Time for a new revisionist tactical mercenary game? Options

[Wounded Ronin]

Jagged Alliance 2 is one of the best regarded tactical squad level games of all time. It was close enough to the undefinable perfect strategy game that, for example, ridiculous amounts of time has gone into making ultra-realism mods like 1.13, which have added hundreds of weapons and features in an effort to reach that theoretical pinnacle.

As it turns out, someone wrote an interesting article about how the original designers of Jagged Alliance hadn't originally known anything about firearms, but ended up creating Jagged Alliance 2 after being influenced by many of their fans who were apparently big Soldier of Fortune Magazine affectionados. They did lots of research and probably made Jagged Alliance 2 as realistic as they could have given their situation and constraints at the time.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/...games-ever-made

Darius Kazemi, a game developer who previously spoke with Motherboard about his Random Shopper experiment, just published a book detailing the development of the game, which was inspired by a wider range of topics than you might expect. Kazemi offered to share the excerpt below, which focuses on the curious relationship between semi-fictional mercenary culture, "macho adventure" magazine Soldier of Fortune, and gun-toting video games.

This makes me think if it's time for a new game similar to JA2 but which kind of deconstructs the Soldier of Fortune cultural tropes. (After all, Soldier of Fortune magazine went belly up a while ago, in part because people who thought they were hitmen started posting hitman ads in the magazine.)

What if you had a game set in the 80s where the premise is that a bunch of average guys who are all Soldier of Fortune magazine subscibers start putting silly mercenary ads in the magazine?

Then, somewhere in a remote corner of the world, some ruler is unseated. Maybe he's a king or maybe he's a president. It doesn't matter. The point is that the guy himself basically lacks good judgement and is a Soldier of Fortune fan. So he decides to hire a bunch of mercenaries, not realizing they're mostly a bunch of washed up blue collar guys from North America. Because of this accident of fate, you end up the premise of the game, where a bunch of average guys with random mismatched weapons and aviator sunglasses ends up assaulting a small developing country. Fortunately for them, the military of that country is also extremely dysfunctional, so as the player you have a chance to succeed. Although it would be possible to "level up" your characters with time, they would virtually all start out as fairly unimpressive individuals. The theme of the game would be a comedy of errors and delusion.

Maybe after you beat the game the ending is that either the deposed king or one of the mercenaries ends up becoming a think tank proponent of special forces based military intervention in the middle east in the 2000s, or something. Or maybe it shows the cover of an issue of Soldier of Fortune covering the coup, and then the camera zooms out showing the old magazine sitting on some politician's desk in the 2000s or something.

[Tanegar]

Ronin, I would play the shit out of that game. I whiled away many a happy hour with Jagged Alliance 2, and would cheerfully murder someone (someone who wouldn't be missed, like Martin Shkreli) for a proper, turn-based Jagged Alliance 3.

[Kagetenshi]

After at least fifteen years, you look to have gotten your wish—turn-based and a July release date.

(Or should I be asking who you murdered?)

~J

[pbangarth]

Not at all pertinent. I already have the last post in 6 of nine sections of Discussion, and I want to be listed in all of them on April 1, 2024.