The Road to Forgotten Hope 2.5 Part 2 news

Hello and welcome back to another Forgotten Hope 2 update.

As you can tell by the above banner, we now have a concrete release day. We hope to see you all on the servers on:

First things first: we'd like to show the amazing trailer for version 2.5 made by Hawky:

There have been a number of improvements made to some of the gameplay mechanics. Most notably to the artillery spotting system. You will now be able to see the name of your spotter, and the system will prefer to automatically change to a new spot made by the same spotter instead of just the next spot in the queue. Additionally, there is a new camera position for mobile artillery and the behaviour of all artillery cameras has been improved.

A new push variant called Adaptive Push has been added. In this mode you will be able to bypass flags that normally would need to be captured to advance. These pocket flags will become isolated and easy to overrun - but watch out, the defenders will have a 60 second window to recapture it so make sure it is secure before moving on! You'll find this mode on Battle of Brest and Pegasus.

Even though Finland was a small nation of 4 million inhabitants, it fought three distinct wars during World War 2 and managed to defend its independence in the post war world, in stark contrast to other nations in the Soviet sphere of influence. The first one, the Winter War, was fought in 1939 and 1940 against an overwhelming Soviet invasion and ended with the loss of territory to Russia. The Continuation War of 1941 saw Finland fight at the side of Germany in order to regain these regions, making it the only democracy in the Axis camp. In September 1944 Finland signed a separate peace with the Soviets, on the condition that they expel all German forces from their territory. This was achieved in the Lapland war, raging until early 1945. Our Finnish Army playermodels were made by the combined efforts of Zero, Stubbfan, Kev4000 and Roughbeak.

Ts4EVER has also posted a nice overview of the 5 maps featured in this update, check out his devblog here.

Finally today, we'd like to list some of the changes in version 2.5:

2 New Nations:

Soviet Union
Finland

4 New playermodels:

Red Army

Finnish Army

2nd Australian Expeditionary Force

British Airborne

5 New maps:

Arad

Dukla Pass

Pegasus

Sammatus

Seelow Heights

34 New weapons, including:

Mosin Nagant M91/30

PPSh-41

Suomi KP/-31

Volkssturmgewehr 45

Sten Mk. V

19 New Allied vehicles, including:

T-34

IS-2

Il-2

Katyusha BM-13N

SU-152

M36B1

5 New Axis vehicles:

PzKpfw 35-S 739(f)

PzKpfw T-34E 747(r)

Wurfrahmen auf Infanterie-Schlepper UE(f)

Captured T-20 Komsomolets

Semovente da 75/18

Many further changes, including:

New "whiz" sounds for shells in flight

Deployable weapons now show a 3D HUD marker in the location that they will appear

Flare gun and spotlights are now brighter

Automatic fast bleed at the end of a round

AT mines stick to statics, AP mines no longer stick to vertical surfaces, all mines take longer to deploy

Uncountable fixes to collision meshes, materials, animations, sounds and effects - almost every 2.48 vehicle, map and weapon updated in some way

Performance, stability and memory usage improvements, mainly in python

That's all for today, but be sure to come back tomorrow for the big release. Until then, feel free to visit our IRC channel, our public forums, and/or our Twitter and Facebook pages to discuss this update and other news.