State of Edain 2022

[Elendils Cousin 3. Grades]

Greetings, companions of Edain!

With the year 2022 coming to a close, we want to take some time to talk about the current status of the Edain Team as we've done in the past. In doing so, we want to reflect on this last year and take a look at our plans moving forward - yes, there are plans

2022 in review

The biggest milestone this year was of course the release of 4.6. We finally completed our work on the last remaining faction that hadn't been converted to the buildplot system, the Misty Mountains. They turned out to be the most unorthodox faction, using a mix of buildplots and builders to expand and swarm over the map, and brought the return of many iconic features like the Balrog of Moria. Drakes can once again roam the battlefield, and Bolg commands the hordes of goblins into battle, united under his banner. But not only that, 4.6 also included a massive rework of the War of the Ring gamemode and the conversion of the two BfME II campaigns to Edain. 4.6.1, a smaller patch released few weeks later then added a new mini-campaign about the Dwarves reconquering Moria which also made use of the new WotR system. 4.6.1 fixed the most important bugs that were present in 4.6 and even added a second Tower Defense map and several new custom voicesets for heroes like Zaphragor, Cirdan and Beregond or many of Gundabad's orc units. Our YouTube-Channel also saw some activity, with the trailer for 4.6 being the highpoint of 2022. We are quite proud of how this year turned out overall.

Our goals for the future

Many of you already saw the pictures we uploaded that show upcoming reworks for many of Gondor's and Arnor's models.

More of these will be coming, thanks to Lord_Elessar who recently joined the Edain Team. He is the second addition to the team in 2022 next to The_Necromancer, who already joined shortly after 4.6 and created the Reconquest of Moria mini-campaign. Unfortunately, one of the longest standing members of the Edain Team has decided to take a step back and quit his extraordinary modding career: Gnomi officially retired in 2022, leaving a hole that is not easy to fill. We want to use this opportunity to thank him for all he has done for Edain in the last 15 years and the modding scene as a whole in the last 17 years.

With that being said, we are still looking forward to 2023, as there are several big projects we want to tackle. There are several medium-sized topics like a rework of Angmar's central spell and the Witch-King (including his ring form) as well as the two outposts of Dale and Lake-town, which will be part of upcoming patches in the not-so-far future. We already presented some smaller concept tweaks to Faramir and the unit roster of Gondor. The model reworks, courtesy of Lord_Elessar and Glorfindel23, will also be included there. You can also expect more new voice lines. In short, you can expect the next patch to be a bit smaller in scope than 4.6.

The big projects, however, are what we are really looking forward to. As we already said in the past, we want to convert all campaigns from the vanilla BfME games to Edain, and the next campaign on our list will be the Good Campaign of BfME I.

Converting the entire campaign is a lot of work, but we've started the process and will hopefully be able to share progress updates soon. We can already say this much: Not only will the old missions be adjusted to Edain, we also plan on expanding the campaign by adding more objectives, more enemies and possibly more story missions to portray the War of the Ring.

And last but not least, we can also add two more factions to Edain. At this point, we can't really share much, but the time has finally come to set our sights on this goal that has been pushed back so many times in Edain's history. Once we have taken the first steps and are able to show you actual ingame footage, we will.

Thank you all for your support throughout the years, and here's to a successful 2023!

Your Edain Team