Booo at 2 years ... how in the world are they financing this project for that long?
And actually that brings up my biggest question about Traction Wars -- how does it plan to make money as a free to play game?
I would gladly pay $20-$30 for a quality WWII FPS ... I see no need to make it F2P. F2P actually makes me less excited because I hate microtransactions.
As Flippy said, it's a "hobby project" in sense. The only thing we pay for is the website, our TS server, some random things, test server (which can also be hosted by one of the developers) and a small license fee here and there. These costs are all split by the developers who want to chip in, some pay a lot, some aren't able to pay anything.
As for, why, it's a portfolio. All the coders, modelers, texture artists, mappers, etc. have ambitions to work in the games industry, they are either studying or already have a good job. So making money off Traction Wars isn't really what they need or want. Why not make a great game for absolutely nothing? It saves us a lot of hassle with licenses at least, we can work on our own pace, etc.
And just to be very very clear about this: Traction Wars will
never implement microtransactions. Donations in the future may be an option but no game changing rewards will ever be connected to those. But we still have to go through the legal details of taking donations.
The name should have at least some connection to the game, most people including myself probably originally skipped this because they didn't know it was supposed to be a cool WWII shooter. My first thought when I saw this topic was a game about cars with guns or something, and I didn't bother to check until the topic became popular.
Yes, I'll admit the opinions are divided. I was one of the people insisting on changing the name but the team voted on it and the result was in favour of keeping it. Why? Because a lot of things change about TW, new subject (steampunk > WWII), new engine or platform, etc. And a lot of the fans from the mod days are still with us, a lot of people already knew us as Traction Wars. The consensus was the name was something familiar, something unique.
It doesn't fit but it's different and it's basically our "brand" by now. It's an odd name but it's an odd game as well, in the end it fits.
The same argument could be made about Forgotten Hope, the name is about the German invasions and invincibility during the early months/years of the war. Yet FH2 is mostly about the Allied push into German territory.