Why BCOF will no longer be developed.

[COPOT]

Bcof Post Mortem Report

TL;DR: Game had fundamental issues and low player count that made continued development not viable

Introduction

This will be my lazy attempt to explain what went good and what went bad with the development of Battle Cry of Freedom and why it failed. All opinions are my own. And I hate writing so this won’t be the most detailed thing in the world.

At it’s core, Bcof had fundamental issues that made development no longer viable to continue. The design was always to create a large scale multiplayer game. This led to struggles further along the development pipeline. Combined with dwindling player counts, it was no longer worth developing.

This is disappointing to many as there is still a fanbase for civil war games. But quite honestly, outside of a handful of commander battle fans and some chinese players, bcof is dead. There was an attempt to bring it back with the 2.0 update. It was a relauch to try and rekindle the game. At the end of the day, players didn’t stick around. And while you can thank the handful that were looking forward to seeing bcof be successful, it doesn’t put food on the table to keep trying to get players back on a dead game.

Design

Design wise, bcof was always multiplayer first. Every single function was to be controlled and validated by a server. This was partly done to prevent cheating, partly because it was easy to do for a multiplayer only game. All movement, shooting, class selection, etc, all relied on sending info to the server and the server did the logic on like if shots actually hit or missed a player for instance. The above reasons are mainly why single player was not feasible.

Bcof was also extremely complex to learn. It was hard for new players to learn the controls, had way too many keybinds, and without a tutorial, relied on experienced people to help teach the game. We had players who were unaware of how to go into melee mode. Multiple streamers gave up and switched games after they couldn’t learn it.

Bcof also catered way too much for regiments. Other comparable games maintained healthy public communities. Bcof never established it’s own which lead to empty servers and a cascading effect and killed servers. Overreliance on events and those players to drive the community for the game was a mistake.

The additional era mods were also a major mistake. The game had an identity crisis. One of the biggest updates that revealed two new regiments had a spaceman plastered on the front picture. Seconds after it came out I told them this was a stupid idea and it would get memed and it did. Forcing AoN maps into the official rotation was also terrible. These split the already fractured community heavily between people who wanted NW 2 vs a civil war game.

Performance

Bcof performed horribly, especially at launch. The goal of 500 player servers at the complexity of bcof was extremely ambitious. Bcof utilized a system called amplify which combined all textures for uniforms, weapons, etc into a single large file. This file took up a large amount of disc space, created a large download size every time it needed to be updated, and needed to be loaded entirely into RAM when the game was running.

The amount of bots and players on the screen at one time created immense lag, as players were mainly CPU bound. Bcof did not utilize the GPU nearly as much. Siege was basically unplayable. Commander battles struggled for most.

Numerous bugs still existed in the code. While there is no exact way of knowing how many of these impacted performance, it would be wrong to not consider them.

Community

Quite frankly the community for bcof sucked. The combination of players from communities never really mixed. This led to large factions of players from X games to always skew one way and stopped a true community for bcof from ever forming. Infighting drove people away.

What worked

• Map maker
  
• Customization
  
• Building destruction
  
• Terrain deformation
  
• Commander battle (besides bugs)

These core features from bcof worked extremely well for the game and it’s why they are being carried over to the new game Over the Top(with the exception of commander battle but we are working on that). Call it a reskin if you want. You’d have to be stupid thinking an indy studio wouldn’t reuse some assets like building models. But OTT got some organs transplanted as well. There are a variety of new systems to tackle the greatest issues bcof had. I’ll probably write a Q and A for the new stuff too on the discord and OTT steam forum.