How do you imagine the FH2 of the future?
Honestly, I see FH2 ending up very similar to mods like Forgotten Hope Secret Weapons and other BF1942 mods; in the sense that people will continue to mod it for many more years. Eventually (even now to an extent) there will just be a core group of guys making content as a hobby in their spare time. Releases will be more infrequent, and not exactly chock full of content, but the mod will still be there and still grow.
Imo, the player base will only "die" when someone forgets/ stops paying for the servers that keep everything running (762, WaW login etc...) Maybe new people with the know-how and dedication to run a server will step up, but eventually the multiplayer will slowly die out. All that will be left is Singleplayer and Russian/ Chinese modders that make crazy mash-ups of stolen content
What should the main focus of a future FH2 be ?
This is the real question
where a lot of people have a lot of different ideas about what
should happen. And honestly, idk what I want.
I think overall I'd be just fine with FH2 'staying the course' and unfolding like I said above. It's been an amazing decade and not a lot of people thought FH2 could get this far.
Just slowly adding content and making it the most 'complete' WW2 game is a great achievement.
Another part of me would love to see FH2 expand to a new engine and make a whole new game. But the obstacles associated with that are
enormous. For a team, that is only a skeleton crew of what it used to be, to venture out and start making their own game is hard to fathom. We see games like Post Scriptum, Hell Let Loose, Traction Wars all have their own struggles along that same road. Some have made it and released to mixed reception (Post Scriptum), some are still under development and the hype is starting to die out (Hell Let Loose) and some have seemingly called it quits/ will probably never be the game they wanted to be (Traction Wars).
It is
HARD to build a game from nothing AND advertise it, AND iron out the bugs AND make enough money to keep putting in that enormous amount of work.
It would be an admirable effort to venture out and make a new game, but if I'm being realistic, it'd be against the odds for it to come out successful.
Continued...
Honestly, I'd like to see the dev team stay the course. Keep doing this as a hobby that you love, and adding content to this mod. Make it the most 'complete' WW2 FPS that the world has ever seen.
Realistically, I would like to see 2 major things happen in the future;1) Create an 'official' standalone installer. Streamline the installation process so that new comers can easily find/ download the game and play on our servers without questions, disconnects, or having to dig through many channels to find information. Radiomersh has already created a great standalone installer that is being advertised on this website. I think it has a few kinks to work out (some people have mentioned having trouble on the discord) but once those can be worked out, it would be helpful to incorporate it into the website. Link our big download button to the installer and update any other places that people can download our mod (moddb comes to mind).
2) Start to slowly incorporate the community created content in an 'official' manner. It would be nice to see the community updater done away with and merged with the official updater. This way people could download new FH2 updates, along with new tournament updates, along with my texture pack and community map pack all in one place.
Optimistically, I would like to see a few things happen in my "perfect FH2 world;"-FH2 would be standalone. Clicking the download button on the website, automatically downloads the standalone installer and gives you the FH2 updater. On the side bar of the homepage, we could link to websites like 762 and CMP instead of Wolf and BF1942 files
Bring back 'Image of the Week' (or Month) and change it to one of the many screens posted in the 'official screenshots thread.' However often EU wants to do it
but I liked that idea.
-The developers would continue to develop FH2 as they are now; they have their own plans to fix bugs, improve old maps, add new content. The FH2 updater would download these 'official' updates as they became available.
-The FH2 updater would have a 'Community Content' section that takes the place of the current Community Updater.
-The tournament would continue to organize events and make new maps/ content based around tournament gameplay. You could opt-in under the 'community content' section and download the tournament as it becomes available. The updater would notify you when a new tournament is happening and it would get posted on the front page as it does now.
-My texture pack would also be able to be downloaded from the 'community content' section. It would be supported officially and I could expand upon it and make updates as I can.
-The CMP Map Pack would be available under the 'community content' section. It will still be developed by the people who work on it, but with the goal of making the content polished enough to be 'official.' As maps and assets become more improved, the devs would adopt them officially and possibly work on assets to replace placeholder assets that the map might use. (things like FH1 models and unfinished vehicles or w/e)
-Maps and content that weren't 'official,' can still be downloaded and played on servers, but with a clear understanding that it's in a WIP state and will be improved upon. Maybe with a large 'WIP' or 'BETA' marking on the loading screen.
-As tournaments finish, the new maps that get made are filtered. The ones that have a good public layout continue to get worked on and made into 'WIP or BETA' maps to be tested and polished. Eventually, they would become 'official.'
-With this, all of the content creators are working towards the same goal of expanding FH2. But the content goes through '3 stages' of it's life cycle as it's released for a tournament, then worked on by the community, then worked on by the developers, and it improves and gets polished at each step. The benefit is that everyone gets to play the content as they do now, but it's streamlined into one easy to find place. Also, the content creators are working in a more organized fashion and seeing all of the projects through to the 'end-game.'
In the end, it seems redundant for 2 separate factions of people to be creating content for FH2.
This is all wishful 'in a perfect world' thinking from my own opinions
but making things streamlined and working
with our community is the way forward imo