It’s hard to believe, but the next COIN title from Every Single Soldier should be Early Accessible by the end of the year. Fingers crossed, Northern Ireland ’74 will be less intimidating than Angola ’86. As I mentioned in this piece, my withered brain struggles with A86’s relatively high (compared to Vietnam ’65 and Afghanistan ’11) village and unit count.
As I discovered in 2019, even suggesting that games should be made about The Troubles, is controversial. All credit to Johan Nagel for daring to take on such an emotive and divisive subject. Post-release, I hope he doesn’t have to spend too much time policing forums and addressing outrage.
Greatly looking forward to this. A conflict where the military struggle, to dignify the random murders on both sides, was so much less important than public opinion and political maneuver.
I am very confused… apart from the one topic you linked from the Angola ’86 forum, I can find no mention of Northern Ireland ’74. There is no Steam page, no mention on their very meager developer web site, and no mention on their social media feeds.
Meanwhile, they do already have pages up for Rhodesia ’72 (with work stated to begin on it this month), and Vietnam ’66 (with work stated to begin in January 2025 using new features of A86 and R72).
If NI74 is to be the “next drop”, one would have to assume work is about complete on it (assuming they are moving to work on R72 this month, which would come out by 12/24 or 1/25 if work is then going to V66). If it is that close to release, why has is there no Steam page, or much info at all about this title?
Maybe intended as a semi-‘shadow drop’ to reduce chances of pre-release outrage? It’s just a very odd situation since pretty much all of their previous releases had information out ahead of time.
NI74 doesn’t have a Steam page yet, but Johan has shared the odd bone:
https://forum.quartertothree.com/t/angola-86-the-latest-from-the-designer-of-vietnam-65-and-afghanistan-11/160396/64
Nice find, thanks! Still seems quite odd that there are pages up for the two 2025 releases, but nothing for NI, due this year.
If nothing else, it certainly makes it seem like they are keeping this one under the radar.
Interested to hear about this one. I grew up in Belfast in the ’90s so I saw the tail end of the days when Saracens and staggered files of Squaddies patrolled the streets (with SA80s rather than SLRs at that time). However the military aspects of it were so rarely discussed in school or at home I probably know more about far flung conflicts further back in time than I do about this one close to home.
Perhaps an approach would be to take the heat and emotion out of it and make a game with a similar “unnamed” location and fictional forces but otherwise all the same pieces of the puzzle that might feed into some interesting gameplay – hearts and minds being important, local population loyalties feeding into recon (simulating the neighbourhood jungle drums), recruitment and morale for both sides being affected by your approach to the campaign, limits on rules of engagement affected by the political system…
There’s a lot of potential but probably unfortunately still quite close to home for a lot of people. I do find the trepidation around the topic a slightly bizarre thing in itself given how many games cover Afghanistan, the war on terror etc – all within living memory and with plenty of opinions on who was the “right” or “wrong” side. Perhaps because it was geographically so close to home and people may have had family/friends involved it becomes such an emotive topic.