Here's a place for us to ask about JAO which many of us are seeing as a good precursor to SROnline.

Split from:

Personally, I'm more interested in JA: Back in Action, although I'm not sure why they're remaking JA1 instead of just doing JA3.

Laziness for writing?

Hey, is Gus Tarballs going to be in JAO? I loved that guy!

well, we are going to include almost all the JA2 guys, so he should be in.
Regarding JA:BIA - different team, different publisher, so not my part to comment on

SWEET! I get to be called Woodie again!

As long as I can have Grunty & Ivan mow shit down, I'm good.

And "Buns" Sondergaard to train up the local militias!

Reagrding Hermit's question in the old thread:
It is going to be turn based but for PvP/Co-op there will be a time limit (and a bonus for people moving faster)

Now i want to go play old JO, i wonder if it's on steam, i know it was on gametap when i still had it.

Jagged Alliance 2 Gold is on Steam for $19.99.

All of the Jagged Alliance games (1, 2, and all of their expansions) are also available on GOG.com.

Nuts. Now I want to play it. 'Cause I don't have enough games on that "want to play again" list already.

Every month or so, Strategy First has a sale with JA and/or JA2 for cheap.

anybody having some JAO related questions then? Otherwise let me chime in by recommeding the excellent ja v 1.13 mod project - yeras of labor and love have gone into that...

I'll have to replay the old games before I can form coherent questions. Is the world going to be shifting in nature (like a persistant territory map) or something more abstract?

We are looking to have a progressing world map with specific locations that can be visited- but the map and missions may change according to global events or player actions

SWEET! Come on guys, we got us an economy to destroy!!!

That's an elegant slution. Curious to see how this works. When is it slated to be online/in beta?

Also, thanks for recommendng the mod. JA has that old-timey feel in games ... those were the days.

OK ,back to my question from the Shadowrun mmo thread I remember reading that there are only about 60 mercenaries in the game,does this mean players might find them selves in a bidding war with other players for a Mercs services or will everyone's game be separate.

Or will we be able to create all our own mercs, a la Icewind Dale?

Oh man, if we're all fighting for Mercs, Gus' price is going to go through the roof!

There will be one initial merc for the players to create themselves - the rest need to be hired (but can be bought for an unlimited time contract). However there will be a Gus for everyone, no worries

Good to hear. I'll have to see about getting on early so I can get the name "Woody" so he can get my name right.

On making a character, please tell me the questionnaire from JA2 has been replaced with something better. I would use a cheat sheet when answering the questions just so I could get the perks/feats I wanted in a character, like stealthy and knives or whatever - I found the character creation in JA2 to be pretty annoying as I tried out new characters once I got a feel for how the game played.

Seconded. Immersion is nice, but give us explicit character creation, please. Point-buy, if possible.

If I have to do ink blots like in New Vegas, and one of the answers is "Two Bears High-Fiving", so help me...

we wanted you to sing a song and decide your char based on that...

seriously though: your first merc will simply be a face and basic stats, you can then distribute points as you see fit.
anything elöse is just a waste of time after the first time of "oh this is fun". and we don't have the resources to fool around

A small teaser trailer online...now remember, this is not BioWare or Blizzard. We did this as a side project while developing, so it has practically no budget.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2kDnKWx48w

start flaming now...

I don't know, compared to most browser games out there, that's some high-quality stuff!

Ahh shit, is that Ivan talking some smack?

Just read on Kotaku you're showing JA:O at Gamescom! Good luck! And honestly, as one professional to another? This looks really, really good. Definitely very excited to play this.

Can we play it yet? ... How 'bout now? ... Now? Damn.

just visit us at gamescom
or come to our forum and wait for the closed beta passes to rain down...some time in the future

gamescom . . hrm, if i had some holidays left over i would consider it . .

Hey, um, what's going on with this?

Just saw a "Pre-Order Now" advertisement on Steam, and...

That is the other JA project- JA-Back in Action. Suffice it to say, many old fans are not too happy with it, though. We are not involved in it, however.

Lots going on with that IP it appears.

With any luck, JA3 is just over the horizon. Why are fans not happy about Back in Action?

Well, maybe if the story of JA2 wasn't being recycled.

AGAIN.

It has more to do with the apporach of dropping tunr based and altering the gameplay in many areas. But it is not my place to say- there are forums who dicuss JA BIA at length for more details.

What?! No turn-based combat? OK, I'm starting to sympathize with the haters.

It's actually kinda cute. Reminds me of the cutscenes and intros back in the days of 16 bit machines. No offense meant.

And making Jagged Alliance not turn based will go to the same place where that Fallout 3/4 isometric hack&slay went. Or Shadowrun - the canon raping shooter, for that matter. I mean, there are very good RTS games out there, but if you buy into a franchise, you better not piss off the fanbase you spent money to gain access to on purpose.

Fallout Tactics mixed Turn-Based/Real Time was great. Story was meh, but it was a very good game.

It's not ALWAYS a debacle.

Both previous Fallout games were also mixed, with real-time exploration and turn-based combat, so there was actually no change there. Jagged Alliance was fully turn-based, while JA2 was mixed. If I understand correctly, Back in Action will be exclusively real-time, which is a much bigger change (and a needless one, IMO).

Combat in Fallout Tactics could be set to real-time resolution, unlike 1 and 2. Jagged Alliance actually had real-time exploration in the DS version, which was a much-needed improvement to the original.

Actually from what I'm seeing, it's Real-Time With Pause, otherwise dubbed "Plan & Go". Basically, everything is in real time until you or the game activates the pause, thus allowing you to take as long as you please to issue new orders and assess the situation. If the designers are smart then there are probably triggers that automatically pause it for you, such as spotting a new enemy or having a teammate get hit.

At the risk of sounding like a terrible heathen whom doth not believe in the pure perfection of previous Jagged Alliance titles, that kind of thing doesn't seem like such a bad or even unneccesary change. I love Jagged Alliance 2, but if there is just one thing that I absolutely hate that the 1.13 mod could never fix was how goddamn painstakingly slow and tedious the man-by-man turn-based system made simultaneous movement and flanking. Every damn time the enemy showed up, it'd take so long to get into a new and better position I was usually better off just making the best of things and shooting back from where I already was. I think I can handle the loss of pure turn-based combat if it means Igor and Grunty will keep running around the damn building while Buns and Grizzly keep the enemy at the front door occupied with suppressive fire and aimed headshots, as opposed to stopping dead in their tracks after running out of AP's and refusing to move until I tell them once again to move.

'Course, so long as you fought at night then 95% of the enemies would casually walk into your line of fire before the remainder smartened up and hid inside closets, so I guess flanking didn't matter much with Enemy AI from 1999...

There are a number of previews that show off this whole Real-Time-With-Pause thing, although they're pretty much all in german. As I don't speak german, I'm not sure but I think this one is amoung the newer previews.

Besides, if it turns out terrible then it's not like we can't just mod Back In Action into an almost entirely new system like we did with the JA2 1.13 mod.

Real-Time With Pause? Sounds like X-COM: Apocalypse without the flying motorcycles.

I think both approaches may have value. And the good thing is - if you don't like one, you can go the the other. JA:O is pure turnbased - so we do run the risk of being slightly tedious. However we have tried to alleviate that with speeding up the controls. Basically most of the time you right click to cycle thorugh options and left click to execute (like with aiming). That in itself makes it a quicker game - I was surprised how fluent it can be if there is enough going on. Of course if you just run through empty landscapes this becomes less attractive, but we tried to prevent that by just throwing more enemies at you. Seems fair, eh?

Only if your character teams up with my character and we move under fire

Character should be based on how you sing "Love Is A Battlefield".

http://www.dakkadakka.com/s/i/at/at2/2009/...3f817_12157.jpg