2015 in Review: Edain's Best Year! news

What a year! We've been working on Edain for over nine years now, but 2015 has been the best by far! Starting with the release of version 4.0 and culminating in a stunning first place in the Mod of the Year competition, the last twelve months saw one milestone after another.

We began the year with a promise: After more than two years of work, we would finally release Edain 4.0 in the first quarter of 2015. However, it would not be a full release - instead, we were going to put out a demo featuring the four core factions of Gondor, Rohan, Isengard and Mordor. Those were already fully complete, but we had lots of work left to do on our other five factions. However, we felt that our fans had waited long enough, and why not let you guys already play with what he had? Our plan was to subsequently add the other factions back in through updates. This would also give us the opportunity to react to fan feedback to the core gameplay of 4.0, which had been completely overhauled.

4.0 was a major milestone for us in several ways. Most importantly, we finally returned to the gameplay of the first Battle for Middle-Earth, meaning impressive castles, siege warfare and dynamic battles for settlements and outposts which form natural hotspots on the map. This had long been a dream of ours - all of us got into the series with the first game and we always felt it was the best of them all and closest to capturing the epic battles of the books and movies. However, it was lacking many things essential to a true Lord of the Rings strategy game - Dwarves and Elves, for starters! And those were things we could now add to the formula.

4.0 also marked the (frankly long overdue) fulfillment of another promise to our players: It was our first English version. The biggest change we would make if we could do Edain all over again is releasing it in both English and German from the start. However, when we began developing this mod, it was part of a then-thriving German modding scene and we never really thought about the international scene that much, as it was occuppied by a host of large and fantastic English mods. As BfME modding started to decline over the years, we were surprised and delighted to find that more and more players from all over the world were drawn to Edain - despite the fact that they couldn't even understand German! Unfortunately, by that time so much new text and sound had accumulated that a translation was no easy task. It took us longer than we liked, but now Edain can finally be enjoyed without language barriers by players everywhere.

Fun fact: On our Youtube channel, German viewers are still the largest part of our user base, making up 30% of our viewers. Behind that are Poland (8,8%), the United States (7,3%), the United Kingdom (4,5%) and Russia (4%). Edain has also found fans in such diverse countries as Turkey, the Netherlands, Syria nd the Czech Republic - this is one of our accomplishments we are most proud of, especially because we never imagined our mod would be this successful. A big thank you goes out to all our players who made this possible!

Along with our first English release, we also made a concerted effort to grow our community. Our forums at Forum.modding-union.com had long been a place mainly reserved for the German community, but with 4.0 we greatly expanded our English forum sections to give all our fans a place to come together and talk about all things Edain. Managing two communities at once, however, has proved a substantial task - we now release all our updates in both languages at the same time or at least not far apart and we try to engange in discussion with both German and English users. This is still something we struggle with on occasion, as it quite simply takes a significant amount of time, but we're committed to keeping on doing our best and improve.

The new Edain Launcher would not have been possible without the help of our community.

Working with the community has been extremely rewarding while developing Edain 4.0. Not only have we received lots of valuable feedback and many great ideas, but quite a few community members have contributed even more actively to building this mod and this community. They have helped us betatest new versions, they have volunteered as forum moderators, they have organized tournaments and recorded a large amount of the sounds we needed to actually release a full English version (and on top of that, Forhir even composed entirely new sound tracks for us!). On Youtube, you can now find both some great fan videos and our own trailers created by Edain supporters. Even our launcher and interface owe a lot to the contributions of magickoala. To any and all Edain supporters, we say: It has been, and will always be, our honor working with you!

Edain 4.0 has been our most successful version by a large margin so far. 10 months after release, it has been downloaded almost 80.000 times. Our previous version, 3.8.1. managed 110.000 - but that took almost three years! But of course, not all feedback was positive. We always knew this version would be divisive for removing the free building system and replacing it with fixed castles. From the outset, we accepted that we might lose some players along the way. But our approach has always been to develop the Lord of the Rings strategy game that we would ourselves love to play and hoping that others would share our vision. This has served us well in the past and we feel it's the only way to bring you a mod that is still developed with love and passion even ten years after it was founded.

What we did not expect was the sheer hatred we would receive from a very small but vocal minority. In the weeks and months after the release of 4.0, we had to weather a barrage of deeply personal attacks and even witnessed people gleefully plotting to kill members of the team. It was frankly disheartening - and extremely grotesque - to see how people could sink so low because a hobby project offered free of charge wasn't 100% to their liking. However, the good far outweighed the bad: After Edain 4.0, we also saw more constructive debate, more positive feedback and more new players than ever before!

Of course, the initial release of 4.0 was far from perfect: Over the coming months, we would take the feedback of the community to heart and make many adjustments. This ranged from quickly increasing the number of settlements per map to contiuanally adding and refining material from the Hobbit movies. And we also had a promise to keep, namely expanding the demo with the remaining factions. Three months after the initial release, Version 4.1 brought the race the community had wanted more badly than any other: The Dwarves! For Version 4.2 and the Lothlorien, we took a little more time, but we feel it has greatly paid off. Not only is Lothlorien one of the most unique and visually impressive factions in the game right now, 4.2 is also a notably stable and bug-free release. And of course, it is the version that catapulted us to the top of the Mod of the Year awards!

This victory struck us utterly speechless. We had made a concerted effort to get a good spot in the awards, of course: In the previous year we had snagged fifth place - already an impressive achievement for a mod for a low-profile game like BfME II - and that was before we even had released 4.0 and the English translation. This year, we felt we might have a shot at third place if we got really lucky. And then you all blew us completely away. We were scrolling down the list of winners, already accepting that with no sign of Edain at rank four or three we probably missed the mark this time. And then there we were, right at the top. An amazing feeling, and all thanks to your incredible support!

After an already great year, we couldn't have asked for a better way to end 2015. Nor a better way to demonstrate that while 4.0 may yet be incomplete and still have its flaws, we certainly chose the right path for this version. For 2016, our plans are quite simple: Keep sticking to our vision, keep working with the community, keep improving! We have already done lots of work of Edain 4.3, which will be the biggest 4.0 update yet.

It will introduce both the Angmar faction and a fundamental rework of all three Dwarven realms, moving closer to both the movie designs and Tolkien's lore. Finding the perfect balance between those two great aspects of The Lord of the Rings has always been our number one goal. We hope you'll continue to follow us along on this fantastic journey!