Nordic Wind: We almost Had it
If you read this all the way through, I’m gonna let you in on a really exciting bit of news for 20. First, though I’m going to tell ya about the part that I’m bummed out by.
A while back I typed up an very excited blog post about the future DPTST projects I had thought about. You can find that post here. The very first one on the list was a concept for a campaign called Nordic Wind. I also stated that it was one of a couple projects on the list that was extremely likely to happen, just that it was dependent on the release of the Kola peninsula map. Well that has finally come to pass.
Even though I predicted a couple years before Kola was released, it’s out now and the overwhelming verdicts are in: It’s meh. Some have noted the area modeled is really lackin. I personally feel that it’s super low detail, and has a lot of shader issues. I would have liked to see them take some more time on it, but it’s still out. In the other camp however, there are some who think it’s extremely cool and the potential isn’t lost on me. I need to tell you though that, progress on NW was entirely because of one good day. We should relay some thanks to ChaosRifle, Frontline Chief, Whomst Actual, Rooftop Korean, Historia Gaming (lotta 2 word names these days), KiitaVT and MIkhaVT. Basically what happened was I invited Chaos and FC for a little casual flight time on 20, and I was expecting that to be it………….. except that wasn’t it. Pretty soon other people started hopping in. The server wasn’t necessarily packed, but man was a lot going on. Anti Shipping Missions, Deep Strikes into Iranian territory, MIG and Phantom hunting. We beat the campaign in a couple hours, and I had a blast. The part I was surprised by, was it seems like you guys did too. It seems to me like we have DPSIM Telemonian basically dialed in on gameplay and features, and the major gripes were addressed. That’s incredible to me, except Alexander wept for there were no more lands to conquer.
Telemonian will be getting additional expansions in the coming months, but first I wanted to address one more gripe from Chaos. He doesn’t like Persian Gulf. That’s not an unpopular opinion either. PG is starting to look pretty dated, and oh boy is it overused. So I figured, the easy solution here is to leverage the recent launch of the Kola map, and build a whole new DPSIM. The new DPSIM had a lot of super cool features to it, including a 1:1 replica of the 1986 Soviet air defense network, with randomization at the start of each campaign, so that you never actually know what the SAM threat is…. even if it’s highly realistic. There would be an incredible 4 separate AIs each running their respective countries. There was even an advanced self controlled logistical AI, that would make BMS players blush.
And it’s all been scrapped.
Ok not scrapped, but put on an indefinite pause. There were 2 factors. One was that the amount of people I normally work with on these things have shrunk, basically to just me. The scale of the AI that Nordic Wind is going to require is bigger than any other campaign we put out before. In the past, some DPTST projects could be built in just a couple of months. When Telemonian was released, it’s Day 1 operation, was finished in 3 weeks. and the entire campaign was done in a month in a half. That’s for campaigns of around a sixth of the scale of NW. that puts Nordic Wind’s dev time at around a year, and I don’t have the time or frankly the money to spend a year on a project that most people aren’t even going to play. Ah yeah, that’s the second part. Kola’s initial reception has been extremely poor, and some of my target audience has said they don’t even know if they’re gonna pick it up. I also don’t think it’s particularly great form to leave all versions of the server locked behind two 70 dollar paywalls that ED calls maps.
Im not leaving you with nothing though, because it ever so happens that there was always a back up plan. A plan that kept the hyper realistic soviet simulation of Nordic Wind, but in the caucuses region. A hyper realistic CVW-20 Experience known as Liberty Forge
