Progress Update: March 2019 news - Yuuzhan Vong at War mod for Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption

Progress Update: March 2019

"Yuuzhan Vong at War is coming to you in Q4 of 2018" ... so, where is it then, besides not released? This article will address a few pressing matters, including where the project stands, what you have to expect this year and why we missed our release by two and a half months and counting.

Project Status Update

We're close to the first release, closer than ever in fact, but we're also aware that we've said so in early December as well, but more on that matter in Missing the Release Date.

As you're aware we're currently working on a Space Skirmish release of Yuuzhan Vong at War. The first release will include four playable factions and lay the ground work for all future content updates. We've spent a lot of our time on optimising all our art assets in such a way that we can provide you with a solid, stable and fluent experience, an effort that has been more than worth it according to out beta testers. Those very testers have been incredibly helpful during the closed beta period that has been running since around July of 2018 and besides the performance optimisations, that has given us the time to root out a ton of bugs, glitches, and balancing issues.

Yuuzhan Vong at War -- The Skirmish Battles (v1.0.0) Content

• Fully playable Galactic Empire Subfaction: Why? Because nostalgia, and because we can!
• Fully playable Rebel Alliance Subfaction: Again, because we can!
• Fully playable Imperial Remnant Subfaction: You won't be able to play them during GC mode, but at least in Skirmish you can serve under the command of Grand Admiral Gilad Pelleaon.
• Fully playable Yuuzhan Vong Faction: The Vong are coming! And they are scary and beautifully disgusting thanks to the tireless efforts of our latest team member Doci.
• Replacement of most vanilla assets (space stations, asteroids, defence satellites, planets, ...).
• Full English, German and French text localisations, with Spanish to come in a future update.

Yuuzhan Vong at War -- The Skirmish Battles (v1.0.0) Status

The content sounds good, doesn't it, but what still needs doing?

• Asteroid animations.
• Final balancing adjustments to Vong units.
• Final texture and rigging tweaks to several Vong units.
• Particle edits for Vong projectiles.
• Space station textures and rigging.

Future Plans

To work with a futureproof concept as worked out by our business analysts, we will implement a game-as-a-service business model, so ... Ok, kidding ... kind of.
Going forward we plan on releasing a steady stream of patches and content updates. Two content updates have already been planned out and will be talked about after the initial release, but let's just say what's the Vong War without the New Republic? And shouldn't we also include the saviours of the galaxy?

With Steam being our primary target platform, most of you will receive these updates automatically as they get released, and luckily - as it's a Skirmish-Only version - we won't have to deal with breaking savegames with patches.
For all other versions of the game, we're currently working on a release strategy that makes sure that you receive updates with as little hassle as possible. Once we have a strategy this will be discussed in a small news post.

Missing the Release Date

So what happened to the release? Real life happened, all at once. Three of our core team members spent most of their time at work during December and most of January, and their workload is only slowly recovering, another team member fell sick for quite a while, add the winter holidays into the mix and you have a delay and bottleneck that drags on. It was almost February until production resumed at a somewhat steady pace, and only since early March we're back in full swing.

So when will the mod come out? Even though we only have a few last issues to resolve, we won't give a date again. The only thing we can say is: As soon as possible!

We hope we could clear up at least a few of your questions (and the screenshots got you excited again), but so far "that's all folks!"
The Shapers - Team Yuuzhan Vong at War

P.S.: If things go just right we should be able to celebrate our release with some friends ... Stay tuned!