Just a quick one...

As we have been posting model designs, a few comments have come in about things such as weapon sizes, or overall design. Suggestions that we make the weapons bigger, add Gears of War style glowy lights to the models, or design Japanese walkers that look like samurai, and so on. As a consequence, I thought I would share the design goal for our line of WWII models. 

This can be summarised by the phrase 'improbable, yes- illogical, no'. 

By this, we mean that, for instance, it is improbable that any nation develop walker technology. However, once you accept that they have, it makes sense to paint them and arm them following existing organisation and marking doctrine and armaments that are readily available. It is illogical, however, to suddenly add a huge weapon with an ammo bore larger than a crewman could actually load, or that suggests ammo larger than could be carried within the vehicle. Indeed, many decades after the Second World War, despite many advances in technology, the look of the Armoured Fighting Vehicle remains substantially similar the the end of WWII because the look of most weapons and armour is dictated by physics and engineering demands above all else.

Likewise, although lights for traversing terrain in non combat roles make perfect sense, glowing pipes and weapon parts, whilst very cool, have no place on a battlefield where most of the target acquisition is visual. Likewise bright red or bone white paint schemes. Equally, whilst we might accept the development of walkers as an improbable but logical occurence, there is no logical reason why a nation on a war footing would halt the production of a weapon platform, nor compromise its efficiency, to make it look more like a dragon, or a samurai, or whatever. 

Such design ideas are very neat and have their place in games with a higher 'fantasy' setting than our game world. However, we are attempting to build a world that logically extends from an improbable set of scientific breakthroughs. This doesn't mean that the weird and wonderful won't appear, but that we will always ground it in a historically logical context. 

Hopefully, that explains the thinking behind much of what we are designing for War Without End. Keep checking back for more design updates soon!

Thanks for reading,

Russ at Team CG