I believe the realism aspect has overall been a severe limiting factor on development. Maybe there could be “historic” and “nonhistoric” battles, it would be pretty easy to just throw in Japanese VS. Italians on a Berlin map and let them fight. It’d be fun.
As far as gameplay loops and player retention, I always preferred extremely slow cosmetic unlocks. Near-unattainable achievements work too. It doesn’t take very much investment at all to make a rewarding “loop” since the gameplay itself is already enjoyable. But there has to always be something to work on, or work towards.
H&G was my favorite first person shooter until their team decided to mongle me. I bought some XP for an unlock, money gone but no XP, support doesn’t respond. I cancel payment. Next day acc is locked. “we will unlock your account when you send the money”
I had over 2000 hours on that game and I never touched it again
Yes, very scummy move indeed. But I hear a similar story, not for the first time. The customer support team there was just pathetic.
I joined H&G in 2016. And it was my main WW2 shooter, which I dedicated a lot of real money to, very wholeheartedly supporting this project, hoping that it would be a revolutionary game that would allow a small Danish company to explode the WW2 shooter market. I remember very well the moment when the game was still in the BETA stage, when it seemed that so little was missing to make the game great. At that time there was a great creative community that endlessly created amazing ideas on the forum. Dev streams have been steady, promising.
But there was always a feeling that something was being done up to a certain point and then everything was just frozen. They were so confident in their abilities that when they finally built their game engine, they just shot themselves in the foot, completely ignoring the game’s smart monetization model that would keep them moving along. All that gold crap just didn’t work. Like for example, they released their first battle pass only last year. (when not a single person remained from the old RETO team)
The turning point was when RETO went to Steam, announced the game - finished. At that point, they just didn’t have any more money. The RTS side of the game was completely dropped, all updates were made with new skins and new toy updates, they released bots, because there were simply no more people to fill the ranks of empty players.
Now there is a new team that easily supports the life of a morally outdated game, just gives in to the flow, and lives, from the dedicated players out there. H&G is a perfect example of how simply wrong management policies and too much trust can destroy a great project.
I’m from Denmark myself, so I really wanted to support the project as well. Lots of potential. It was fun while it lasted, but the mismanagement was too much at the end.