Wars of the Firstborn based on The Ridder Clan Mod for Battle for Middle-earth II: Rise of the Witch King

Hello followers,

There has been some time since we had any gameplay updates on the Mirkwood faction for a time. That is because I worked frantically to finish up as much work I could for the mod after my unplanned and prolonged break. The being said, I did reach some milestones that I'm proud to share with you.

Mirkwood 3D Art

I'm proud to announce that, all the planned 3D art has been done for the mod. This took a big chunk of the development of the mod and Mirkwood faction, from the design phase, to animations. There might be some additional changes to the mod, as all things, but for the moment, the 3D art is DONE! Also, there are surprise units that are not shown in the faction plan and you can see them in our new gameplay video!

Multiplayer

Moreover, I was also able to to sort out our multiplayer, which has been in a stale state for some time. This enabled us to test the game in a multiplayer mode! And it works pretty great. The Rc Mod was a bit problematic in the past, but at the new WOTF mod's release we will make a thorough guide in order to get it working!

Combined with what was said above, now that all pieces are pretty much in place, we started to intensively test the mod, and rebalance the Mirkwood faction, see what works, what is overpowered or problematic. Also started an intense bugfixing period (I must admit my older self left me enough bugs) in the event that I might start a closed beta for the mod in the near future.

State of the Mirkwood faction

While there are still many details and a great deal of bugs to be fixed until the Mirkwood faction can be done, I am eager to show you how the Mirkwood faction looks currently! I know there has been a while but I hope the wait was worth it. Below you can see a multiplayer game with me and our betatester, Matt, playing against some AI. While playing we also tried to explain a bit the core mechanics of the faction.

Unfortunately, due to some technical issues we've had in the past weeks, we had to cut the video a bit short. However, we plan to release these kind of videos more often so people can see what Mirkwood is about (or don't, if you want to keep some surprises for the actual release).

This is all for now but more news about Mirkwood will come in the coming weeks. You can share your thoughts in our discord channel you can find the link on the main moddb page or at the bottom of this article. Also, we share there bonus stuff in the #sneak-peek channel for the very curious ones.

Sincerely,
NewErr and the Wars of the Firstborn team