Battlezone: Battle Grounds

[Ded10c]

I imagine by now that even those of you who didn't know about The Red Odyssey before have now heard the calls for it to be remastered alongside Battlezone. The Red Odyssey wasn't Battlezone's first expansion, though; that honor belongs to Battle Grounds[battlezone.wikia.com].

Battle Grounds wasn't great; as was something of a trend in the 90s, a third-party publisher got together and released a shovelware collection of maps sourced from around the internet. Battle Grounds was organised differently to the legally-shady packs released earlier in the decade in that they had Activision's blessing and properly compensated the maps' creators. All the same, this was all in the first few months after Battlezone's release; most people had barely got to grips with playing the game, never mind making maps of the calibre we see today. Most of its content wasn't anything to write home about.

In 2014 the Heracles Brigade, a small group of community modders, took on the job of maintaining Battle Grounds. It's a task I had started alone two years previously and had already had an initial release, but a team was really what was required. We released our first proper version, version 1.1, just over a year ago.

Since getting our hands on Battlezone 98 Redux - it's no secret that all six of our core members were involved in the test, you can see us in the credits - we've been working to make sure that Battle Grounds' multiplayer content is on the workshop from day one. And it is - here. Sixteen strategy maps and thirty-six deathmatch maps all ready to be played.

There are two important things to note about this. First is that these maps are (mostly) still the maps from the 1998 release; in order to get them out for you to play with we've had to put off getting them all up to the standards of modern maps (or as close as we can, at least). We'll be updating them on a map-by-map basis in the future, and if you subscribe to them now you'll get these updates automatically within 24 hours of us uploading them. The second thing to note is that, as yet, we haven't uploaded the Instant Action maps. This is for a very specific reason; for some of us the Instant Action maps were the big draw of Battle Grounds, and we want to do them justice. We feel it's a shame Battle Grounds didn't deliver any coherent narrative content, and that what little it did often contradicted established canon, and are working to fix that. When we upload the Battle Grounds missions they will be arranged into a coherent narrative order and supported by solid campaign-style scripting.

Since we're using Steam Workshop this time around you can subscribe to as many or as few of these maps as you like, and swap them in and out as you please. We'll keep you updated whenever we make a major change to a map or add something new, so you can decide whether you want to switch things up.

See you on the battle grounds.

[Mix]

Cheers man I vaguely remember these.... They were a great bonus for us with crappy internet back in the day, and I agree on the points re:AI. Good luck to you!

[Ded10c]

Having taken quite a while out while I focus on other things (university work, in particular), I thought it best to let you know that I'm getting back to this. Some time ago the fantastic ssuser has kindly donated some updates to the project (including lua-power!), and I'm coming around to uploading the rest of those updated maps now. The first of those, Nightmare I, is up on the workshop here:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=796488746

The rest of the trilogy will follow, along with Moonshine and the E&S series. Once the whole set is uploaded I'll start going back through them and bring them up to standard, and give you all a glimpse of what Battle Grounds could have been if it were a full expansion. After that, the last stage will be the GOG port.

So, don't worry. I've not forgotten about this.