WARSAW News

Hello,

We’d like to share some important information about the upcoming changes in WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes.

As per our previous announcement, players who owned WARSAW in their libraries prior to August 23, 2023, will receive an update with a special launcher on May 20, 2024. This launcher allows those players to choose between playing WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes or the older version of the game, which was previously available on the “bootcamp” beta branch. At the same time, both available beta branches of WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes will be closed. This change affects the 'legacy_version' branch, which contains the older version of the game, and the 'bootcamp' branch, which was used for public testing for updates.

Achievements and save files:

• Achievements on Steam are tied to the current version of WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes and not the older version of the game. Completing the campaign in the current version of WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes will be required to unlock all the achievements.
  
• Save files from the 'legacy_version' branch will remain compatible with the older version of the game with one exception - if you saved the game during the tutorial, you will have to start over due to the changes introduced in the meantime.

Players who never purchased the previous version before the launch of WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes will continue to have access to the current version only. That means if you added WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes to your library after August 23, 2023, and started your playthrough of the older version of the game from either “bootcamp” or “legacy_branch”, you have until May 20, 2024 to complete it.

WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes Team

Hey everyone,

Thank you for all the feedback you’ve been sharing with us since the release of WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes. We’d like to use this opportunity to let you know what the next steps are and at the same time answer some of the most frequent questions that arose on Steam after WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes launched.

On August 23, 2023 WARSAW was updated to WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes and became available on Steam as a free game featuring:

• New playable hero
  
• Two new enemy units
  
• New storyline, complete with animated and voiced cutscenes
  
• New, fully voiced Polish narrator (with complete subtitles)
  
• New soundtrack
  
• New location type to interact with on the map
  
• Tons of new entries for the codex including photos, posters and newspapers
  

Alongside there have been two beta branches with older versions of the game available to all the players. That beta has run its course and will close in 30 days. On April 5th, 2024, we will retire all the beta branches from WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes. Players who had the game in their library before August 23, 2023, will receive an update that adds a special launcher. This launcher will allow you to choose which version of the game you want to play - WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes or the older version of the game (with improved controller support, optimization, balance updates, bug fixes, and other quality-of-life changes).

Those of you who did not purchase the previous version of the game and did not have it in their library prior to the WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes launch will retain access to that version only.

Q: Why did you remove a strategic element from the game, making the gameplay too linear?
A: The removal of the “momentum” system was required to follow for historical accuracy - this means that Rising cannot falter based on the player’s choices that are not true to the historical facts. Currently the linear mission progression requires the player to undertake a mix of both the actual missions that happened in real life, as well as a degree of random missions to make each gameplay that much different but it does not affect the historical milestones of the actual Rising.
The second thing altered was the omission of three missions to choose from - what now remains is a random mission that propels the story forward in linear fashion, although the random missions are still chosen from a pool of available ones.

WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes remains a tactical turn-based RPG with a wide roster of playable characters with their own unique skills, that tells the story of Warsaw Rising - now presented in more accurate chronological order. When playing the game you will experience:

• Tactical turn-based gameplay with rpg elements and resource management
  
• Extensive roster of characters with their own unique skills
  
• Collection of weapons that players can find on different missions
  
• Numerous enemies and enemy vehicles with their own sets of skills and strategies
  
• The events of the Warsaw Rising accompanied by historical characters, places and documents
  

Q: Game became a visual novel now.
A: WARSAW RISING’S gameplay remains the same as in the older version and now players also have the opportunity to learn more about the events, people, and places of the Warsaw Rising. WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes is a turn-based rpg that has an extensive, tactical combat system where players can develop their characters that have their own playstyle, weapons and story. It portrays the events of the 1944 Warsaw Rising, one of the most tragic chapters in the city’s long history.

Q: Game is not historically accurate.
A: We partnered with Institute of Polish Remembrance to expand on the historical aspect of the game, to enrich WARSAW RISING with the addition of authentic events, characters, missions, cutscenes and Warsaw Rising day by day diary. Warsaw Rising Museum and Institute of Polish Remembrance supplied us with the materials that contributed to the historical accuracy of the game - photos of people and places, notes, and newspaper clippings.

Q: I lost access to the game that I paid for. How do I get it back?
A: Access to the older version of the game was never removed - it required you to access the beta branch to play it. Starting from April 5th 2024 we will introduce a launcher that allows owners of the older version of the game to choose which version they want to play.

We greatly appreciate your support, comments and feedback for WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes.

UPDATE:

We decided to postpone the beta branch deactivation by two weeks into the second half of April.

We are releasing the first hotfix for WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes:

• fixed issue where "Parasol" Soldier's skill, "A Risky Gambit", caused the game to soft-lock during combat upon usage.
  

Hey everyone,

Yesterday’s launch of the new Free version of WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes was a technically challenging affair. Switching the game live, from one version to another, with a major overhaul of the features and content, Steam page assets, the name of the game and the price tag was not without its challenges and we had all hands on board for this.

It was never our intention to remove the access to the original version of the game. Unfortunately due to the technical challenges outlined above we ran out of time yesterday and didn’t make it available for the launch of WARSAW RISING. Sorry!

As a result we’ve prepared a Legacy Version branch where everyone can access WARSAW as it was before August 23rd and experience the original version of the game.

In order to access the Legacy Branch of the game please select WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes in your Steam Library, right click on the title, select “Properties” and then “BETAS” tab. Choose “Legacy Version” which should automatically update to the version of the game from before August 23rd.
Moreover, we will continue to iron out the bugs and hotfix both the WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes version of the game, as well as the Legacy Version. Our aim is to introduce the existing Bootcamp Branch changes (controller support, patches, etc) into the Legacy Version after extensive testing in the near future. Please note that the Bootcamp improvements are already available in the WARSAW RISING version of the game.



Thank you for your patience and understanding while we were working out the best way to move forward after yesterday’s launch. We want to make sure that you can enjoy both WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes and have a chance to come back to the Legacy Version, if you feel like it.
WARSAW RISING focuses more on the historical accuracy when compared to the 2019 original. It was important to get the events, places and people right. For this to work, we had to adjust the strategic layer of the game. We achieved this by removing the "momentum" system and the random mission generation, because they allowed for unpredictable and unhistorical progress of the uprising (ie. Śródmieście falling in the opening days of the struggle). The game now follows a more linear but also a more authentic timeline.

The rest of the strategic layer, however, remains intact. Random calendar events, hero recruitment, inventory, character progression, hospital are all still in the game. In addition to historical missions, the game will present you with randomly generated ones, similar to the 2019 original. This way the campaign retains replayable elements instead of being fully "on rails"

New features of WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes

- New playable hero
- Two new enemy units
- New storyline, complete with animated and voiced cutscenes
- New, authentic Polish narrator (with complete subtitles)
- New soundtrack
- New location type to interact with on the map
- Tons of new entries for the codex including photos, posters and newspapers
- Console improvements (Bootcamp branch) are now available in the PC version, including controller support
- UI, visuals and gameplay improvements
- Huge performance improvements for the city map

Thank you for your support and understanding

WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes Team

Five years ago WARSAW launched. A game focusing on a history of the city and it’s history that is not as widely recognised as we felt it needs to.

WARSAW reached hundreds of thousands of players on different platforms and was included in the Polish history books, was recognised by German Digital Culture Foundation as a valuable educational tool to teach about World War II and received a lot of attention from both the players and gaming media from more than 40 countries that covered both the game and the theme of Warsaw Rising.

We always felt the story of WARSAW deserves to be shared with many more players and we partnered with Institute of Polish Remembrance (IPN) to expand on the historical aspect of the game, to enrich WARSAW with new historical events, characters, missions, cutscenes and Warsaw Rising day by day diary with support both from IPN and Warsaw Rising Museum. The end goal is to make sure the game can be a learning tool for students of Polish history both locally and abroad.

The new version of the game removes the strategic layer that we felt did not support the more narrative driven elements of the game, as well as adds new enemy characters, a new playable Hero and a Polish native narrator on top of numerous other text based additions and factual revisions.
All these changes deserve a new title of the game and we present to you WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes, that the game will from today be called.

But what’s most important is from today, WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes becomes a Free game. Available for everyone to download, enjoy and experience the Warsaw Rising as they never have before.

This wouldn’t be possible without IPN’s support as WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes officially becomes a title joining other historical games – Cyphers Game and Szybowcowa 82 to allow players to learn about Polish history.

Thank you for your support,

WARSAW RISING: City of Heroes Team