En Bref. Battlefront a confirmé hier que plusieurs titres de la série combat Mission vont bien arriver sur Steam cette année, par étapes, ce qui aurait dû se faire plus vite l’an passé mais a été retardé par des soucis techniques imprévus.
Concrètement, Combat Mission – Battle for Normandy arrivera en mars prochain. Il sera suivi par CM Red Thunder en juin prochain. Puis par CM Fortress Italy en septembre et enfin par CM Final Blitzkrieg en décembre 2023, ou au pire en janvier 2024.
De plus, du nouveau contenu est prévu on ne sait quand pour étoffer encore trois jeux, à savoir un nouveau Battle pack pour CM Fortress Italy, des ajouts dans CM Final Blitzkrieg concernant les forces à la fin de la guerre, et des ajouts dans CM Cold War entre autres relatifs à poursuivre la chronologie. Un module prévu pour CM Black Sea est lui en pause du fait des événements actuels.
Enfin, l’upgrade 5 est a priori toujours en chantier ainsi que différents patchs.
Tout cela n’est pas forcément très clair dans tous les cas, voyez le communiqué suivant pour quelques précisions supplémentaires, mais cela donne quand même une idée plus précise du calendrier des réjouissances à venir.
Si vous ne connaissez pas Combat Mission – Battle for Normandy, voyez dans nos archives, par exemple notre article Combat Mission Normandy – Commonwealth Forces : Les Britanniques en Normandie.
Communiqué
Annual look at the year to come – 2023
A belated and very happy New Year wish to all of you! Hard to imagine soon it will be 23 years since Combat Mission Beyond Overlord made it’s commercial debut. Time is a strange thing. Anyway… it’s time to give you a view of what’s to come for the year.
We did pretty well with our 2022 calendar, but we definitely got hung up at the end with one thing that caused a ripple effect. I’ll start with that.
We are moving to get all of our existing CM games released on Steam and Matrix through our partners, Slitherine. One of the key features for those releases is supporting their excellent PBEM++ system as well as Tournaments. The coding for these two things has been, er, a little challenging to say the least. Some of the unique features of Combat Mission created integration problems that were not well understood when we embarked on this journey. PBEM++ was solved a while ago, but some of the same problems we encountered with that carried over to Tournaments.
The long story short, we had to rework how Combat Mission handles scoring because Tournaments (correctly) requires tracking progress per turn for ranking, which is something Combat Mission deliberately wasn’t coded to do. We came up with a work around that doesn’t interfere with the normal scoring you’re all familiar with. That delayed breakthrough, unfortunately, came too late to hit our previous marketing window and the field was too crowded for us to squeeze in for Christmas. Therefore, CMBN got bumped until March as part of the ripple effect. Now back to our regular scheduled program ;)
What follows is a fairly high level view of everything we have planned for 2023. I will provide more detailed information throughout the year as we get nearer to release times. I’ll also try and answer questions here, briefly, over the next few days.
2023 Combat Mission Events Of Note
1. Steam/Matrix Releases
Due to the delay of getting CMBN out all subsequent CM games are bumped accordingly as we are going on a 1 « family » per quarter schedule. The schedule now is:
CMBN – release set for March 2023
CMRT – release set for June 2023
CMFI – release set for September 2023
CMFB – release set for December 2023 or January 2024
2. New Content for CM2 Games
Battlefront has retained the ability to release new content to you guys when it is ready, not necessarily when we have a Slitherine release scheduled. This is why you got George’s excellent Red Thunder Battle Pack 1 many months ago instead of having to wait many months more for it to be released. It is also why you got your hands on CM Cold War months before it was out on Steam/Matrix. Something like that may happen again, depending on when new content is ready to go. What is that new content?
CMFI – new Battle Pack
CMFB – expanded to include late war forces, including Commonwealth
CMCW – move the timeline forward and some other fun stuff
There is also the pretty much completed CMBS Module that is on hold due to the war. We plan on reevaluating our embargo on the Module sometime soon, though that doesn’t mean we’ll come out of the discussion with a hard release date.
3. Upgrade 5
There was talk last year of an Engine 5 Upgrade designed to improve game performance free of charge. This is still planned, but it did get caught up in the PBEM/Tournament development headaches. Ripple effect, again.
4. CM2 Professional Update
Things are going very well on this front, however as of April 2023 we will pause major CM2 Professional work in order to concentrate on commercial efforts for the rest of the year. We are currently working on one last project that is due in March, after that it’s all commercial work. Well, at least on the development side of things.
5. Patches!
Lastly, patches are in the works for CMBS, CMSF2, and CMCW to fix some bugs and add the latest PBEM/Tournament features. Yes, that means Slitherine will soon be hosting Tournaments for all three games. Honestly, I don’t know what the exact schedule is, but we should know soon.
And there you have it ;)
Steve
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