maitrebongo
Posts: 298
Joined: 3/18/2014 Status: offline
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Like many of us, I entered the world of wargaming a long time ago, at a time when computers were not used to play. We pushed tokens on cardboard boards on the living room table ... Squad Leader was the first tactical wargame I played in this context. As for many players of this era, it was a real crush and gradually I spent a fortune by buying the boxes of Squad Leader and those of Advanced Squad Leader. The personal life of each and the evolution of the leisure society have made it increasingly difficult to find opponents and then find the time to play a full ASL game. So I turned to computer wargames that can do without adversaries and whose games are much shorter, more in line with our current way of giving time to leisure. The boxes of Squad Leader and ASL have started to pick up the dust on my shelves and I do not leave them anymore today to contemplate the content with nostalgia. When VASL appeared, I thought it would be the solution to finally be able to replay ASL games; Opponents available all over the world, all the time ... But I realized that I myself had evolved to another way of enjoying a tactical wargame. I did not want to spend as much time as before, I did not want to be forced to master all the complex rules that characterize ASL ... Years of comfort brought by the practice of computer wargames had made me a lazy wargamer , who wanted the computer to handle all logistical constraints so that I focus only on tactics to deploy. I think I've tried all the computer-based tactical wargames out there, from Steel Panther to Close Combat to more exotic things like Armored Brigade. The list is long. Unfortunately, they all have something that does not satisfy me; the graphic aspect for some, the real time that I do not like for others, the absence of multiplayer ... All these tactical wargames nonetheless have in common to claim a filiation with Squad Leader, the ancestor. Thinking about it, that's what I'm looking for: Recovering the sensations I experienced playing Squad Leader, but on a computer, without the complexity of the rules, and against an artificial intelligence. Simply nostalgia ... After playing Tiger on the Hunt, which with its ASL Mod seemed to meet this expectation, I realized that a key factor was to take into account: the immersion in remembers. And for me, this immersion is primarily visual, therefore graphic. And here, both VASL and Tiger on the Hunt do not satisfy me at all. Their aesthetic poverty is not enough to immerse me in my sublimed remembers of Squad Leader. So I turned to game engines that would recreate the variety and completeness of materials and scenarios in the ASL universe while causing this immersion by their graphics qualities. I naturally leaned first on the computer adaptation of my second favorite tactical paper wargames: Lock'n'Load Tactical. I created for this system a number of Mods that went in this direction (see here), but for reasons that I can not explain here, I had to stop suddenly my work on this game. So, I became interested in my third favorite: Conflict of Heroes. I discovered a computer game not finished, abandoned, deserted ... And yet looking more closely with enormous potential to achieve what is important to me (see here). Its lack of facility for modding has condemned it against its direct competitor (Lock'n'Load tactical) and yet, digging a little in its architecture and accepting some compromises on non-essential elements (like the interface by example) it seems possible to turn it into a real gem and maybe even to make it a base for something much bigger. I would never understand why developers spend so much energy, passion, resources to create computer warfare systems with such a high potential for evolution and leave them abandoned ... An answer may have been given to me by a developer one day when he told me that he thought that old school wargame lovers like me (and maybe you ...) was a niche market at the time, inside a niche market. The only solution in my opinion to get these games out of oblivion could come from the community of fans of this type of gameplay (that simulates the game on the table) by the production of free mods, made with passion for lack of professionalism, that will fill this gap in this playful videogame offer.
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"Impossible is not French" Napoleon Bonaparte
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