Happy 17th Anniversary WWII Online!

17 Years ago on this day, as the world celebrated D-Day, the Allied landing’s that marked the beginning of the liberation of Europe from the Nazi stranglehold... thousands of WWII enthusiasts and gamers celebrated the beginning of a dream game being born. World War II Online was officially released, and one of the greatest gaming community’s was assembled.

Despite the difficulties of the initial release, the game, community and CRS endured. Extra effort was put into making things right and moving the game into better maturity and refinement. The community helped that effort than, and continue to do so in a very big way today.

Today as we stand on this monumental achievement in gaming history, we must pay respect to our community first, and a very close second to the men and women who have served as a RAT throughout this whole time. It is by their vision and guidance that we have made it to this point. All of them, in some way, have left their mark here and it can be stated with confidence that all of them were passionate about WWII Online’s future and success.

Now as we fast forward today, many of our current RATS who were once community members are carrying the torch onwards, into the future. While that path may not be totally set in stone, we remain steadfast ready to conquer any challenge that presents itself. We are confident that with our internal will, and our community’s continued support, much can be accomplished.

As the Roadmap we’ve laid out starts to get accomplished, we begin looking at, what’s next? The good news is there will always be a “next” thing to do.

For example, we have brought in a new programmer to begin investigating our lighting engine, to see what we can do within our game engine to improve its graphics, so that the game may be more visually realistic and maintain its grand scale.

1.36 development continues to make progress and the restoration of Squads being an integral component to game play, with freedom of movement, and having a fighting chance against overwhelming odds is on the way.

SpeedTree is now under investigation to see how we can improve the landscape and environment. Trees moving again or potentially be something you can knock over with enough force. Most importantly, getting several generations ahead in terms of the models that you see and interact with, across all environment objects (trees, bushes, rocks, etc).

64-bit for Windows is nearly ready for testing, and most of that will cascade / transfer over to the Mac client nicely. It also opens up a major door for us development-wise that could allow us to open up multiple cores for improved client side performance.

We also have un-announced vehicles currently under development, which are going to be made completely, from the ground up. As we get closer to completing these, we’ll release more information about these, but we’re pretty sure you’ll go crazy for them.

All of these things go to show, that regardless of other games coming out, WWII Online can and will endure so long as there’s a team at CRS focused and motivated to accomplish the mission, and a large support from the community both by subscription (to fuel development) and by moral support (to spread the knowledge of the game).

Let’s be clear about one thing... there is only one WWII Online. There’s only one WWII Online community. And to back up both of these things is a dedicated group of game developers at Cornered Rat Software, who as stated before is mostly compromised of veterans of the WWII Online community.

The goal for us is to make WWII Online go on to the next generation, for another 17+ years. We can do it, you and CRS. The goal is to not lose sight of the dream and remember why we’re all here. Things may not always be done as quick as we want, or our ideas may not go exactly to plan, but our commitment is to continue and give it our very best effort.

We hope that some of you who are on the sideline’s waiting for “something” decide to come back and recognize that this newer team at CRS deserves YOUR chance at an opportunity to take the game forward. Words will not expedite development, only your subscription will, because that will go into purchasing the time of a developer who can then turn those results around for WWII Online’s betterment.

We continue to march onwards at WWII Online. We will endure, as a team. The team at CRS wants you to know that we’re all incredibly grateful for being entrusted by you to develop this game that we all have so many fond memories in.

I’d invite you all to join us this evening at the in-game ceremony at 8PM Server Time (US Central, GMT -6), hosted on the Campaign server.

Thank you for the many years and memories. May we continue to have them and share them with a whole new generation that deserves to learn about the game.

Very Gratefully,

Matt “Xoom” Callahan

Cornered Rat Software