Dear Players,
I know that I had announced a patch and abandoned it, but this time I'm sure there will indeed be a patch. As I replayed my own campaign, I encountered many problems that I think are to be resolved. Most of them have got to do with RR being initially optimized for Retail FreeSpace, that is, the good old FreeSpace 2 as released by Volition. Now that most FreeSpace players use FreeSpace Open, I feel it is imperative to update RR to work more or less well in FreeSpace Open. Naturally, that means that the new release will not even work on Retail. I'm sorry for those who prefer vanilla FreeSpace a la Volition, but time has slipped by it.
The patch's main purpose, however, is not only to optimize it for FSO 3.6.9, but to go through the dialogs as thoroughly as possible. I know that Renegade's main weakness was its dialog and their grammar. As I went through my campaign again, I noticed that there are still a bunch of mistakes that need to be corrected. Some dialogs (mostly briefings) are just incoherent, or too repetitive. I intend to make RR far better in this regard, but again, since I'm not a native speaker of English, not all mistakes will be corrected. The most disturbing grammar mistakes - including spelling mistakes - will surely go. This version of RR will be consistent in American English, unlike the first release.
The missions will also go through a rebalance. Some missions were allegedly too hard. Others were too easy, but I think it is reasonable to say that too hard missions are more imperative to be dealt with. I have always followed the "too easy is better than too hard" principle in mission design.
I daren't announce a permanent release date yet. So far, all I can promise is to release the patch when it's ready. Perhaps it is tomorrow, perhaps it's some time in September. Nevertheless, it will be out soon.
