed or abandoned during the battle.