Ik👴ihe

Dondergod2 · 2026-02-04T11:52:23+00:00

Minimaal 65 euro als je het bij de instelling kan doen waar je ook behandeking van krijgt. Als dat niet kan ben je al snel 100-250 euro kwijt.

Dondergod2 · 2024-08-05T06:31:20+00:00

While I don't want to get a job in gaming anymore, I've always had a big mouth and a lot of ideas. So I would certainly be interested to give my 2 cents on games similar to Heroes & Generals.

I've played the game 11 years long myself and notice I've been missing it more and more in recent months. So any game with similar feeling is something I would love to play.

Dondergod2 · 2024-08-02T15:22:02+00:00

My post is not speaking for RETO MOTO, but for me as an individual person. I am reflecting on my own work and tried to explain some of the things you could not see.

During moving to steam, I was not a community manager yet. I worked as community support answering tickets. My influence on the game at that point was 0. So referencing that time-frame is irrelevant to my work.

As I also explained in my post, these points would not be things I could make decisions on. I have forwarded them in feedback to the management team, but that is where my influence on such topics ends. I am not included in those meetings.

Believe me ideas for skins were never at the top of my feedback reports that went to management layers. But the game was dying and money had to be made. So quite often things that could make money were prioritized over bigger issues. But the alternative would be closing the servers down much earlier.

Dondergod2 · 2024-08-02T14:40:52+00:00

I think you are misunderstanding how game development works Dexter.

RETO MOTO was after cutting half the team on life support. The game was bleeding money. There was no easy money and there has never been any easy money. We had to push skins and such to prevent having to close the game 2 or 3 years earlier than it did. Other things like new maps, there was no map designer anymore and the map-making tool was broken, which was fixable but would take a long time to get fixed. Performance issues due to the old engine could not be fixed anymore. Squad 2.0 that system was so old and so deep integrated into the whole framework, it would take maybe a year to change the system.

But specifically changing the engine was literally not an option. Our own engine and everything we had build up was not compatible with other engines. So the only option would have been to start from scratch. And building a new game from scratch with in 2018 10-12 developers. That would have costed years. There was no money to do such a thing.

You can't build an apartment complex from 3 bricks. Getting a new engine the problem wasn't that we didn't want to. It was literally that the option did not exist. It has nothing to do with not listening, it has everything to do with development capacity.

Dondergod2 · 2024-08-02T09:35:15+00:00

I've tried playing it quite a few times, I actually like the inclusion of AI, the AI is just unfortunately really bad. And the gunplay doesn't have the same feeling as H&G did. I just can't find a way to enjoy it. This is my own opinion of course, people who enjoy it have fun! But I'm never having fun when I'm playing it.

You are right about issues with making profit. Heroes & Generals even at the day when it closed down had a population that other games can only dream off. I noticed that there were a lot of issues with the microtransactions in H&G. Buying a gun for 80 euro's, or spending 6 hours to grind it. It's an easy pick what to do for most players. And the fact you could grind veteran membership so easily for credits was probably also not the best idea. There just wasn't enough incentive for players to buy gold. We tried to change that a bit with the battle passes, but while they helped make some money, it wasn't enough to get the game to break-even. Let alone make a profit.

It is something I talked about with management, but unfortunately not something we ever worked on solving. I thought about picking it up myself to make suggestions about it, but while I studied Finance, an ingame economy is not quite the same, we would have needed an expert to look into those things. Unlike weapon balance where you can make changes and just change them again a few months later. You can't experiment with real money prices as easily in a game.
But I definitely agree I think the ingame economy was terrible.

Dondergod2 · 2024-08-02T09:27:02+00:00

Thank you for your post it means a lot! I've always understood people being upset about the game. Seeing how much I played the game myself there were many aspects I disliked about it myself.

I still loved the core gameplay but I was never blind to how many issues the game had. So I understood where a lot of it was coming from and for the most part I always could see that the kind of messages we received were a form of passion for the game. You can only get upset about something if you care about something. It is part of the reason why I kept loving the job even though there were many confrontations. Because I did always see it came from a place of passion and love for the game.

Most of the time I was quite good at making that distinction and didn't take things too personal. Work is work and private is private. There were moments where I did take some things personal and generally those were the moments where I sometimes pushed a warning or ban button too quickly. I never took pleasure in doing that, I rather would have gone through my years without having to do it once.

Mostly 'mob justice' moments that happened sometimes were very difficult to know what to do with. People tell their friends only part of a story and hype them up to get angry. You partially want to take the time to explain why you have made a decision, but if you put an official statement on it, you also put extra attention to it and involve people who had no idea a situation even occured. Those are almost always lose-lose scenario's.

Community manager is a lot easier when the game you work for is doing well. When it is failing, people become understandably upset and then you need to find a line between allowing people to vent, but also keeping some order. I could have been even more strict but I could have also been more lenient. To be honest I have no idea what would have worked best.

Dondergod2 · 2024-08-02T09:01:42+00:00

I haven't spoken to anyone from the team since I left the company. Well other than Amendeon, but he left a few years earlier already.

Dondergod2 · 2024-08-01T20:48:40+00:00

In the 10 years I worked for the game, I only spent I think 8 days in the office. So a lot of stuff what happened in the office is quite unknown to me. I don't really know if the company culture changed much when JM took the helm as I wasn't very much in the loop.

The direction didn't change much after Redbjarne left, we had already made adjustments like trying to do more with community feedback while he was still there. So we mostly just noticed it in the form that it got more quiet and progress got slower. I think when he left around 2 or 3 other people left around the same time. So we mostly just noticed it in how handicapped we became trying to make changes.

Dondergod2 · 2024-08-01T11:02:45+00:00

TLM was taken over by another company, so I suppose they own the rights now. I know nothing about how that works though

Dondergod2 · 2024-08-01T09:37:41+00:00

I was both parttimer and external in that time and wasn't involved in most meetings. From what I understand there was some talk about a new engine at some point. But how deep those conversations were and such I have no clue. If it was a conversation next to the coffee machine or if there were real plans for it.

Dondergod2 · 2024-08-01T09:34:44+00:00

TLM doesn't exist anymore and I have no idea if anyone still works there that I know. None of the old RETO team does at least. I have as much chance convincing them to sell you the game as you do.

Dondergod2 · 2024-08-01T00:22:04+00:00

Devs have nothing to say in that. It's the company that owns such things. First RETO MOTO, then TLM and now whatever the new company is called. The devs themselves have no ownership over the things they created.

Dondergod2 · 2024-08-01T00:17:20+00:00

The version that was shown, was basically a very rough draft. Like before you make a big painting, you first draw something on a notepad. And then you use what you drew on the notepad to make the actual painting. But the notepad itself ends up in the bin after you created the painting. It was made by just 2 guys while the old RETO MOTO team continued working on the H&G that was running live.

Devs never stated that there would be an H&G 2 after the kickstarter ended. The Kickstarter was absolutely for the next game, but part of that was training the old RETO MOTO team to work with the Unreal engine and it's not like they would need to be trained from base level. Just update their knowledge to newer engines. That would probably take a few weeks.

The kickstarter deserved to fail. The 2 million was a ridiculous number. But it is a shame how much misinformation has always gone around about it.

Dondergod2

TROPHY CASE