Qt3 Games Podcast: forgeforsaken and Chromehounds

Finally catching up with this podcast.

Good times while it lasted, it was great playing with you guys. If there was random deployment on every map (to prevent the arty spam), and the weird war updates before every match were truncated, and … oh I don’t even know what … perhaps it would have survived. I guess if it was on the PC, hah.

Now of course I wish I played more. /cry

R.I.P., Chromehounds.

Now I’m sad that I didn’t play the game more.

By the way we sent if off with a 2 hour or so match on Sunday night, I think it was (whenever I posted). ForgeForsaken, my brother, and I played through lots of old builds, reminisced about the launch of the game and its quirks, made fun of Roger Wong’s wacky builds, and won more than we lost against the computer. Good sendoff.

This just went up over at the Sega forum, the last line gives me some faint hope that maybe there may some day be a sequel.

http://forums.sega.com/showthread.php?t=308657

I would like to thank all players for enjoying Chromehounds over 3 years. After the title release, I’ve worked for many titles but Chromehounds is still an impressive title for me. We enjoyed developing the game, even if we had a lot of difficulties during the development.

Unfortunately, we decided to close online service for Chromehounds. I had a lot of questions from users asking on why we close online service but I can’t talk about it; as it was a company decision. I would like to give some insight into the development as gratitude of your long time support.

> Concept and ideas for Chromhounds game rule:
Most significant concerned issue was “establishing the rule for team play incentive”. To achieve it, I referred to “American Football”. “American Football” is a sport specified in each player’s role clearly separated which is one of the goal for Chromehouds.
As an aside, the university I graduated is famous in American Football. When I was a student, I was not interested in American Football but I’m surprised at this unforeseen fate.

> Learning Curve
For finalizing the game balance, we played many battles in our development team. Always we found effective mech build or strategy we investigated captures against for it and took balance again. We finalized the game repeating this process. After releasing the game, we were surprised at seeing users’ build and strategies almost followed our process for some time.

> Soldiers
I’m not sure who gave an idea becoming a soldier when his hound is broken but most of development staff had considered it was joke because human soldier has nothing to do against Hound.
Then development staff realized it was not joke suggested many ideas such as soldiers could use more strong weapons or capture COMBAS but we rejected because of tight schedule and concerns for glitches broken Hounds on purpose for undercover action.

> Unidentified weapons
These were prepared for surprising event. Thinking back, it should be appeared easier but I remember users’ heat up when it appeared first time. There were some users who left their offices early to catch a glimpse of the event, but it had already been destroyed when they returned to their home.

I have too many wonderful memories through Chromehounds.

Finally thank you again for playing throughout launch to present. Nothing could give me more pleasure if our Chromehounds could entertain you.

I hope to meet again in Neroimus.

FromSoftware, Inc.
Chromehounds Producer
Toshifumi Nabeshima