Greetings Troopers!
It's that time of the year again, and the ModDB Mod of Year nominations are upon us once more. And this will also be our first MOTY under our new leadership, so let me hand you over to FSDev Dnamro as he lets you know just why First Strike is still a contender, and invites you to go out there and cast your vote for First Strike!
It's been a tumultuous year with EA dropping support for many of their older titles including BF2142 which has effectively killed the First Strike mod as a multiplayer game. However in this past year, the team released the First Strike 1.6 update which featured four brand new maps including the long awaited space boarding map Parmel Invasion, an impressive map which features space combat from cruisers down to starfighters, and for the first time integrates this with FPS infantry action on the same map as soldiers repel boarders and defend the space station at the heart of the map.
In addition to this there was Silver Station, a space based conquest map.
The community map which became Nesmazzda Conflict, which had the added
bonus of being co-op/singleplayer ready right off the bat.
And a little later the prison complex map set on the planet Dathomir.
Unfortunately, by this time most players had abandoned BF2142 as well, resulting in poor turn out. GameRanger managed to save BF2142, but this did not support mods such as First Strike.
With the death of the multiplayer side of the mod, the team decided to join forces with the Battlecry team to develop a free Star Wars game on the Unreal 4 Engine.
The team has been busy working through the issues of converting First strike to the Unreal 4 Engine. With a 10 year age difference between game engines, there is a lot of updating that has to happen, which makes for a slow process. All the textures have to be redone and many models will have to be updated as well. FSDev TALON has been hard at work in his spare time converting First Strike assets for use in Unreal 4, and has even been working on new material not yet seen in First Strike which will make its debut in the Unreal 4 Engine, and we have a preview for you of this work below.
The First Strike mod, however, lives on as a singleplayer experience, as work-arounds have been found to enable the game to continue with offline support. In fact First Strike is currently being revamped with the focus being on singleplayer with a beta release expected before the end of the year.
There are some exciting developments in the works for First Strike, keep your eyes peeled for the next news update for more on that. But until then, your votes will determine the future of First Strike. So go out and vote, and give us feedback in the forums or on the ModDB site.
See you on the Battlefield Troopers!
Singleplayer for the win :-)
Hell yeah. :-)
Like star wars battlefront, fallout, mercenaries, and red faction. Heck, even Kotor along with countless others did very well on just single player.
They need to make more deep stories along with damn fine single player campaigns for players these days. Now there all focusing on MMORPG's like Star Wars the Old Republic.
Drives me nuts when I have to enter a boss fight with like 3 other people just to continue the campaign. Royal pain is what it is.
Hi Doyle_138, we're more talking about converting First Strike assets for use in the Unreal 4 Engine. Then we'll be collaborating with the Battlecry guys in developing something new and Star Wars flavoured within Unreal 4, hopefully we'll be able to do more than have First Strike assets in there, but also take some of the gameplay style which made First Strike so popular over there too.
Who is this GameRanger you speak of? Is there still a last bf2142 server clinging on the last branch?
GameRanger is a facility which circumvents the need for the EA Master Server to be active to play multiplayer EA games, it basically emulates a LAN game if I understand it correctly. It works for BF2142, but there is no current workaround for mods of BF2142, so you can play BF2142 in some form via this, but not First Strike, Dnamro was in contact with the people with GameRanger at one point to see if they would continue their work on BF2142 to add more fidelity to the on-line experience for that game (not sure if the unlocks worked correctly in the last version I tested), and see if they could work specifically on getting First Strike to work, not sure if that went any further though.
If it emulates LAN, how can people all over the internet play on it and not just local?
The main difference between a Lan or offline account and a online account is that the online accounts were tracked by EA for a number of reasons to include stat tracking, unlocking weapons and abilities, controlling hacking and multiplayer cheating as well as preventing game piracy. Offline accounts are not tracked. Gameranger is free (Ad based) service that hosts a wide variety of game servers. The GameRanger devs currently have BF2142 set load up and play multiplayer using offline accounts, bypassing the master account logon server. There are no unlocked weapons or abilities because of the use of offline accounts. I have approached them about supporting First Strike, but they were overwhelmed trying to support the large number of games that EA dropped this summer. I will contact them again after the first of year and see where they are at. This would allow First Strike to continue to be played online multiplayer as it was intended. The only thing that would be lost would be stat tracking, which was for only bragging rights as there was no effect in game.
I'm not sure, it emulates LAN, in that it fools the game into thinking it is a LAN game, but then works over the internet rather than a local network.
Here is a link to their website that explains all about it:
Gameranger.com