Well, hello there!
As you might have noticed, we recently released a new expansion for our other strategy game - Wargame: Red Dragon - which in the past few months took some time out of our schedule. Now we are fully back in the Steel Division 2 saddle.
This means a couple of things, one of them being that we are going to return to our original rhythm of one blog post each week - hoorah! It also means that we can finally spend time on that one request that seems to keep cropping up: maps.
Read on!
A development disclaimer
All right - we hear you loud and clear. New maps are wanted by the Steel Division 2 community. We got some interesting news for you. But, before we continue, a little explanation of why we are not churning out new environments every other week.
Simple reason: it’s damn hard, with the amount of time needed to design, create, balance, fine tune, and produce a map being rather considerable. This especially rings true for a small independent team here at Eugen Systems.
And because we need to make sure our maps play well, taking into account a wide variety of factors from the number of players to types of cover, it’s easier said than done to just flip out a map editor or an existing map.
However, this doesn’t mean we don’t want to provide you with more environments and cool locations. Leading us to…
Incoming new map: Kostritza
Rejoice! A new map is in the works: Kostritza. Full disclosure: this map is actually not “new” since it was the very first environment designed for Steel Division 2. It served as a testbed for terrain placement, lightning models, elevation, that sort of thing. It was also used as the scene and setting for our first trailers. However, we never actually featured Kostritza in-game, as the intent of this map was mostly to serve as eye candy, not rigorous online battles.
Kostritza is a large clearing surrounded by woods & marshes, North of the Orsha-Kieve highway. A sector already featured in several existing maps (Bobr, Krupki, ...). You can see also see the village mentionned on the Beresina Army General campaign's map.
We took Kostritza off the shelf, dusted it off, and are now getting it ready for public consumption. Our designers are currently reworking Kostritza to be featured as a small 1v1 public and server-locked “tactical” version map coming soon.
DISCLAIMER: this is the ORIGINAL version, currently being reworked, NOT the final one.
More maps variants, and one cancellation
That’s not all. We are also working on creating new variants of the Tannenberg 10v10 map. By limiting the playable zones on parts of the vast battlefield, we’ll be able to make different, smaller versions. This will introduce some additional variety in the map rotation. More details will come soon!
There is one sad note: after much time spent on our long-awaited urban map - known as Wołomin - we have decided to lay this fickle beast to rest and cancel it. Why? From the many (many) tests that we ran on it, the very early game, the first 10 minutes, were reasonably fun, but afterward… not so much. With the central town destroyed, players would find themselves in a void where once city blocks stood, now an expansive killing field with infantry all but assured to be slaughtered in the open while crossing it. From Phase B onward, this tactical wasteland, plus an increasing influx of troops, made the map lose most of its fun and quickly delve into a boring grind.
A solution we pondered for some time was to replace the “city block” terrain element with a new “ruins” one (with different gameplay values still usable by infantry), but this would have required an extraordinary amount of work, not only on Wołomin but also on all existing Steel Division 2 maps. A resource sink, difficult to justify as our small team.
See you around
At ease, commander. We’ll be back with our regular schedule from this point onwards. See you next week with fresh details on an additional batch of (new) balance changes affecting some of our Allied divisions!
Let us know what you think. Do this through our Steam forums and Eugen forums, or check our (Facebook and Twitter). Looking for an online game? Visit the kick-ass Discord server or Reddit page.
See you on the battlefield!