The day has arrived my friends. The day for which you have held your breath so long.  The day which heralds changes the likes of which you have never seen and which most likely you will not see again in your life times. Today is the day we finally unveil our newest, grandest feature of all time! Today we bring you flying unicorn mounts! Oh, wait. That's not right…

I know you have all been waiting patiently, and by that I mean spending your time wildly speculating in the forums on just what is 1.31? What the heck does "Unity Upgrade" mean anyway? I’m afraid you’ll have to wait just a bit more for some details. Rafter and Motor are working hard on putting together one of the biggest and quite likely the best marketing pushes we’ve ever had for the game. They’ve got articles and movies and rollout plans and all kinds of other things that are the domain of the marketer (of which my awe is only surpassed by my ignorance).

They’ve only been waiting on one thing to unleash the goodness they have devised. That one thing is this very announcement: Battleground Europe version 1.31 is now in TEST! This is a very big milestone for us as we can finally see all the changes come together and begin tracking and tackling the bugs. Once we have that stable we’ll begin to release to the closed beta team and very shortly after that we’ll be moving into open testing where all of you can have a chance for a sneak peek. But before we get there I have a few updates and other things I need to talk about.

China

As you all are aware we have a pending release in China. Our partner there has just passed the first (and most difficult, I am told) round of certifications. He has 3 more rounds of certification to go with each representing a smaller but higher up group of government officials. Think of it like the ESRB ratings we have to go through except these guys can make or break you and I think they have access to tanks.

Short story is things are looking good now that we have translated the game all but completely and switched all of the flags and icons over to a more appeasing, country red, country blue and country green. Remind me to show you some pictures sometime, it is actually kind of cool.

System Requirements

There’s no other way to say it. System requirements will be going up for 1.31. This is a good thing for all of you who enjoy the latest graphics technologies. It’s also a great thing for us as we can honestly say that we have a very modern looking environment. There’s plenty of head room with everything turned all the way up to get a truly awe inspiring game world.

That said there is still room to turn a lot of things off and still enjoy a lot of the improvements. But, with these improvements does come a rising of the bar for entry. It’s not particularly drastic but let me go over a couple of the must haves:

SSE2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2)

SSE2 has been a standard since the Pentium 4 was introduced and includes chips back to the Athalon 64. These will now be the minimum requirement to play. 99% of you will be unaffected by this requirement change. We will however also be using this time to upgrade our recommended processor. We haven’t got a final decision and we’ll need your help testing to determine what is best but we are certainly thinking something in the Core 2 Duo range at 2.4 GHz or better.

We are also looking at the possibility of moving to SSE3 which includes later versions of the P4 and Athalon XP along with all current processors since the Athalon 64 X2 and Pentium D and Intel Core Duo. We haven’t made a final decision here but again, this will not affect very many of you at all.

Shader 3.0 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_shader")

Video card minimum specs will also be taking a jump to requiring Shader Model 3.0. This includes cards from the GsForce 6600GT and Radeon X1600 series on up. However, these are minimum cards and we would strongly recommend players to use cards from the Shader Model 4.0 family.

If you’ve been thinking about an upgrade this is probably a good time. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll highlight some budget builds from places around the web as well as some of our own builds and upgrade suggestions. In today’s market you can do a lot for a little and building or upgrading your own PC not only saves a lot of money but it is easy to do and will give you better components that what you can buy pre-built.

Capture Mechanics

There has been a lot of speculation regarding capture mechanisms changing for 1.31 and indeed we are making some changes that I can outline for you today. First and foremost the capture table (or crate) is no longer a part of the game. Instead we will now use presence in the capture building to initiate capture. When you enter the building you’ll get a small capture dialog that tells you ownership and spawn capability and if you can capture the building similar to what you see today.

Capture will be continuous however. If you start the capture but die before completion but there is another member of your side in the building the capture will continue. If you die as the last man in the building the capture will begin to undo itself but you’ll still have time to return and try and continue the cap, it won’t immediately start over. The other side to this coin is that it will take longer to capture than at present.

This change in mechanic will offer us a starting point for some of the other features we are considering including having capture affected by the numbers of attackers and defenders present as well as dramatically reducing the ability for single players to affect a capture. We’ll have plenty of time to play test this in open test and we’ll want all of you to come and give us a hand when we declare testing days.

That’s all the update I have for this week but as we progress I’ll have more news for you. Please feel free to post comments or questions below. I’m looking forward to getting 1.31 into open test as soon as possible so we can start getting your feedback. Until then…

See you on the Meuse,
GOPHUR