lucumr

About four years ago I stumbled about a promising game called “Söldner — Secret Wars” in a magazine. It was an online tactical shooter and featured a fully destroyable environment, more than one hundred weapons I think, many different vehicles, aircrafts and much more. It was hyped back then in the German gaming community, probably because it was developed by a German studio called “Wings”. Long before the game was released the developers updated their online dairy about recent changes in the code, about what the game will feature and a lot more. Unfortunately they decided to release their game by Jowood, an Austrian publisher.

Why was that bad? Back then Jowood once again had financial problems and they tried to solve it by convincing the sharedholders that their next game will be a major success. They set an totally unachievable release date and the developer team at wings had to live with that. It went that far that they had to design the box are themselves even though the game was still buggy. The game was released and was still buggy. I think GameStar even omitted the rating because they wanted to wait for the first patch.

However the game sold pretty well the first two weeks despite the bad quality of the release version and the bad reviews. It even outsold the greatest competitor at that time (Joint Operations). I was one of the early adopters and I loved to play it. Owning a bad ISDN connection at that time it was terrible lagging, especially because their netcode was a catastrophe. Still, it was great fun and the destructible environment was great. Not only that, the game was somewhat revolutionary. It was the first online game I played with an (albeit bad configured) physics engine, it used python as scripting language, it had one big map that was generated from satellite images with detailed areas where the fights took place. You could buy yourself a jet and leave the map and visit all off Siberia. Not like Battlefield Vietnam where you hit the borders of the map with a jet after roughly 15 seconds. Dammit, it would still be fun and I bet it would have been bug-less by now.

The community that appeared around that game was incredible. A wiki appeared, people tried to hack around on the code to get extra features into the game, unofficial mods appeared. There was even a project that wanted to create a mod for a medieval setting. Hell, it was great back then. But instead of fixing the bugs Jowood forced the developers to start an addon project…

Shortly after the addon was finished the company developing that game was liquidated. The developers lost their job and the community continued developing the closed code. The group around “project zero” continued maintaining the game until that group broke apart and the gEasy team took over the work. The gEasy team was basically just the project zero team without the founder. They did an tremendous job but Jowood once again destroyed everything. They refused to pay their bills, then the gEasy team took down the master server and Ivan Ertlov appeared on the scene. He managed to resolve the problems between Jowood and gEasy team to some extend that the master server was up and running again.

Who’s that Ivan Ertlov? Very good question indeed and I personally don’t know the full story but from what I’ve read on the forums he is called Johann Ertl and owns a company that sells guerrilla marketing and similar services. And he worked for Jowood and apparently still does, at least he is listed as community manager in the official forums. He also brought up the topic “Open Sourcing” the code after it was clear that there will be no Söldner 2. A sequel was actually under consideration and gEasy started working on that till the day they took down the master server because there was no payment by Jowood. But since some time there was no feedback any more and an open source version is somewhat unlikely.

Frankly I don’t know if Jowood payed or didn’t. What Jowood did was destroying the game by forcing an early release, forcing an addon when the code was still unfinished, fired the developers. Even worse: they are telling their shareholders that everything is working perfectly and that they are releasing dozens of new games. Hell, they released Spellforce 1 and 2 which both are awesome games (just happen to have the worst copy protection ever designed), the Gothic games (the 3rd part was buggy like Söldner but probably also because Jowood forced an early release). Jowood however claims that they payed and that gEasy was lying. Who is running the portal now? Apparently Ivan’s company.

So why am I blogging about all that? Mainly because I think that topic hasn’t gained a lot of attraction. I stopped playing that game after Wings was liquidated. For one because I switched to ubuntu and on the other hand because my Söldner plugin (an in-game Winamp controller) disappeared when the forum was updated to reflect the new ownership. All the old topics where either deleted or made unreadable when Wings was closed down.

What nobody really notices is that the game had a tremendous German community. Hell, some of them even took over the development! If Jowood would have noticed that earlier they could have made that game the freaking best online shooter available at that time. But because of their small horizon they just thought about their next quarter and decided to do what shareholders want, not what players want. But not only Jowood is to blame but the root of all evil in that case.

Krawall supported Jowood in the beginning to host their initial infrastructure needed for the game. Unfortunately the server software needed Direct X to run properly which caused a lot of trouble. One the one hand it was hard to get multiple servers running on one machine do to the way the server was designed, on the other hand you needed a windows server to host games. And because the initial code base was that buggy all the magazines flamed to game. Despite the good sales figures it magazines never wrote about the game and forced an early dead which harmed the community. A release six month later, a linux server from the beginning, no addon and good press coverage would have avoided all the problems this game was facing in the past. And it would have saved Wings, the game they were working on beside Söldner, and in the end of course Jowood which would have had a lot less bad press.

Especially the gamers hate Jowood for their buggy products now and I doubt that they will be able to continue to ignore all the user feedback and push alpha versions as release versions for much longer.

I’m especially interested what the Wings guys are doing now. I know that former Wings community manager and sound designed Marc Olbertz is working at Blizzard but that’s about it. It’s sad what happened there and that Austrian’s only game publisher caused all that.

Funky fact: The communication with the master server worked via jabber, the physics engine was ODE and the scripting language was Python. All open source technologies I never saw in a commercial game before :-)

Disclaimer: the information on this page should be accurate but it’s hard to say for sure because there is few information about this topic actually available. If you are able to understand German you can find some information in this thread on the Söldner forums: Söldner ein Abenteuer mit ungewissem Ausgang

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 11:49 pm and tagged as planetubuntu, rant, thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.