SpellForce 2 - Faith in Destiny Announced

Dhruin

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JoWood has announced Spellforce 2: Faith in Destiny. Of course, Phenomic was bought by EA some time back, so this is a different development team. Here's the PR:
Vienna, Austria, May 26th; 2009; JoWooD Productions and DreamCatcher Games announce that a sequel to the successful SpellForce saga will soon be released. SpellForce 2 – Faith in Destiny combines real time strategy with exciting role-play elements. Be part of the story, when all the loose ends tie up in a grandiose showdown between good and evil. Only you can conquer the shadows of the past and reveal the demonic conspiracy.

“Developing another game in the SpellForce saga is an exciting opportunity for us. Faith of Destiny is developed incorporating feedback from the community and feedback from those who have assisted in the development of previous Spellforce games,” says Clemens Schneidhofer, PR Coordinator at JoWooD Productions. “I’d like to add that we bow before the loyal fans of the brand and want to thank all of them for their amazing support.”

“SpellForce 2 – Faith in Destiny will continue the successful Spellforce brand” adds David Skreiner, Associate Producer at JoWooD. “With its brand new multiplayer features and the countless detail improvements, SpellForce will, once more, set new revolutionary impulses to the genre."


Release: Winter 2009
Platform: PC
More information.
 
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Not that I mind more Spellforce games, but didn't we have a Spellforce 2 a couple a years back? So, why isn't this game called Spellforce 3?
 
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Whatever the name good to hear that the series continues. One of my absolute favorites.

EDIT: Have to say "faith in destiny" sounds cheesy as hell though.

Be part of the story, when all the loose ends tie up in a grandiose showdown between good and evil. Only you can conquer the shadows of the past and reveal the demonic conspiracy.
Isnt that exciting? A real demonic conspiracy. Havent seen one of those for a while.
 
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Sounds like the SpellForce series is getting its Forsaken Gods treatment. Makes me wonder if this one is being made by Trine Studios as well.
 
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Sounds like the SpellForce series is getting its Forsaken Gods treatment. Makes me wonder if this one is being made by Trine Studios as well.

That was exactly my thought ...
 
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Sounds like the SpellForce series is getting its Forsaken Gods treatment. Makes me wonder if this one is being made by Trine Studios as well.

Yep, that's my guess. I think JoWood deliberately left any mention of the developer out to avoid the stink of Forgotten Gods lingering on this one as well.
 
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As usual, most games that are */RTS eventually turn too RTS for me (and I suck at RTS). Spellforce 2 was one of them. I was loving the game until there was a point that it felt more like Warcraft 3 than anything, and my units kept getting slaughtered.
 
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Once bitten, twice shy with G3:FG. Will wait for the reviews (and the inevitable patch).
 
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Spellforce 2 was more an RPG than RTS, and its add-on (Dragon Storm) almost fully left out the RTS part.

I hope they won't ruin this series as well.
 
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My intuitive reaction to the PR was. "If they had something positive to say about the developer, they would say it."
Trine has a contract for 4 or 5 games. I'm pretty sure this is one of them.
 
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'm pretty sure this is one of them.
Then we'll all have a good laugh,I can't believe they still call themselves developers.
 
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Then we'll all have a good laugh,I can't believe they still call themselves developers.

I won't laugh. This game deserves better.

Please, dear developers, please do not ruin it! :'(
 
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I won't laugh. This game deserves better.

Please, dear developers, please do not ruin it! :'(

Remember, whatever they do, it will not ruin the existing Spellforce games ... I told myself that repeatedly playing Forsaken Gods, and guess what - it is true! Played some of Gothic 2 Gold and it *still* rocks!
 
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From a business model perspective, this is pretty interesting. From what I've gleaned from very little info, it seems JoWood has targeted an idea of mining games that have a loyal and established niche/fan base for all they're worth with expansions by leveraging cheap off-shore labor (Trine is in India, right?). Obviously, FG bombed. I wonder if they'll be able to feed lessons learned from that into this next attempt and improve on the model. Personally, I doubt it. I've been project managing software development for well over 10 years now. One of the many things I've learned is that software development is more art than science and does not lend itself well to off-shoring like a much more literal pursuit, such as manufacturing, does. I imagine this is even more so in highly creative conditions such as game software development.
 
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I wonder what the P&L for FG actually looks like?
 
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One of the many things I've learned is that software development is more art than science and does not lend itself well to off-shoring like a much more literal pursuit, such as manufacturing, does. I imagine this is even more so in highly creative conditions such as game software development.
I have to disagree. I've been managing software projects for over a decade as well. Software development is a skill, it's not something everyone can do well (we agree on that part) and the people in India do have good skills. Their education system as far as software development goes is on par with ours and there are several CMM level 5 companies in India too (CMM is the capability maturity model for software and level 5 is the best you can become). We have done a lot of off-shoring to India and projects don't fail because of the lack of quality or skills those people have but because of bad project management from our side.
I don't know how good or bad the other games of Trine are (http://www.trinegames.com/) but without more detailed information about what happened or how good Trine is as a development company I for the moment think that JoWood got exactly what they were willing to pay for.
 
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@Mythros: I didn't intend to impugn the individual skills of the developers at Trine or in India. My point was off-shoring is very hard to get right in the software development field, especially for large projects, whatever the reasons. Bad PM'ing can certainly be one, but there's a level of communication, give-and-take, and interpretation necessary (again, even more so in a highly creative endeavor) that is already hard and made even harder by the challenges inherent in off-shoring. In other words, it’s not a failure in coding skill by an individual or a group of coders, but rather a systemic issue in trying to execute software development in an off-shoring environment.
 
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Hidden somewhere in one of the documents of that game fund it was written that they didn't even get an insurance for the G3 add-on, because the budget is so low.

Maybe JoWooD really got what they paid for. Not so bad in short term though. G3 FG certainly didn't have to sell much to be in the black.
 
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