Mercenaries - Secret Wars

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Mercenaries - Secret Wars
Semper Fidelis - Marine Corps
Studio Wings Simulations
gEasy Development Team
Stebosoft
Publisher JoWooD (SSW)
Evolved Games (SFMC)
Erstveröffent-
lichung		 May 27, 2004 ( Secret Wars ),
November 11, 2004 ( Mercenary Reloaded ),
March 17, 2005 ( Marine Corps ),
May 2006 ( Semper Fidelis: Marine Corps , North America only),
May 8, 2011 ( Community Edition )
platform Windows
genre Action game / tactical shooter
Game mode Multiplayer
control Mouse , keyboard , joystick
system advantages
preconditions		 Windows XP / 2000 / ME / 98
256 MB RAM
Intel Pentium IV 1.4 GHz
32 MB DirectX 8.1 compatible graphics card
at least ISDN connection for internet games
medium CD-ROM , download
language German
Current version v33980
Age rating
USK approved from 16
PEGI recommended for ages 16+

Mercenary - Secret Wars (SSW) is a by the German developer studio Wings Simulations developed and JoWooD displaced Online shooter that selectively from the first-person or third-person perspective can be played. Up to 32 players compete as independent mercenaries in two teams, with different types of play. The player can steer vehicles, airplanes and helicopters in the game and the game environment was destructible in a multiplayer game for the first time in the world.

The game came onto the market in a crisis phase of the publisher Jowood with major technical problems and could not meet the profit expectations of the group. It was the last game from the developer Wings Simulations, which had to cease operations in January 2005. In March 2005, Jowood released the previously completed add-on titled Marine Corps . In 2006 the game, including the add-on, was released again in the USA via Evolved Games under the title Semper Fidelis: Marine Corps. In 2008 the game was released as freeware .

Gameplay

Mercenary is an internet game; offline training with several missions is all that is possible.

Game modes

The possible order types:

  • Capture The Flag (CTF): Each team has a flag in their base, which must be stolen by the enemy and brought to their flag. The team that has acquired the flag most often wins.
  • Capture The Vehicle (CTV): Similar to CTF, but with a vehicle instead of the flag.
  • Conquest (CQ): The teams must capture and hold several areas on a map, the areas are marked by central flags. If one team has the upper hand, the other loses points. Whoever has more points at the end of the round is the winner.
  • Super Conquest (SCQ): Like CQ, but the enemy headquarters can only be taken if you have already occupied all other flags.
  • Deathmatch (DM): everyone against everyone. Apart from eliminating the other players, there is no mission.
  • Team Deathmatch (TDM): The goal is to eliminate the opposing team.
  • Hostage Rescue (HR): One team is holding several (computerized) hostages while the other has to try to rescue them.
  • Bombing Run (BR): One team has to try to destroy a certain object, the other has to prevent it.
  • Frontline (FL): Similar to CQ, but the flag that is currently to be captured must be closer to the last flag of your own than a flag of the opponent. A certain order of conquests is given in order to limit the gameplay to a few areas.

Except for CTF, CTV, (S) CQ and FL, however, hardly any other modes are played, almost all modes are possible on all maps.

Differences from other games in the genre

  • Gesture system: The player is able to use short keystrokes to perform gestures and actions in order to point out certain events to other players. He can use military sign language as well as malicious laughter or insults to other players.
  • Damage system: the player can destroy any game object. Forests can be destroyed by the effects of heavy weapons, it is also possible to razor buildings to the ground and to litter the landscape with craters from impacting tank shells.
  • Personalization of the units: The player can assemble his character from a large number of individual elements. Different uniforms are just as possible as the appearance of a forest worker.
  • Playing field: The player can move freely in an area of ​​6500 × 3500 km and thus relocate the game to another location. The individual cards to be played only show buildings, spawn points and purchase terminals. If you have a precise knowledge of the game world, you can go to all other cards - but no buildings or the like are loaded there.
  • Commander mode: The players of a team choose a commander who, in addition to his other game options, can see the complete map in a top view in order to give his own team waypoints and goals. The commanding officer approves larger purchases from the virtual team fund.
  • Mobile respawn vehicles: Each team can purchase special vehicles which, after a short period of parking, turn into a spawn point that can be selected directly in the (S) CQ. In CTF / CTV, players spawn randomly there or at the headquarters.

Mercenaries - Marine Corps (add-on)

The Marine Corps add-on , released on March 17, 2005, simulates combat in the desert and added previously missing marine units and watercraft to the game.

The add-on was fully compatible with the main game. Users of the main program could use all features of the add-on after installing an update. The only restriction was on purchasing the new items that were reserved for owners of the add-on. However, these items could be used by all players during the game as soon as they were dropped or the vehicle was left.

development

Concept and development process

The idea for Söldner arose because Wings founder Teut Weidemann wanted to develop an MMO . Jowood agreed to the idea during the takeover talks with the studio founders and it was agreed to develop a test product in order to gain initial experience with server and client technology. This test run resulted in Söldner: Secret Wars and was one of the reasons for the comparatively high cost of the game, as the technology was designed for a significantly larger online game. Marc Olbertz aka Perplexer created some of the noises heard in the game.

According to Weidemann, Wings was already struggling with the parent company's financial difficulties during development. The studio only received approval for 20 employees instead of the originally decided 30 positions. Furthermore, the studio had to compensate for missing payments from Jowood temporarily. For the finalization, Wings also had to put together its own quality assurance team at short notice, as the actual QA team with eight testers did not have a sufficient number of employees. In a post-mortem lecture, Weidemann also complained that Jowood's marketing budget had already been used up by Spellforce and that the studio had to take care of the marketing itself. In addition, the studio only received two additional months of development due to a request from sales partner Bigben Interactive . After all, the team was not adequately prepared for the rush of players on the day of publication, which is why the server crashed. Overall, the project suffered from the fact that Jowood had no experience of publishing multiplayer games. Since the averting of Jowood's bankruptcy and the ongoing quarrels largely tied up energy and resources, planning errors remained undetected for too long.

After publication

The developers reacted to the buggy release with several patches , which, however, could not completely fix the problems. From November 13, 2004, a retail version was available with Söldner Reloaded , which already contained the first four patches. Patch 3358 from March 2005 brought all versions (initial release, Reloaded and Marine Corps ) to a uniform version number. The game has been running since the last patch from Wings to version 33628 without serious errors. In June, Jowood launched the main game and add-on combined in a Gold Edition.

The game including the add-on was released again in May 2006 under the name Semper Fidelis: Marine Corps by Evolved Games for the North American market. In Semper Fidelis (and the English SSW original version from v33671), unlike in the English first publication, curses and insults are no longer possible in the gesture system.

Further development through the community

The development of further updates was carried out from May 17, 2005 by fan developers of the Project Zero group . To this end, Jowood gave the developers an insight into the game's source code . In August 2005, the official portal and game servers were shut down for cost reasons, so that initially no game was possible until Project Zero set up a portal server on its own. Since then, game servers have only been operated by the individual clans. In mid-October 2005, Project Zero published new maps and revised versions of old maps.

On February 10, 2006, the first patch was released under the direction of Project Zero (v33668), which should further improve the game balance and add more features. For example, some tanks and helicopters are only effective if two players share vehicle controls: one drives / flies, the other controls the weapons. However, due to the significant increase in visibility and the number of objects (trees, houses, etc.) per map, the hardware requirements increased too much, which is why the visibility was reduced again with version 33669, which was published shortly afterwards. With version 33670 of March 10, 2006, a. Fixed other bugs that occurred due to the changes to the maps in v33668 / 33669. On March 12, 2006, a hotfix for version 33670 was released that fixed problems with some mice . Version 33671 was released on May 14, 2006 to align the SSW versions with the newly published Semper Fidelis .

On July 23, 2006 version 33672 was published, which led to massive problems and had to be withdrawn again. Among other things, players could not connect to any server. The controversy surrounding this release and ongoing internal squabbles led to the breakup of Project Zero. The next day, JoWooD handed over responsibility for further development to the gEasy Development Team, an association of those programmers who had previously left PZ. On the evening of July 25th, gEasy released a hotfix for the faulty patch 33672, called 33673. The last patch (33675) for mercenaries was released on January 7th 2007 and added hitboxes to the game .

On October 25, 2007, all support from gEasy was discontinued, which also switched off the online portal so that online games were no longer possible. On November 1, 2007, gEasy put the portal online again after the financing by HRMC Management, a company of the former JoWooD employee Johann Ertl (Ivan Ertlov), which specializes in the management of online communities , was guaranteed. The portal was taken offline again in the night of April 1, 2008 after the aforementioned contract with HRMC Management expired, JoWooD refused to purchase the portal software and gEasy was not ready to continue closing the portal at all due to the differences with JoWooD about Mercenary 2 operate.

Development according to gEasy and approval

Due to a contract that was not disclosed, a portal, now hosted by SteboSoft, was reactivated on the evening of April 1st. Under the leadership of Albert Steckenborn, an employee of gEasy, but expressly independent of this and in connection with the portal hosting agreement at SteboSoft, another patch was released on June 27, 2008, which brings the game's physics engine up to date brings to improve the often criticized driving behavior of vehicles; numerous bugs have also been fixed.

On June 3, 2008, Johann Ertl announced the release of the game as freeware under the name Söldner Community Edition in the official forum . This was made available for download on August 5th, 2011 at soldnersecretwars.de and contains all functions and content of Söldner - Secret Wars and the Marine Corps add-on.

reception

In the sales version from June 2004, numerous program errors (bugs) occurred that had a massive impact on the gaming experience and were accordingly critically assessed in the test reports of the trade press. The technical problems meant that despite tens of thousands of copies sold, relatively few players were online in Germany alone.

Söldner's sales start was initially positive. The game sold 14,000 times when it was released in Germany, climbing the top of the German sales charts two days after it was released. In calendar week 22 it fell to second place behind the real-time strategy game Codename: Panzers , but held this position until calendar week 31. After eleven weeks, the game had sold almost 45,000 times in Germany. This made it more successful than the jointly published Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising by NovaLogic . Overall, however, the game could not meet the sales expectations of the publisher Jowood. In 2004 the company issued a profit warning and founder Andreas Tobler had to vacate his position as managing director in favor of Albert Seidl. The new management carried out a reassessment and decided to focus the portfolio on strategy, simulation and role-playing games. On January 26, 2005, the closure of the development studio was announced publicly. The studio itself had already been informed in November 2004 that operations would be discontinued after the work on the Marine Corps was completed.

On December 29th, 2006, JoWooD announced Mercenary 2: Mercenary Wars , which was to be developed in cooperation with gEasy. For this purpose the gEasy Development GmbH was founded by gEasy Team Development. On October 1, 2007, however, gEasy announced that the development contract for the game had been terminated.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Petra Fröhlich: Jowood theme week Day 3: Mercenary maker Teut Weidemann: "All I got were stupid faces". In: PC Games. May 20, 2011, accessed December 31, 2018 .
  2. ^ A b Teut Weidemann: 2004: Mercenaries - a Post Mortem. November 6, 2012, accessed December 31, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Justin Stolzenberg: Mercenaries: New edition for download. In: PC Games. November 15, 2004, accessed December 31, 2018 .
  4. ↑ Marcel Kleffmann: Mercenaries - Secret Wars: Giant Patch for download. In: 4Players. March 12, 2005, accessed December 31, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Fabian Walden: Mercenaries - Gold Edition is coming: Original plus add-on ... In: Gameswelt. April 13, 2005, accessed December 31, 2018 (German).
  6. ^ Semper Fidelis - Marine Corps at Evolved Games
  7. ↑ Bodo Naser: Mercenaries - Secret Wars: After shutdown, new portal online. In: 4Players. September 2, 2005, accessed December 31, 2018 .
  8. ↑ Rene Heuser: Mercenaries: Secret Wars - Mappack with four new cards. In: GameStar. October 11, 2005, accessed December 31, 2018 .
  9. ↑ gEasyTeam official developer of mercenaries
  10. ↑ Marcel Kleffmann: Mercenaries - Secret Wars: New patch released. In: 4Players. July 25, 2006, accessed December 31, 2018 .
  11. ↑ gEasy Development discontinues support for Mercenary 1
  12. ↑ Mercenaries - Secret Wars Portal online again
  13. ↑ Mercenaries - Secret Wars: Community Edition (v33900) for download. In: 4Players. Accessed December 31, 2018 .
  14. ↑ Mercenaries in the test. In: GameStar. July 21, 2004, accessed December 31, 2018 .
  15. ↑ Marcel Kleffmann: Test: Mercenaries - Secret Wars. In: 4Players. June 12, 2004, accessed December 31, 2018 .
  16. ↑ Söldner - Secret Wars Review at GBASE.ch
  17. ↑ Tim Pototzki: Bigben: "Mercenary" start meets expectations. June 4, 2004, accessed December 31, 2018 .
  18. ↑ JoWooD closes locations. In: derStandard.at. February 3, 2005, accessed on December 31, 2018 (Austrian German).
  19. ↑ Marcel Kleffmann: Mercenaries 2: Successor announced. 4Players, December 30, 2006, accessed December 31, 2018 .
  20. ↑ Andreas Ludwig: Mercenary Wars 2: Mercenary Wars - developer terminates contract !: Game is about to end ... or is it? In: Gameswelt. October 1, 2007, accessed on December 31, 2018 (German).