I thought quite some time about whether I should write a personal conclusion about this game or not. After your mail from January 6th I think I should.

In my opinion you can’t blame Backers for expecting a game from 2014/2015 to be at least equal as good as the original from 1999. No matter if you call it a prequel, sequel, remake or whatever.

If my mind doesn’t play tricks on me you where the ones to say that you liked the original and knew what the fans liked about it.

Why do people still play a game from 1999 (or the wildfire mod) today? Because of the good graphics? Surely not. Because it’s a well balanced game with a lot of nice small details and a good feeling? Definitely!

Please don’t take this as a personal offence but that’s actually the problem I have with your game.

The graphics are better than in the original game (no question about that) but it doesn’t even equal the original in any other aspect.

1. Why are there no statistics? I want to know which character has achived which "goals" at the end of the game.
2. Why is there no interaction between the mercs? I loved Buns wanting to quit when you had Fox on your squad and stuff like that. That was one of the major pros of the OG. In the original game every merc fellt different and there interaction made the team feel „alive“. Sorry but this is totally missing here .
3. Why do all the mercs play exactly the same way – beside the marksmanship?
4. Why is leveling up so useless? In the OG you really felt an improvement after a while – I didn’t feel real changes in your game. Especially the experience level was important - which made a true difference in who would have the first attack-round - you or the enemy.
5. Why are there no wire-scissors? I liked that I had to cut some wire to get to where I wanted to in the OG. (There is always a hole in the wall in your game)
6. Why are there no gas masks?
7. Why can’t I decide whether I want a lot of weapons or not before I start the game? I personally don’t like to have 20 or 30 different kinds of ammo. For me it is no fun to take so long to spare the ammo between my mercs.
8. Missing roofs – there has been said enough about that (it had even been included in „Demoville“, though enemies didn’t use roofs in JA 2 OG before mods).
9. Why is there no sector-inventory? Do I really have to pick up each item by walking next to it?
10. Why is there no transportation system (truck, heli,…)? It really sucks to walk from one side of the map to the other. Especially in combination with point 15.
11. It makes things easier but why is there not the slightest delay when I hire a merc?
12. Why can’t the game remember where I placed my mercs? If I want my mercs to defend a sector there is a reason why I put them where I put them. It is BS that they are standing around somewhere else when the enemy attacks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What the f…!
13. The worst of all – why is the AI so horrible? In the OG you really had to think about how you could succeed on each sector. In this game all you need to do is place your mercs behind some cover and wait for the enemies to come to you – one after the other. I've got a nice screenshot (but I don't know how to include it here) where all the enemies of the 3rd-last sector are lying dead at one place!!
14. Why are militia so useless and why can’t I fight WITH them? In the OG I could fight together with militia if I had at least one merc in the sector. Here my militia who outnumbered the attackers 10 to 9 got all killed – killing not a single enemy – and I had to fight 10 ememies without the slightest scratch afterwards.
15. Why does the game rush me so much? Don’t tell me that should be challenging. Enemygroups are comming in a constant rush without any sense for the situation. As militia are useless (14.) the only strategie to fight them of is to go straight after them. Which means you have to advance quite fast and cannot really take your time for the sidequests.
16. Rushing – why do I have to rush to put my mercs into position when there occurs a fight? I’m playing a strategy game not an ego-shooter. I don’t want to have to rush myself bringing my guys in position. The OG didn’t know the problem because the AI didn’t let the enemy advance towards you but let them stay in cover.
17. Why can’t my guys retreat to another sector if things go wrong? 
18. Why do I see the prince the first time just before I kill him? Deidranna and Elliot where much funnier and you knew who you wanted to kill! I loved the idea to send them flowers from this funeral onlineshop for example.
19. Why can’t I reread the details of the sidequests? Doesn’t make them easier after stopping to play for a while.
20. Balancing – beside the balancing-problems I mentioned before (militia, AI,…) I think this moneystuff isn’t balanced too well as well. In the OG you were really happy to get cheap help from the rebells and dynamo and so on. In this game I didn’t seem to have any money problems at all…

Don’t get me wrong – I really appreciate that you’ve tried to develope a new Jagged Alliance and in my opinion right now you have a good technical base to start with. But right now I don’t see any reason to replay your game – I’d rather replay JA2 Wildfire as it is better in all the details that seem to be important to me (anything beside the Graphics, especially balancing and merc interaction).

I don’t know anything about the development of games and probably you really had to do much more work than I would have expected you to have. As it looks like you had to redevelop anything. I thought you could take the original game-mechanics ad some nice graphics, create new sectors and a story and that would have been it.

So thanks for all the work you put into the project to get here – it’s been nice to be a Backer and get early access and that stuff - but to be honest the game hasn’t reached the level of JA2 yet and will surely take some more effort to get there. I don’t know if you have the financal ressources left to manage that but I really wish you the best to succeed with it.

Kind regards

Dennis

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Pretty much all of your "Why isnt it there?!?" Questions can be answered with lack of Money.

Even the balancing issues and stuff would be much better with more monetary funds because more money = more development time + more testing.

Your argument that new games should be much better than old games only applies for the technical base. The old rule that making good big games is a lot of work still applies.

There are two points here that are better than in JA2. We see what we have. Its pretty cool that we can see what weapon or armour the enemy has. And the second is the very good mod support from the start.

There is new mod called "Revival"  in steam workshop which makes it a lot better.  Just a Tipp for replay value.

Edit: Want to have a tiny climpse how Ja2 could have been with a smaller Budget?

From what i heard Sir-tech had almost 3 Million Dollars to spend on JA2. And a lot experience with making games.

And this is how their early versions looked like.

http://www.jagalaxy.com/index.php/news/ja-museum/3146-jagged-alliance-museum-tour-with-ian-currie-1997-ja2-section.html

http://www.jagalaxy.com/index.php/news/ja-museum/3145-ja2-museum-tour-by-ian-currie-ja2-sketches-section.html

Good points, but they've been raised during development too.

Money ran out, that's the short answer. There wasn't a huge lump to start with, let's be honest. FC promised to compensate with sales income and continue development post release, but that backfired because Steam buyers don't like to wait. And sales took a dive. So no sales, no money to invest. $360k was never going to last but for a bare-bones game. No matter what FC said, promised, etc. 

I for one hope they will recover and with some content mods (working on one), with some confidence investment from the backers, they'll put the game back on development and add the features we dream about.

I am also a backer at $125 because I thought that Full Control could revive one of my most favorite games. But having said that I can not even play this game, it is not even close to being balanced. A good recent ( today ) attempt at a game was when in the first sector I get attacked by 2 or 3 enemy soldiers. I have a .45 cal pistol and the first attacker  comes into close range ( 1 square ) I have an 80 marksmanship. I take a 1 point aim and fire at the attackers head and hit for 28 points damage. I follow up with a shot to the chest and hit for 20 damage. The enemy soldier is bleeding and on his turn beats me with his fists the first hits for 38 points of damage and the second for 32 damage. I have been almost beaten to death by a guy I just blew a 2 inch hole in his head with a .45. This guy did more damage to me with fists than 2 shots from .45. His buddy now walks around the corner and shots me dead. I have been playing JA, Deadlt games, JA2, wildfire, 1.13 and almost every mod ever made since 1995. I didnt expect JA3 what I did expect was a solid mechanical game. The graphics could have been like JA2 and no one would have cared, if the game play and story was good. I have to say my nephew is a game designer / programmer / artist and when I let him play my copy via steam he was ashamed. He said it very well .... This should never have been released. It would have been better to have run a kickstarter and just ran away with the money that to release this. I am sorry if this hurts, I am sorry that you didn't get enough money to make the game you SAID you could make within the budget you Said you could do it within. Maybe back in the begining you could have asked for a more realistic amount of money and maybe it would have failed but at least we would not be given another half baked attempt and another failed JA title. I have played Crossfire and Back in Action both were bad but this in my opinion is the worst of them all. I love JA and this breaks my heart. I will await my backer items and put them away. I hope that if anything comes of this it will be a full editor that can allow the fans to fix all the flaws and create end game triggers, open up all the dialog and story line code for editing, and fix the terrible character graphics which are one step above the pre release back in action characters.

Sorry again if this post hurts it hurts me too. I own my own business and have for over 20 years. If I say I can do somethin g within a given budget I do it and if is ends up I was wrong I eat the bill and pay for it out of my own pocket to give the customer what I promised. End of story and rant.

Headshot

The Character portraits killed BiA for me which is sad because some elements like the strategic map looked very promising. And JAF is at least a Turn Based Game.

Dialog and story lines are in json files. Which means everyone can change them.

They also published the level editor so sectors should be open for change too.

@Headshot - the AI must likely didn't punch you with his bare fists. He must've had knuckle dusters equipped (that does 25-30 dmg, fists do much less). Funny though that you got outplayed by the AI, most people complain they are way too easy to beat. In JA2 the AI almost never uses melee, why complain about a feature that's a plus? Plus the AI was really lucky there, the melee is way less accurate than a gun, he could've missed you twice just as easy. 

A wounded AI/merc suffers a penalty on his chance to hit . But you must've been crouching when he went melee on you, so you handed him a huge advantage. To be more specific, he had a -5% penalty, but you handed him a +15% bonus for melee.  Instead of him having a crappy 55-60% CtH, he had 70%-75%.

--

You gotta remember this - the weapon you're using it's the same weapon your enemy will use. So if you want higher dmg on your handgun and more criticals, you will be on the receiving end of that soon enough. That's what makes nerfing or buffing weapons very tricky.

Don't get bummed out because you lost to first two guys. Try a lower difficulty level until you figure out the game. Just because you played JA2 doesn't mean you're an expert in JA:F.

Hi,

when I wrote about the lower buget in JA2 I meant the In-game-Budget - not the Budget for the game itself.

I liked the "money-problems" of the OG - you were really happy if you could afford a truly good guy like Magic or Raven for a very few days, take 1 or 2 difficult sectors with him / her and hand his / her weapon over to your AE. So could fight on with our AE, 2 average guy who you could afford and mercs like Ira and Dynamo that you could get to help you for free. Every help was welcome and needed. You had to play for hours and hours until you could form a team with truly good mercs at the end of the game!

In Flashback you can have almost anyone who is available without thinking about the money - especially as noone is very expensive. Again a really bad problem of balance.

Maybe the game is also a little to short for a true character developement.

@Headshot:  I think they really tried to do their best and had planned things to work a little different. 

I really wish them that they could still create the game they had planned to - though I fear it might not happen.

If there was another kickstarter to collect money for improving the game I might even give them a second chance (but I had not backed as much as you did).

Kind regards

Dennis

Can only speak for myself but for me point 20 was the same as all other points -> just stuff that is missing.

The Point that i tried to make was that the JAF developers just lacked the funds to implement this stuff. They also made mistakes during development but longer development time could have corrected that.

The comparison to JA2 was just to emphasize my point.

+ 1 to that

I also miss some diversity on the characters. I loved that in JA2 people were in for the fight for different reasons - not just mercenaries. I really miss to have some cheap crap guys. In JAF all hireable people seem pretty replaceable.