Update Post Mortum: 3.2, Liberty or Death

With 3.2 right around the corner, I figured I would give a different sort of update this time. More of a post mortum of how 3.2 came to be, why it was made and what kind of content you can expect in it.
3.0 in OWB, directly following 2.1 and the inclusion of the Oregon and Utah updates was always slated to be a big update. It was so big that it took us a solid nine months to complete it - with most of the team of 5-15 active developers focusing on the update itself.

Zapdude, the original focus planner for 3.0, originally imagined a sweeping narrative for Lanius - putting him directly into a "Base Game Germany" kind of role in being an important conquerer country that defines the region. He also wanted to put in a lot of narrative choices and decisions for what kind of person Lanius becomes at the end of that journey.

Now, as I described it there that sounded cool - yeah? That's because it was.
However, where 3.0's original plan failed was in the implementation, not the base idea.
Since we came in with the mindset of "Lanius was important in this update" we wrote all of our trees and content with that in mind. Based on the presence of Legion scouts in the design documents of the cancelled game "Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel 2" we wanted to include a focus path for Lanius going into and conquering Texas.
When we coded in Texas's trees, we made the assumption that Lanius always would often come into Texas, since he was the pivotal character of the update. When we made that decision it also came with another assumption.

"Lanius, since he had to come to Texas most games, couldn't face major threats before dealing with Texas".

That design choice, in combination with the earlier ones, would lead to a set of compounding bad design choices that would ultimately lead to Lanius being blatantly overpowered and a lot of 3.0 trees not being as interconnected or healthy to one another as we, and players would have liked. Systems like the "East-West Legion Faction" were put in last minute mostly due to the danger of Caesar calling in a Lanius that had double the factory count of Arizona.


3.2 was originally conceived in November of last year, before the update was even out, as a sort of "Plan" that we could follow if 3.0 didn't turn out so hot because of these design issues.
When we released the update, while it was clear that there was good content there the design issues with Lanius were so appearant that it made a regional rework necessary directly after implementation, less Texas, Colorado and New Mexico be rendered a unfun mess of countries.

3.2 ( Originally 3.1, but it took too long and we delayed it later ) is me, Faelin and Garn's efforts to try to patch up 3.0. It should be coming out very very shortly and I trust you all will enjoy it when you get your hands on it!

( This also means that I am finally free to work on 4.0 content, which is exciting. )