Comeback for Republic at War news

Comeback for Republic at War

Look out everyone and tell your friends...
We're putting the band back together!

It was at the end of summer and I was at Busch Gardens waiting in line for a ride. While waiting I struck up a conversation with a young guy also waiting in line.
He like me was a SW fan and the topic inevitably turned to SW gaming. He said his favorite SW game was EAW/FOC and that he played a killer mod on it called Republic at War.
He began to gush about how much fun he had with mod and that it was the greatest one he had played etc.
At some point I couldn't hold it any longer and revealed that I was the creator. His reply was "Oh my God, you're z3r0x?"
You can maybe guess his reaction and it's something that every modder or content creator actually works for if it's not for the money. He asked me why I stepped away from modding I gave him the answer.
As the conversation went on I realized how much I missed modding, and all that went with it.
The EAW Community, Friends I had made, and of course creating wonderful content for the Star Wars Universe.

You see, I never was totally absent from the community. I was regularly monitoring the EAW Mod scene but without interacting much. Even the rest of the current team had no real contact with me.
And for them, as far as I know, lots of things changed. So why leave at all? It's a complex answer but it deserves a complete and honest answer. The mod was in good hands with some amazing people
who I knew I could trust to honor my wishes and continue with my vision. After 7 years of constant modding it was time for a long break. Having kids will kind of take your focus away from modding.
Life was changing rapidly. When I started this mod I was 29 Years old with no kids. I am 45 now and have 3 kids... A lot has changed! What has not changed is my passion for the SW Universe,
games, and my passion for working on and creating mods. Its time to get back to work!

Now with that being said, its time for some big news. The team is back, including myself and Warbnull we are motivated and ready to work! We have added some amazing new team members to enhance and round out the team.
All total we have added an additional 5 new members to the team. We now have 12 dedicated pros working on this project. That is the largest amount of staff we have ever had!
We are not done hiring and we want even more staff. We still need dedicated testers, a PR Manager, Social Media Manager, and if you have coding, art, or other talents shoot us a message or hop on our Discord Server.

In the past I announced that we will keep working on the mod however with the release of v1.2.5, which enabled multiplayer GC again,
nothing much was done. There are a couple of reasons which I don't want to enumerate all, but in the end I raised some hopes which, to be honest,
were just not realistic given the shape the team was in. I need to apologize for that and on the other hand want to give a huge thanks for everyone who still hung in there and stayed with us, staff and fans.
Even after such a huge hiatus we were in the #3 mods of Steam and still ranked in the Top 100 on Moddb

So in order to make things much better in the future, in the last few weeks Anakin and I have been talking for hours on end and the topic was how we want to continue.
First off: Yes! We want to continue. The story of Republic at War was not yet told completely and there are tons of things we wanted to have in the mod.
This of course includes new never-seen feature, maps and units. So this was sorted out quickly.
But how shall we continue without making the same mistakes we did in the past a second time?

We thought of a couple things that need improvement in our modding philosophy and organization and we want to tell you all about that now.

- There will not be any major releases/expansion packs anymore. The gaming community has moved away from large releases and relies mainly on a smaller content DLC model.
The benefits doing this are:
1. Higher fan satisfaction as we are able to release updates much more frequently
2. It's far easier to plan the next releases based on the feedback that we receive from you.
So if there are urgent things that need fixing or need to be added we can just choose these things over some others and put them into the next release short time after.
3. With Steam Workshops we can ship updates much much faster without requiring you to do anything but just launching the mod.
Back in the days where we needed to distribute mods with .zip files, these massive feature updates were necessary to avoid too many installation issues.
4. Smaller releases in general just fit the current times much more. Neither in software nor in game development you see massive updates get released too much.
5. This all means LOTS OF RELEASES!!!!! With high quality content.

- There will be much more interaction with you regarding what will come in future releases. We have several things planned for this.
This includes polls where you can vote for new stuff or prioritize one thing over the other.
Also we will share our task and bug tracker with you, once it exists, where you can transparently read what's going on or what's planned for the future
but you also be able to file your own bug reports or feature requests there.

- The mod will be developed for Steam only. If it works for the disk and GoG version, fine, but if not we won't fix these issues are more.
The Steam version just got some exciting updates, driven by the modding community, and we would be fool not to make use of these changes and instead prefer legacy compatibility.


Please keep in mind that the whole team is currently re-forming and several modding skills need to be re-learned
and an optimal workflow within the team needs to be found and established. Thus you will not immediately see all of the planned changes at once.
For the first releases we are expecting things to take a little longer but also get much better as time goes by.

Lastly there are two more important things we want to announce with this update.

We mentioned earlier needing dedicated testers. While we plan on some limited public testing do have a immediate need for dedicated Alpha and Beta testers.
Testers will get access to in-dev versions. If you see yourself in such a role please also reach out to Anakin.

So we know this was a lot of reading for now and we still have more news to share. For this we will update again next week, so stay tuned!

Best Regards
The Republic at War Modding Team