A few days ago, a Kickstarter project was created by a Danish developer called Full Control who have recently acquired the rights to the Jagged Alliance series. Their project is to develop a "reset" rather than a "reboot" of the Jagged Alliance series. I’m not quite sure that that exactly means but I believe that unlike a reboot, they're not drastically changing the gameplay mechanics and they're also not rewriting the game lore. Jagged Alliance: Flashback (JA:F), which is the name of the proposed game, looks more like a prequel to Jagged Alliance 1 and 2.
I’ve decided to back the project and here are my reasons why you should too:
1. Story will be set in the late 1980s and act as an origin story for the mercenary organisation A.I.M
This means that JA:F will act as a kind of prequel to the series which means we’re receiving more Jagged Alliance canon. This also means we could get to see some familiar faces.2. Full Control is applying the K.I.S.S. principle and focusing on making the game a JA2 style game with 3D graphics.
While extra features are nice, I believe they take away from an already great formula used in the previous Jagged Alliance games. It’s good to see that Full Control will focus on the basics instead of promising Heaven and Earth to the fans.3. The game is being developed by an experienced team.
Not only that, but the team have already developed four turn-based strategy games already.4. The game will be DRM-free
5. Full Control is in contact with the original developers and hopes to recruit them.
6. Full Control are bringing back personality to the mercs
Thankfully Full Control have realised this was a major problem with the most recent Jagged Alliance games since without the memorable personalities for each of the mercs, Jagged Alliance was no different to any tactical strategy game out there. Here's what they have to say:One of the main complaints we had about recent attempts to make Jagged Alliance games was the removal of some of the humor and personality for each mercenary.
“Dont fix it if it ain’t broken” - remember?
So we are super happy to be able to bring back a lot of what defines the game - mercenary personality.
We are going to get back to the great 2d icons for each NPC and mercenary. They simply allow for much more personality than a generic 3d head that will never have as much detail as a well drawn 2d image. Together with some cool facial animations a lot of personality and feelings can be displayed.
Another very important aspect are the inter-team personalities. E.g. don’t put Fox and Buns together unless you want to listen to a cat fight making your ears bleed. While having the i-team working together will boost a teams performance.
A big amount of personality also comes from the voice over for the mercenaries. While we haven’t decided yet if we are going for English with a national accent - or having Ivan speak Russian only - we definitely want to get a strong personality shining through voice overs.
7. The I-team are returning
Do you remember Igor and Ivan Dolvich? Yeah they were awesome.Along with the Kickstarter page, check out the reddit IAmA that was done recently for more details.
Comments
Post a Comment