I hope to god you are not, for me Holdfast was a huge disappointment both in content and community. It went from a popular alternative to NW, then quickly to an arcade bunny hoping shitfest of lonewolves and Disney play style...
I was part of the Holdfast Development team and one of the original founders of the company and the game. I was there from the first second. The game was envisoned and designed to be a naval/coastal only game, but the Maltese Developers (Refleax, Rycon, Dreas) started going a different direction after a while. I left the team shortly after as I could not stand it anymore.
The game is not very good right now, with Naval clearly being the strongest but sadly unfinished part of the game.
It had such promise but ended up a joke, the funniest was its claim at Historical accuracy! They now cant give it away.
The Holdfast Developers (The Maltese Team) know absolutely nothing about history. When I was still in the team, me and Admiral (Who also freelanced for them sometimes) were the ones providing historical details to the Devs. After we left it went down the gutter.
This is clearly visible in their Prussia Patch (Prussian Empire, For the Kaiser).
BCoF is intended to be a historically inspired game, but still be fun to play. We intend to go as accurate as we can, but we will change/scrap history where it is needed to provide good gameplay. We wrote a blog post about it a few weeks ago.
At this point I would like to claim that our Uniforms and Equipment are far higher quality and far more accurate than the Uniforms in both Holdfast and War of Rights.
You can read the part about historical accuracy here:
Historical Accuracy in the game
When creating a game set in the past, research and staying as close to reality as possible is one of the most time consuming and difficult tasks. It is extremely important to balance both historical accuracy and gameplay to make a fun but authentic gaming experience. Looking back at our previous game, Napoleonic Wars, we could have done a much better job on research. We did not realise it at the time, but we now have a much better understanding of the subject and how to do proper research.
We started re-enacting in June 2014 and joined a Dutch Napoleonic re-enactment group, that reenacts the “85ème régiment d'infanterie de ligne”. At first we thought that everything they did was historically accurate, but a year later we slowly started realising that most re-enactors are anything but historically accurate. This might be a surprise to anyone who is not in the re-enactment community, as it was to us. However, the truth is that most re-enactors do not do much research at all. Many re-enactors even make up their own facts, because “It makes sense”.
With that in mind we decided to instead form our own group that also tries to re-enact the “85ème régiment d'infanterie de ligne”. As we did our research we noticed more and more things that were wrong with our previous understanding of the subject and with re-enactment in general. Ever since then we have been trying to improve our performance/impression of the time and are still continuing to do so.
At about the same time, we also started our own Civil War reenactment group, the “110th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry”. Now with a lot of our research focused on the American Civil War, we started seeing more and more issues with our uniforms and equipment in the game.
Having started work on BCoF right after finishing Napoleonic Wars we barked up the wrong tree due to our poor research and general understanding of the subject. On account of this we decided to redo most of our models and textures for BCoF. Many of them were based on sloppy references and had problems. For example, their colors were wrong, their stitching patterns were all off and on some of them. even the scale was completely off...
Research for the game is now practically no different to the research we do for our re-enactment performances or as a historian might do it. Primary sources, originals and photographs are regarded as the only reliable sources. Secondary sources are only used if it is absolutely impossible to find anything else and preferably if they can be corroborated. This produces not only more accurate content but also much better looking content. Reality always looks better than some made up stuff, at least in period gaming. The problem with this approach is that since we are progressive re-enactors, this is our passion and we sometimes like to focus on unnecessary details like inspector and manufacturer stamps that no player will ever see...
Below is a small series of screenshots showing some of our old and new equipment pieces like haversacks, knapsacks canteens etc. I am sure you will recognize the new models.
Despite that, in terms of gameplay we try to limit ourselves and we do not want to go into extremes. A game has to be playable and in certain aspects we have to cut corners to make it work. For example, if you were to strictly follow the drill manuals, many of the animations would take to long to execute and would destroy the flow of the game. To this end some animations have been sped up by cutting out movements. Some of the actions have also been combined and we also used different drill manuals to create more visibly distinct actions. For example, we are using both Hardees Revised, Gilhams and Caseys manual as a base for our musket animations.
The melee animations in particular had to be made up from scratch and are based on no real manual. We need each swing direction to look visually distinct from another and this would have simply not been possible if we had followed actual manuals.
With our small team it would also not be possible to make uniforms and equipment pieces for all regiments from 1861-65. Certain equipment pieces will be intermixed and worn in a way that does not strictly reflect history. Differences in the time period of 1862-65 are fairly minor though, and it should not be a big issue. For example, the backpack featured above is from 1864, while many of our units are based around 1863. We will obviously continue adding more content to the game during development and after release, so hopefully we will be able to create enough gear to represent all of the years accurately.
We admit that we have made mistakes regarding historical accuracy in the past and we will continue making mistakes. We are not infallible. As such we do not claim that our game is historically accurate, we merely claim to be inspired by history. There are various things in the game that we are aware need to be changed, but are very low on the priority list. For example after making all of the ammunition and ammo crates, we took another look into the ordnance manual and found out that some of our ammo crates and cartridges are wrongly colored. This will have to be fixed, but it is by no means a huge mistake. It certainly can wait until after release.
Anyway, we hope that you now have a better understanding about what we are trying to achieve in regards to historical accuracy in the game, and how we try to approach things.
Quote above is part of Developer Blog 32: (The background is sadly broken, due to our Website being updated some time ago. But while not looking pretty, it should still be readable.)
https://www.fsegames.eu/forum/index.php?topic=40157.0However I have noted a few alarming similarities, namely the graphics and sound are the same (in some cases they look even like reskins of the Holdfast models), you also have HF Refleax on staff.
You might notice similarities due to several reasons.
1.) Both games are made in Unity
2.) Both games were partly made by me.
3.) We do share some assets like for example a fence model that I originally made for BCoF but then ported over to Holdfast.
4.) BCoF and Holdfast share approx 20-25 sound files. I made some of them for BCoF and also used them in Holdfast. 25 might sound a lot, but it actually is not that much. BCoFs sound design is actually going to be fairly different. You can read a little about sound design here:
https://www.fsegames.eu/forum/index.php?topic=40300.0That being said, if you play the games you will quickly notice that they actually look quite different. We have a slightly different, less cartoonish artstyle than Holdfast has.
Character models, animations and most other items are all made from scratch in BCoF and share ABSOLUTELY NO similiarities to the Holdfast Models and Textures. They are both completely different.
This will be apparent once you start comparing some of BCoFs uniforms to some of Holdfasts Uniforms. They have different proportions, materials definitions, fold layouts etc.
As such, to compare them, I would like to link you to BCoF Blog 34 and 36:
https://www.fsegames.eu/forum/index.php?topic=40254.0https://www.fsegames.eu/forum/index.php?topic=40345.0And to Holdfast Blog 16
http://www.holdfastgame.com/forum/index.php?topic=1228.0All of which include in-game renders of various uniform and face models.
Refleax was Community Moderator some time ago and he helped to test NW in the early Alpha stages. He and Rycon also created a bunch of maps for NW and helped out for free on NW and early BCoF development. However, they are no longer doing so, as is evident by their missing Developer/Moderator tags on the forums.
If you are not similar how will you avoid the problems Holdfast faces, and how will you attract and promote Team play, formations and army cohesion, instead of a free for all of loners?
You can read a little about our Artillery related teamplay features in Blog 33.
https://www.fsegames.eu/forum/index.php?topic=40210.0You can also read a little about some of the Teamplay and formation/cohesion features in the Blog 34 and 36 that I have linked above.
https://www.fsegames.eu/forum/index.php?topic=40254.0https://www.fsegames.eu/forum/index.php?topic=40345.0We will write a Developer Blog going more into detail about how we intend to encourage Teamplay in a future Blog.
Talking about gameplay, BCoF will play VERY different to Holdfast. This will be immdietly evident if you start looking into BCoFs gameplay.
For example take a look at our Shooting and Bullet mecanichs here:
https://www.fsegames.eu/forum/index.php?topic=40088.0Or at our Melee Gameplay here:
https://www.fsegames.eu/forum/index.php?topic=40390.0We have created a Discord Server where you can directly talk to us about the game here:
https://discord.gg/3aUrQfmI suggest you join it and ask us anything else that might be on your mind. Thanks!