Battlefront, the studio that gave the world plausible 3D WeGo WW2 combat, is no more. After licking its lips with a darting bifurcated tongue, and letting out a thunderous belch, the massive Surrey reptile that consumed BFC yesterday, said this: “We are thrilled to welcome the Battlefront team into the Slitherine family. Their expertise and passion for wargaming are unparalleled, and together, we will continue to push the boundaries of what is possible in this genre. Our goal is to not only preserve the legacy of Combat Mission but to elevate it to new heights.”
By the time you read this, potent gastric juice will have ensured “all Battlefront staff, including co-founders Stephen Grammont and Charles Moylan” have been “fully absorbed within Slitherine.” Apparently “This integration ensures continuity and preserves the invaluable knowledge and experience that the Battlefront team brings. Fans of Combat Mission can rest assured that the franchise is in good hands, with the original creators continuing to play a pivotal role in its development.”
Moments before dissolving in stomach soup, one of the consumed, Steve Grammont, echoed Slitherine’s sentiments:
“The most important thing to address is why we finally decided ‘now is the time’. We’ve been working closely with Slitherine for about 5 years now and we’ve gotten to see how they work, they’ve had the chance to see how we work. It turns out we both liked what we saw.
It’s pretty amazing that we stayed independent without either selling out or going out of business long ago. Looking ahead we could see us continuing down that road if we wanted it to, but we took a long hard look at things and decided we didn’t want to.”
“Us being independent is a double edged sword. On the one hand we stayed true to our roots and produced a lot of great games over the years. On the other hand, the primary reason we didn’t go out of business is because we kept our staff small enough to be sustainable. That means a lot of things we want to do, and are in fact capable of doing, just weren’t feasible. Or at least feasible as quickly as any of us wanted.
The upshot of all of this is Combat Mission will get a huge production boost without losing its focus. I can say that for sure because there’s already 2x (closing in on 3x) more people working on Combat Mission already and all of Battlefront is part of that. We started ramping up almost 2 months ago, just as an FYI, and we’re VERY happy with how it is going.”
As for who gets to call the shots… ultimately Slitherine makes the call. However, remember that 5 years of working together I mentioned? It built up a lot of trust. Slitherine knows what they bought and they know that we (Battlefront and our core customers) are responsible for its success. They are smart people who really do care about what happens to CM. And as smart people, they know full well that it’s dumb to ‘mess with success’”.
What precisely will the acquisition mean for Combat Missionaries? Right now, no-one outside of a few privileged insiders, knows what “This partnership is poised to deliver new and exciting experiences for fans of the genre, while expanding the reach and impact of Combat Mission” presages, but a new Unity-reliant CM engine appears to be on the way, and statements like this one – “All I can say is that CM1 and CM2 fans will have much to be happy about in the near future!” – suggests that it won’t just be fans of the more realistic, more labour-intensive recent CMs, that see the benefits of greater investment and a larger workforce.
That is great news, thank you! Looking forward to see the new engine.
Fingers crossed – Hopefully this means we’ll get a return to Barbarossa from CM
Didn’t they already do this in CMRT?
CMRT is late war Eastern Front. A return to Barbarossa would be 1941 Eastern Front. Because it would have involved modeling a bunch of early war vehicles, BFC was not willing to expend the effort, making the reasonable business decision to focus on mid-to late war, where they could leverage the vehicles they had already modeled for the other CMx2 titles.
This is almost certainly great news. No more of the horrible Battlefront website, confusing upgrade schemes, etc.
Hopefully we’ll finally get CMAK2 sooner rather than later now.
Not sure how others feel about it but I think they should add melee combat too. I mean, those ultra-long bayonettes the Desert Rats used to run about with might then not be useless?
“It’s pretty amazing that we stayed independent without either selling out or going out of business long ago.”
This is very spot on, the way the industry has been these last 10 (20?) years it’s a real triumph that Battlefront has had such longevity.
I hope the recent steam integrations with Slitherine have yielded a larger playerbase. I for one have been delighted running local PVP sessions of Shock Force on a steam deck, passing the system from hand to hand and watching my opponent react live to lucky shots and knocked out vehicles.
How does Shock Force perform on the Steam Deck? For some reason I just thought it would be too fiddly without M+KB.
I mean, I have both so *could* just see for myself but there’s nothing like a bit of real-life reportage.