Salutations, Panzer Generals.
It’s been a month since the debut of Panzer Corps 2’s latest DLC, and we wanted to take a moment to share some insider insights with our community.
First of all, we are continually amazed and humbled by the reception our work on Panzer Corps 2 receives. To the thousands of players who have embarked on Panzer Corps 2 campaigns, and even now continue to do so on a daily basis, we have nothing but the deepest appreciation for all of you; especially in this day and age of games being shut down from lack of interest and of players.
We’re always thrilled to read about your experiences with our campaigns, and look at screenshots and media of your campaign playthroughs. There really isn’t quite a feeling like the one we get when we read about the fun players are having with Panzer Corps 2; it’s our reward for all of the countless hours of work that goes into the planning, research, construction, and playtesting content for Panzer Corps 2.
Now that said, there have also been some very articulate criticisms in your player feedback, and while we enjoy bathing in the glow of fun and fuzzy positive vibes, it would be a disservice to ignore well constructed criticisms. Valid criticisms offer an opportunity to learn and grow. Afterall, it takes a really passionate fan to know, and care, enough about something to take their time to sit down and write about it in detail.
To keep this Developer Log on the short and sweet side though, there is just one of these criticisms I’d like to address directly, because I think it should be explained better, so you can see our developer perspective on what we are aiming for.
Something Panzer Corps 2 has been doing recently is to have some deliberately inaccurate or misleading objective design. Here is an example from Fall of Poland.
That objective to ‘Rally Encircled Border Guards’ is something players very quickly found out was seemingly impossible to achieve, and I’m here to tell you, yes, it is actually very much impossible. So don’t worry that you were unable to achieve it, that’s why we made that objective not hand out a ‘game over’ defeat screen.
So why is that objective listed? Well, when we put things like that into the campaigns, we’re trying to create some ‘fog of war’ with imperfect or incomplete information and directions. The history buffs among us know how many of the battles of World War II turn out, and have probably some inkling of how the recreations of many of those battles within Panzer Corps 2 will also probably be turning out.
But to actually be in that moment, your information would be incomplete. On the morning of September 1st 1939, the Polish soldier on the border with Germany doesn’t immediately know a full scale invasion is happening all across Poland. The only instruction you’ve been given is to alert and organize border defenses against some kind of incursion, and this realization that the border troops are completely overwhelmed and overrun well past any possibility to preserve or rally, that’s a window into the realization that bigger events are afoot than anyone in that place and in that moment in time would be aware of.
Bottom line though, we definitely recognize this sort of thing can be confusing to players, even if that confusion is by design, perhaps in the future it can be done in a way that is less anxiety producing and more mysterious and thematic. We’ll certainly keep that in mind moving forward, as we try our best to read and assimilate the player feedback we regularly receive.
We definitely have some very interesting ideas and plans still yet ahead for Panzer Corps 2, and we’ll be back to tell you all about them hopefully sooner than later.
