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Call to Arms - Gates of Hell: Ostfront News

Men of War successor Gates of Hell is now a Call to Arms expansion - due out later this year



Gates of Hell is a game we've had on our radar for a while now. It was definitely on our 'Most Anticipated' list for 2019, not sure if we'd spotted it before then. A real-time tactical WW2 game, it was shaping up to be the Men of War successor we all deserved, but developed by the creators of the original engine that powered Men of War - Best Way Soft.

Something weird happened behind the scenes at the end of 2019/early 2020, and the actual developers of Gates of Hell split away from BWS. They've now been picked up by Digitalmindsoft - the company that made many of the later games in the Men of War series, like Men of War: Assault Squad 2.

It was hinted at back in June, but today those same developers - now officially Barbed Wire Studios - have announced that Gates of Hell will be coming later this year as an 'expansion' to DMS's Call to Arms game. It's also called Gates of Hell: Osfront, which means we get ANOTHER game set on the Eastern Front. Yay.

There's an official announcement trailer you can watch here:



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Access Granted: Call to Arms


Call to Arms - Gates of Hell: Ostfront -- Announcement!



We are happy to announce Call to Arms - Gates of Hell: Ostfront!

Digitalmindsoft, the makers of Men of War: Assault Squad 2 and Call to Arms, teamed up with Barbedwire Studios to deliver a new and exciting WW2 gameplay.

Call to Arms - Gates of Hell: Ostfront is aimed to convey the realism that strategy players have always desired: Historically accurate visuals and locations, no health bars, no simplifications, no shortcuts taken. Offering unrivalled immersion to give the most legitimate WWII RTS/RTT to date.

Learn more about the game in our announcement trailer and new store page!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD0o9xC8lkM

https://store.steampowered.com/app/400750/Call_to_Arms__Gates_of_Hell_Ostfront/?beta=1

Development update #91: Features and support



Hi everyone, we are still going strong, and we hope you are too!

Development is progressing nicely and we will soon be able to tell you the alpha test is done and the beta is looming. We’re getting a bit more excited now!
While we are preparing to update our store page, we think it may be nice to highlight a few features that you will encounter in Gates of Hell.
Some of these have been discussed in our devblogs over the past years, and because it’s hard to keep track (plus too much work to read all updates) we decided to do just a short list of selected features of which we think they will make Gates of Hell a completely new experience.


Community input

Many features have been asked for by the community, through our forums and social media; so thank you all for giving us such excellent feedback. We’re quite sure we’ve got the most wanted features right. Chances are that you see your own suggestion here already! Keep in mind that we will develop more after release; because development on the first DLC will start immediately after release. We plan to do quite a number, adding factions as we go along, and adding features wherever we can.

Here’s a selection of features:

  • At least 150 vehicles of all sorts (including civilian), 70 human models, 80 small arms for the 2 factions in “Ostfront”.
  • 12 historical missions, 10 multiplayer maps and 15 dynamic campaign maps
  • All SP missions are historical and all SP maps are historical locations
  • Realistic representation of ammunition and ballistics
  • Realistic armor
  • Suspension for vehicles
  • All authentic vehicle and weapon sounds
  • Crew hatches and other vehicle peripherals like smoke screens are operational
  • Dynamic campaign mode
  • Doctrines in multiplayer to specialise your army in different tactics.
  • Authentic voice acting
  • Flight models for aircraft have custom parameters for each type
  • Detailed mechanics for all game items: Land mines include fragmentation mines, bouncing betty and magnetic mines. Bayonets and various melee weapons. Countless types of tools you can use in singleplayer to sabotage the enemy, and to build boobytraps
  • Multiplayer gamemode mechanics representing a historical experience (“territory” gamemode)
  • Peer to server multiplayer netcode in 64 bit architecture for smooth multiplayer experience, thanks to the advanced DMS platform.
  • Realistic logic for repair and engineering work in the battlefield
  • Vehicles have realistic crew settings, including large cannon, which may have up to 6 crew members
  • Visualization for damage in each vehicle component. There are no health bars, but there's hints on the status of the component's durability.

There are many more new things, which you will find out on release!

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Historical missions and DCG

Co-operating with DMS developers there are some very nice features that our game will benefit from. Thanks to the fact that DMS has developed (and is still developing) a Dynamic Campaign Generator, we have a great extra asset. For this mode we have developed a number of purpose- built maps, some of which can be used in other game modes too.
These maps are different from the ones we made before, because of the purpose they serve; this means that unlike our SP missions and campaigns, DCG maps are not based on historical events; you will have to write history yourself on these. We’ll be giving more details about the DCG feature later.


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Voice actors wanted

We are steadily working to deliver a fresh new game, in which we will have new voice acting. It’s almost complete, and yet we could still do with some voice actors. So, if you have a decent microphone and if you are a native russian speaker, please fill out the form on our webpage. Thanks!

Mac and Linux

Because we have switched to a different engine we must also point out that, as a result, we can’t provide Mac and Linux support any more. These OSs do not support our advanced directX and we are not in a position to change that. We’ve always aimed to be one of the few, but it is now beyond our reach unfortunately. We apologize if you are among those in our community who uses either of these OS’s. At first sight there is nothing we can say to “ease the pain” except that we will of course let you know immediately should this change again in the future.



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Trailer

We are putting the finishing touch on our new trailer, which we made to update our store page. When that is finished, we will put it on YouTube too. We expect this to be finished before the next blog. So subscribe to our YouTube channel (link below) to make sure you don’t miss it!

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Development update #90: Roadmap and FAQ



Hi everyone, we’re back with some more information about what we’re up to and how we want to arrange things for our release, which will take place later this year.
Since we made our announcement last month, a lot has happened and many questions were asked. In this blog we want to answer some of the questions we got.

Buying the game, and game price
“Will I need to buy 2 games if I want to have Gates of Hell?”
No. We will release Gates of Hell as a DLC for Call to Arms in such a way that you pay an amount that would be a reasonable price for 1 game.

There are 2 possible situations; either you already have Call to Arms or you don’t.

If you own any version of Call to Arms already, Gates of Hell will be available at a reduced price. It does not matter which version of Call to Arms you own.

If you DO NOT own any version of Call to Arms yet, Gates of Hell and the Basic Edition of Call to Arms will come bundled together for a single, moderate price. We will decide this soon.

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Release
“Isn’t a 2020 release a far too ambitious goal, given that you are switching engines?”
No. Thanks to our specialists and to very energetic support from DMS we have already finished porting to the new engine. The waiting we had to endure earlier this year resulted in more time to produce content, and that’s exactly what we used that time for. This will allow us to offer way more content than we had planned for Early Access, which in itself is a step we will skip completely.

What will be the release date?”
The last thing we want to do is make a promise we can’t keep. We have dependencies in the process that cannot be ignored. But let’s just say we’ll be beta testing by the end of this summer, and that we will plan a date as soon as the beta is completed and any bugs we might find have been reworked. We aim to tell you in september.

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Assorted FAQ
“When can we play the beta?”
We will beta test in a closed environment. Our testers have already been selected and we have no plans for doing an open beta, because we think that would be too much of a challenge to manage with our indie team.

“Will you be using the first person view that is typical of Call to Arms?”
This is not part of our original intentions with GoH, so the answer is no. Maybe this can be a future consideration, but for now we do not intend to use it.

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“Will Gates of Hell be just like Call to Arms?”
Even though we use the Call to Arms engine, Gates of hell will look and feel completely different. This is the result of implementing our own features and using our own philosophy for the game dynamics. For example, we have our own way of determining any damage in- game, based on entities like munition types, armor thickness and shot angles.
The result will be a game that doesn’t feel or look like Call to Arms.

“Which game modes will be available?”
We plan to have different modes of course; in the first place, we will have SP and MP content. The SP content will be a historical campaign for each faction, and the MP will be a historically-based asymmetrical PvP with the possibility of playing with AI bots.
You will be able to experience the evolution of the armies and their traits as the war evolved. A more competitive mode will be included for the ranked auto-matchmaker but nonetheless will still be historically accurate. We will tell you our own names for these modes at some point, and they will resemble earlier games to a certain extent, so maybe you could compare these to “assault zones” (which we call Territory) where controlling an area is not down to a small circle around a flag but to an entire area of the map. more modes will be revealed later.

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We will also implement a dynamic campaign, which will allow you to grow your army from mission to mission and will provide an immersive continuous campaign, outside of the singleplayer missions which due to their strict historical setup, cannot be interlinked story-driven. We will tell you about our game modes in a later devblog, most likely a blog that will give you an overview of features as well.

”When can we see a trailer?”
We have our specialist, and right now he is working on a new trailer. The previous one, which was almost finished, became obsolete the moment we knew we were going to use another engine. That’s life, but it basically meant “back to square one”. If this hadn’t happened it would have been finished months ago. So we’re working on it; this is as important to us as it is to you.

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”Will there be workshop support?”
Yes. We love the creative community and we will welcome any effort to add something special to the game by means of mods. In fact, we would encourage anyone who considers a mod for our game to use our forum as a starting point; over time, we have grown a big collection of suggestions and ideas that can be turned into scenarios. In fact, our forum is a perfect starting point for modders that are looking for ideas for mods that portray a historical battle which the world has forgotten.

That’s it for now. We will be back with another update in about 4 weeks.
If you haven’t done it yet, you could subscribe and follow us on social media to make sure you miss nothing! Click on as many links as you want:

Thanks for your support, see you next month!

Development update 89: the future is bright



Hi everyone,
As promised last month, we want to make a few announcements in this update.
We would also like to share our view of the path ahead with you.
In the past months, people were already guessing about many different kinds of directions we could take after we broke up with our publisher.
The number of people that went out and gave us practical advice and pointed out possibilities to us was very encouraging. There were very sceptical comments as well, probably just because we could not announce anything yet - so it was no surprise to get those comments. But now, the time has come to move forward and tell you in which direction we will migrate and leave the past behind, and to share the bright future we see for ourselves.

”Are you suggesting coconuts migrate?” (An English castle guard, 932 A.D.)


Publishing

We are very happy to announce that Gates of Hell will be released in cooperation with Digitalmindsoft, and that launch is to take place in 2020.
There are a number of obvious reasons to want to do it like this. One of the reasons is that the 64-bit engine we get from DMS is a very sophisticated evolution of the engine we conceived our game on.
So, we save time in comparison to switching to a completely different engine; instead, we will port to a version of the GEM engine that has been developed into the reliable and stable 64-bit version with out of sync free netcode that already powers Call to Arms.

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Integration

We came into talks with Digitalmindsoft, who became interested in Gates of Hell and who were willing to put in the needed software investment, but as they also have no rights over the engine and we didn’t have a license, there was little that could be done to release Gates of Hell as a standalone title.

Instead we agreed to incorporate Gates of Hell as part of the DMS game “Call to Arms". To most people that will sound a bit surprising, as GoH has little in common with CtA.
However, we put together a plan for the release of both projects under one license, without compromising the uniqueness of GoH.

Call to Arms: Gates of Hell will keep the own identity and gameplay it is supposed to have, while Call to Arms will continue onward in its own path. Our teams have agreed to keep the gameplay of GoH as intended to ensure the truly compelling experience you expect.

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What’s next

We never stopped producing content, whatever was going on. We were able to deliver a lot of extra work; in all departments we have made more progress than we ever thought we would.
As a result, we think we will be able to give you a very generous amount of material in every department when we release the game, which we will do in 2020.
We want to start our beta by the end of this summer, and we are on our way to publishing still this year.
Publishing will mean we completely skip the early access part of our previous plans by the way, instead we will be going for full release! We produced so much more than was required for early access that we think we should skip that step.
Exact dates are to be determined.

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Content

We put the extra time to good use. We’ve been producing lots of content and this is not just about more assets.
We’ll be introducing new voice acting, new animations, new sounds, new maps, scenarios and everything else will be new as well in the full release version, but maybe you already knew this.


Testing

Porting will be finished soon. We will then turn our attention to QA and start testing; first we test internally, and the next test will be the closed beta we tried to start all those months ago.
We are currently reviewing the closed beta briefings and we will be in closer touch with our beta testers than we have been for a long time.

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Our store page will be updated soon, to reflect the changes that we need when being part of CtA. Within our team, the excitement is growing, knowing we have excellent technical and community support, and knowing we are not going to hell in a bucket after all! We want to thank you all for your support and we will be working hard to make it all happen.


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Meanwhile, if you haven’t done it yet, subscribe and follow us on social media to make sure you miss nothing. Click on as many links as you want:

In the meantime, stay safe everyone, and stay tuned!