Gary Grigsby’s War in the East 2 expected in 2020 By Joe Robinson

While not officially announced, it’s been known amongst those who frequent the Matrix Games forums that Gary Grigbsy and his development team 2by3 have been working on successors to War in the East and Steel Panther, namely War in the East 2 and Steel Tigers.

Nothing’s really been heard about these projects (being unannounced) so one would be right to wonder what’s going on with them right now. Thankfully, the developers have read our minds and posted on the Matrix forums late last week as to what the development team has been up to, and what their timeline is looking like. Instead of paraphrasing, here’s the full text:

2019 has been a very busy year for 2by3, with two major projects (War in the East 2 and Steel Tigers) in the works and we wanted to give you all a brief update on how things are going and our current expectations for 2020. Finishing War in the East 2 has top priority for 2by3 and it is expected to be feature complete within the next quarter, which means that a final release date will depend on final testing and polish time, but we expect it will be a 2020 release. Recruitment for testers will ramp up once we reach a feature complete state. Steel Tigers is the next priority after WITE2 and is already roughly 70% feature complete for our initial feature goals, but it is a complex title and a great deal of work still remains. Steel Tigers is a cooperative project that has included development and engine support from Matrix and Slitherine as well. Steel Tigers will release after WITE2. As it is based on a new engine and not yet feature complete, it's too early to predict a timeframe but we want to allow enough time to finish it properly and also to support WITE2 properly after its release. We do plan to involve the Steel Panthers community in the alpha test once the basic feature set and testing are complete and their feedback will help us greatly in determining the final shape of the game and additional development and the final release timeline.

So a 2020 release for WITE2 is very likely, unless something goes very wrong or the developers are secretly working on Blizzard time. Steel Tigers I suspect will be 2021, even if it’s early 2021.