In short, one might say that we may have embarked on too much stuff at once, that we have miscalculated time, and that a lot of private issues have got in our way, as the team themselves underwent crucial changes in the meantime. We can say it was all a mix of different things.
Most of you already know that Ealendril used to be an extremely active member, and he had been our leader since the beginning of the modification. He gave his precious contribution to pretty much all fields of modding, except for mapping, and was very efficient in everything he tried his hand at, including finding time to work on the game in the first place, more than anyone else. Unfortunately, he left the modding scene during the development of Edain 4.5 completely. However, what some of you might not know is that there were other talented members in our team, as talented as Ealendril, who mainly focussed on 2D and 3D art (skins, models, icons, and so on); being less active in the forum meant that they often went off the radar or simply kept a low profile. Speaking of whom, Thorongil was also a founding member of Edain and has always done an excellent job, Adamin joined us relatively early and proved a valuable resource for the mod, and Radagast the Musical came much later, but was no less gifted member to welcome among us. When it comes to coding, Gnomi and Lord of Mordor have been able to care about the rudiments for a long time, and FG15 worked quickly to improve his skills and show his great talent. Therefore, although Ealendril did look after most of the total workload, we could still rely on enough talent and manpower to ensure that, event hough at a slower pace, our progress would never stop completely.
Yet, here is our next problem: Thorongil, Adamin, and Radagast had announced at about the same time as Ealendril their intention to quit modding. So, not only did we lose our team leader, but also four members as a whole, all working in the same areas of modding. You can think of it as the construction of a house: there are a few people carrying stones and bricks, others mix up the mortar, and some others put everything together. Eeryone works wonderfully as a team, and, if anyone were to do less, his fellows would keep up to it. If there are fewer bricks, less mortar, and not so many people to assemble each component, the own construction process will surely go on more slowly; but, if nobody insures a constant supply of stone, mixing up the mortar, or pieces all elements together, how is the house supposed to be built? One can try their luck and put one stone upon another, but, without any mortar, there would always be something missing and nothing positive would come as a result. Hence, people have to relearn to work on mortar, which they had never done before. Are they going to equal the skill of someone who has been doing it for ten years, in an instant? No, they would most likely not. And, in the absence of a member in a position of leadership, there would perhaps be chaos until a new person takes on that role and becomes familiar with every dynamic of the case. That was what the team had to go through, basically.
Luckily, FG15 and Lord of Mordor have led and navigated the team through that storm well. Furthermore, Joragon and Elendil joined the team and provided great help likewise, and Radagast has ultimately joined us back. Without any of them, the release would have been nowhere as great as it was. Nevertheless, Lord of Mordor has, too, bidden farewell to the project in the end, due to his private life, and real life will always have the utmost priority over modding. Additionally, not all team members of that time have been mentioned properly: Reshef and Trapper have always been there and done exceptional work. The former has made it possible to expand the AI in ways that surprised us a great deal; no one was expecting to see Isengard's AI blow up structures and walls with mines.
We wish Ealendril, Lord of Mordor, Adamin, and Thorongil the best in their life, and thank them for the extraordinary effort and time they put in Edain. You have all worked on it for very long time and certainly defined the mod's course in the long run.
You see, there have been waves of setbacks and various troubles that made it much harder to carry on progress. So, we now get to the second major point, which is why 4.5 took so long to be finalised: the high expectations we have committed ourselves to. In hindsight, it is clear to us that many of the internal Betas between 4.4.1 and 4.5 could have been standalone versions that we could have easily published; some of them would even have gone past the size of previous official releases. We had not realised it in that moment, though, and one of the reasons for that is encapsulated by the "change per time" principle.
Just to cite an example, let's say that a new update consisted of a new spell-book and an overhauled faction, and that we released said update half a year after the last patch. Now, we had also finished a new spell-book and an overhauled faction, but it had been a whole year since the previous update. Then we knew that releasing such a version would be a huge disappointment for the community (because of the long wait), and the obvious solution would be for us to create even more stuff to make up for the waiting time, thus increasing the ratio of changes per time. From a retrospective judgement, this whole argument was probably rubbish, and it would not have bothered anyone at all to have smaller releases out. The longer Edain 4.5 took, the higher the expectations around it and the more the things we set out to accomplish, falling prey, inevitably, to a sort of vicious cycle from which we had to break free. We also wanted to do too many things simultaneously; the original plan was solely related to siege for all factions (that alone could have made for a single patch). In spite of it, we thought that changing siege would have less of an impact on the game, if other key-aspects of gameplay itself had not been looked into in the same manner (economy and spells). It followed that we were soon faced with eight different spell-books to work on, eight siege overhauls, and the entire economy to adjust accordingly. That was much more than we had ever experienced with an update. It seemed feasible in the beginning, before we were put in front of the mentioned issues, and then everything got delayed by consequence.
Over the past year additional problems knocked on our door. We had planned to make 4.5 public at the beginning of 2019 (March, at the latest); we were sure we could do it, and that was the end of 2018. But, BFME modding would not be BFME modding, if something crazy did not occur: all of a sudden, we noticed that saved games could not be loaded and that customised heroes no longer worked. Releasing a bug-ridden game was unthinkable for us, and so we had to go back Beta after Beta until we found a version of three months before that was not affected by that critical error; this is because some bugs are quite difficult to spot. For example, I either test a feature briefly or play a whole game without saving. We had to reinstall everything from scratch and do several tests to make sure that the bugs did not show up again.
On the other hand, the whole Article 13 (later Article 17) chapter opened up, and we knew we were in a dangerous grey area. Surely, we are conscious of the fact that we are a small fish in a vast sea, but we do not want to risk anything here. We earn nothing from Edain and are mostly students who could not afford lawyers; and that problems may always arise is visible on the
German website, www.herr-der-ringe-film.de, that also includes Ardapedia (the german part of tolkiengateway). The administrator of that page had to pay multiple thousands euros for lawyers, as he used by accident some copyrighted images over 10 years ago. We have therefore proceeded to remove all controversial pieces of music and sound snippets from the game. Thanks to the unexpected combination of both issues, we spent three quarters of the year looking for a solution and 2019 was drawing to a close.
This time we actually did it. Our goal was to release 4.5 in January, 2020. The
trailer set a clear limit and we did not release the patch on 31st January, as rumour had it, but a few days earlier.
We would like to thank Turin and Simbyte again. Turin created our launcher and adapted it to 4.5, and Simbyte is our administrator and took care of everything.
It would be easy to have second thoughts and look back, knowing that earlier releases could have seen light, but finding mistakes in the past is no challenging task; difficulties lie in learning from them. We shall try, nonetheless. 4.5.1 fixed a couple of things in relatively short time and our main focus is currently on the forthcoming tournament, and we want as few bugs and balance issues as possible to be in the mod.