Lebatron
Posts: 2166
Joined: 5/30/2005 From: Upper Michigan Status: offline
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Yep, I was on the design team for AWD. In fact, I'm proud to say I came up with the name 'A World Divided' The little 'C' box in the upper left corner of the main game window shows the credits page. One reason why my mod is not included in a later patch, and Global Glory is, is that it has a new map that would make it incompatible with certain data files. Global Glory includes all the advanced stuff that I and a few others thought to add long after it went Gold. Brian, the maker of Global Glory, made his scenario to his own personal taste in the same way I have to mine. I disagree with a lot of the minor details in say the events and where and how much to place of undeveloped resources etc. and I completely steer clear of the Russian surrender stuff. I think auto victory set at the right number works fine. After I redesigned the Pacific ocean and eastern Russian from the first game(regular WAW) for the second(AWD) I still wasn't satisfied. Russia, the Mediterranean, Africa, etc could have been better. That would require more than just another alternate scenario that could be patched in, ie GG, it would require a full mod. The result of my continued map tweaking is Deluxe AWD. Matrix Games has a policy of not officially supporting Mods. Users install them at their own risk. However, there is no risk here FYI. All you could do is screw up were to place the dat folder. And I try to give good instruction on how to install properly to avoid that. I can understand why the prices don't drop just because it gets older. The games here are very niche market and sell nothing like games from EA etc so developers can't go and discount their product several months after it's been out like Xbox and Playstation games do. Developers on here make their money on these games for several years and need that whole window of time to really justify going into work each day and make another. In the wargame world, a few years old is still relatively new. 5-6 years old middle aged. I would say AWD is now just entering middle age. There does come a day when certain programs do see significant discounts but AWD is by no means obsolete. One of the final patches put in a resolution scaler so as monitors get bigger the game could adjust to that. That's one of the things that has really helped to keep this game from going obsolete. Who would want to play at 1024x768 these days? Since the game is comfortable to play on any display now and the map and unit graphics look fine for a 2D map game there is no reason to suggest that it would not satisfy any player looking for a fast playing grand strategy game on WWII. I predict, and this is already coming true, that wargames being made today, including a few years ago, will have very long legs. Two reasons account for this. We are seeing diminishing advances in unit graphics because we have already reached a point where they look nice. The days of really blocky graphics is long over. And second, devs have finally gotten smart about building in resolution scalers so as bigger monitors become available players can enjoy seeing more of the map at once. Since AWD meets both of those criteria it could be a favorite to some for several more years yet. I will continue to play it until the day another game like it comes out that does this style of game better. So far nothing has. Perhaps we will have an AWD2 some day to retire AWD.
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Jesse LeBreton, AKA Lebatron Development team- GG's WAW A World Divided
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