HomeLAN - Would you like to have gone back and redo some things to the retail version of Tactical Ops given the chance?

Laurent Delayen - This is a difficult question. Of course, now that we're 6 months after the game did hit the shelves, I would do some things differently.Working on Tactical Ops, and also the retail version, was quite an adventure, I learned a lot of things.

My main regret is the lack of planning on Tactical Ops. The project started as a simple experiment to learn the Unreal Engine, and ended up being a commercial title. This after releasing 5 big updates of the game (not counting small patches, but real big updates involving severe code and graphic changes), winning the 1st place at the Make Something Unreal Contest (best mod entry) and being selected for the Unreal Tournament Game of the Year Edition (which didn't appear for contractual reasons) - all of this in 2 years and a half. It's quite an exceptional story!

If I had known that earlier, I would have started the game like a commercial product and not like a mod, unplanned with no long term goals. We got caught by the success of the game and kept improving it while keeping the features that players loved, while I would have loved to rework the game from scratch at the risk of losing the current players.