This is wonderful!
For some aspects, I truly mean that. For others, I don't.
I got the original when GC39 came out in late 2011, and although it took me 4 years I eventually finished the GC. Also played the vanilla campaign a few times over and loved that one. AK was also great until I got to the difficult bits (Gazala, Basra, I'm looking at you two!). However I wasn't impressed with AC and especially SC, as both seemed to be "we'll force you to pile enormous quantities of rubbish on the enemy tigers until eventually you bash your way through", and the maps were missing a lot of villages (I've learned a lot of geography from playing these games, so I was disgusted when I couldn't learn stuff from the SC Bagration map. There are more than 5 towns in the Minsk-Bialystok area!). so if we go back to the old campaigns with lots of tactics and stuff, plus a great AI and various improvements, I will be pleased. If SC's 'you can only use tanks becuse everything else will die' attribute comes back I will be thoroughly annoyed.
Also, I am quite well known as a modder for this, and I expect people will want me to port at least one of my projects to PzC2 (with improvements). How can I do that with 3d? I struggle to mod graphics for 2d, so you'll be missing out on a lot of stuff with that move.
. I've had around 2000 downloads between my three main projects (in my sig), so I think modding is quite a significant part of this game and it will suck if you miss out on that aspect.
More on 3d, I don't hate 3d by itself. OOB has been my favourite game ever since it came out (toppling PzC, largely because I enjoy bombing Pearl Harbour and Melbourne with torpedo bombers and stuff like that), and 3d works well for it. So I won't judge based on that alone... except for the modding above. However both it and GTA4 use 3d, and those are the two games I have the biggest performance issues with. Granted, I haven't upgraded my PC since 2011 and probably never will (I still use a CRT screen for the record), but from what I gather you are moving to a resource hogging engine. I'm sure everyone else on this forum has newer stuff than I do, but I would hate to see even middle-range PCs miss out on your latest version because it uses so much power. If you make it run for my machine, that's great and I'll be a day one purchase, but if not then I will probably just lurk through that forum until I get a new PC. Probably in 2025 or something.
So why do I say all this stuff? No-one cares about by "when I was a kid" level PC, or at least I assume no-one does. Its simple: PzC shone because it was simple and easy to access, while there was a lot of depth that interested players would get to experience after a very short while. From what I read, at least some of this seems to be getting taken away. On my ($300 piece of junk) laptop, OOB runs about as well as a monkey with its legs stuck into a block of concrete, while PzC can run at max performance. If you pull up the requirements, a lot of people will miss out accordingly. Same if it is hard to mod. Sounds like you are keeping the gameplay, which is good, and I hope it turns out successful.
I'll keep my eye on this. Obviously, I'm not going to be able to change the opinions of enough important people to make a lot of a difference, but I hope you are acknowledging what made the first game great, so the second can be greater. Either way, it isn't likely to run on my rig, and I'm not bothered by that, but I hope my experience in recent years helps you realise some issues that should be taken into account for development!
- BNC
