Attention, Generals!
A few weeks have passed since the first test event for Call of War 1.5 took place, but to us it feels like it only happened yesterday! The team put a lot of time and dedication into Call of War 1.5 and it was great to see the huge amount of feedback from the community and how passionate our players are for the game.
We are currently working through the community feedback and are preparing the next test event. Until we are ready to move on and pass the current state of Call of War 1.5 into your hands for more feedback and testing, we have asked our Game Designer Freezy a few questions about Call of War 1.5.
What was the reason to develop Call of War 1.5?
Call of War as a game is still close to the state it was in 2015. We released some new features and units over the years but we envisioned much more. We wanted to make the game easier to get into, make the game better balanced and enable much more diverse strategies. We also wanted to add many new awesome gameplay features. Now we have the time and focus to do that!
We feel that this is a necessary change to keep Call of War fresh and competitive in the ever evolving games market, so that we can support it for years to come.
Of course it is a quite drastic change to the game, that’s why we want to test it thoroughly together with our community, and roll it our only after we had several test events.
We saw some drastic balancing changes with units, buildings and resources in Call of War 1.5. What was the idea behind these changes?
The goal of all changes is to have a more balanced game experience with access to evenly valid and diverse strategies.
The challenge with WW2 is also that everybody envisions things a bit differently. For example: Was a tank destroyer in theory designed to be an offensive weapon? Yeah sure. Was it more iconic though for its defensive usage? Yeah sure. If history allows us to interpret something in multiple ways, we will rather go for the option which opens more different strategies and roles.
This said, we realized that we gamified the first Call of War 1.5 balancing a bit too much and that some parts of the balancing work well, while others don’t. This is the beauty of testing - we can now change and tweak the balancing over multiple event iterations. Rest assured that we will fix the apparent balancing problems and that we will also make the game more realistic again where possible. So please expect a lot of changes in the next event.<br><br>
We keep praising the community for the amount of constructive feedback they provided during the first Call of War 1.5 test event. What was the biggest learning for us from it in your opinion?
The biggest learning is that many players have a strong vision what Call of War is or should be. For example many players seem to value historical accuracy over everything else. But there are also players who value gameplay more. Our biggest challenge ist to find a compromise that pleases the majority. While it certainly won’t be possible to please everyone, we will still try.
The feedback and gameplay reports also helped us to spot some specific issues in the new balancing. With some changes we admittedly went “A bridge too far”, for example with the steep level progression, which we are now able to improve.
What are your personal highlights of the first Call of War 1.5 iteration?
Feature wise my favourite is the combination of new building roles with the disabled auto-upgrading of units. Both features together really push you to smartly diversify and upgrade your core provinces. I like to dedicate my cities to certain tech branches to play most effectively.
There are still features coming up in the next tests that will improve this aspect even further. For example we are developing the much requested possibility to manually upgrade units that are already on the field, and we will also streamline the build requirements of advanced units to make production easier to use.
Balancing wise I really like the new possible strategies, I noticed players playing unit combinations that I rarely saw beforehand. Needless to say that there is still room for improvement and we continue our quest to give all units a valid role in the game.
Regarding the event as a whole I really like the huge participation rate and determination of our community. Though not everything with the event was perfect, doing it was overall still a success, and it encourages us to continue with this approach.
When will the next test event for Call of War 1.5 start?
Due to the fact that holidays are coming up and that we are still changing the balancing as well as implementing more features and usability improvements, you can expect the second test event earliest at the end of January 2020. We really hope to see all of you around by then, and hopefully most of you will agree that we are making improvements! A personal thank you to everyone who participates and helps us shape the future of Call of War!