This project is not mine, but I had the honor of being invited to participate since the beginning in 2009, because the German clan that was behind it was one of the biggest Frontlines clans in Europe and they already knew my work, and wanted me to create new exclusive gametypes so that the mod would not be just visual. They had already made several maps for Frontlines, some of which became quite famous in the community like Burg and Apesgorod.
The mod was Galactic Warfare from BlackMonkeys.de, which gained a lot of attention and popularity when it was released in 2011, beating Frontlines in the competition for the best Call of Duty mod of the year at ModDB‘s MOTY, and even coming close to winning the award for best overall mod, which was disputed among all games.
Then Xiao, the leader of BlackMonkeys, invited me at the time exclusively to design and implement the new gametypes for Galactic Warfare. I designed two gametypes initially, one was called R2D2 and the other Shields.
We started with R2D2 because we thought it would attract more attention due to the beloved droid, despite being the most complicated to implement, since it involved modeling, animations and the droid’s own intelligent movement.
There was a forum restricted to the project’s developers, and there I posted both gametypes in detail for approval and also to pass on what information would be needed in the maps for the R2D2 logic to work so that we could have a gameplay that was not only fun, balanced and free of possible bugs.
Beside is the exact image that I posted in the restricted forum, showing exactly how the path positions should be marked on the maps that were still being made. I even made a test video of the droid’s movement using these markings.
But since everything was still very early, there wasn’t even a model of R2D2 for the test, so I used any model, by chance from the suitcase because it has a similar size and was already compiled in all the maps, in which the procedure would be the same with the droid.
So I kept working on Frontlineswhile they were working on the maps, but I was always following the project with Xiao, waiting to have at least one map ready and then finish the gametypes.
But the project dragged on and lost its main developers over the years, who were being hired by professional studios, some of which were hired by Treyarch and Infinity Ward, the two largest and most important Call of Duty studios.
What was sensational for them was devastating for the project. And on top of that, the BlackMonkeys clan itself began to disband, and they even lost part of the material they had already done, including entire maps. With that, Xiao decided to close the project and release it as it was, and without my gametypes. Despite that, it was a great success.
In 2012, I became a father and wanted a Star Wars game with a more realistic simulation like the movies to play with my son, and unfortunately there wasn’t one. But there was Galactic Warfare, and although I didn’t have the source code and couldn’t recompile it to add new models to the game, I could implement several innovations to the game, and especially bots, since the servers were always empty and it wouldn’t be any fun to play like that with just my son.
Another big problem was that there were only 7 maps available, one of which was very small and the other was the same map with different lighting. In other words, it was extremely repetitive, and I needed to solve that too.
So I implemented large parts of the base Frontlines structure into it, and started developing solutions to make the game more dynamic and diverse, hence the Forever Concept was born, which was later ported to all versions of Frontlines, including the main one, in a much more expanded and diverse way.
I implemented incredible bots for the game, which were also ported and evolved for the other versions of Frontlines, so we now had a playable and extremely fun game, using the incredible modeling work done by BlackMonkeys.
But there were still things that bothered me, so I also completely changed the VID Gametype, because it was very bad and unbalanced, but it contained the droids from my gametype but which were controlled by the players. But since there were now also bots, I thought I could do something even better than my old gametype, and I decided to create a completely new one using the same name, mainly because I couldn’t change it without recompiling the project. In the end, the new version ended up being much better.
To top it off, there’s nothing better than new maps to increase diversity a little more, as well as different uniforms for each type of map, instead of keeping everything the same as it was in the original. This way, I was able to adapt community maps to the Star Wars universe, in addition to creating dozens of innovations to shake up the maps a little more, such as ships taking off, being shot down, flying past, and also adding the Viper Droid to all maps, which had not been finished in the official version.
I also added several administration controls, a new anti-cheat, and even a COOP mode for up to 12 players. And thinking about pleasing my son, there is also a Droid Mode, where we can play all Gametypes using only Droids. With this, my version was truly superior to the original. I was able to play for years alongside my son, which provided us with incredible moments together. It was only published and released for everyone to play in 2014.
ModDB Page
On ModDB you can check the entire development history of Star Wars Frontlines and more details.
Gameplays
In this playlist you can watch several online gameplays since the earlier development days.
“Coincidences”
By incredible coincidence, both gametypes I created appeared in more modern versions of Call of Duty developed by Treyarch, which happened to be the studio that hired the most Galactic Warfare developers, and the only ones who had access to the details about them.
In 2015, with the release of Call of Duty Black Ops III, it incredibly came with the exact R2D2 gametype, but instead of R2D2, there was another type of Robot, which despite looking threatening, is harmless and fragile like R2D2, this is the Safeguard gametype.
In October 2018, Call of Duty Black Ops 4 came out, the first and only major release to date without a campaign. Furthermore, the great curiosity here is that this time they focused only on the 2 gametypes created by me, which happened to be exactly the 2 that I created for Star Wars, the Safeguard, a clone of R2D2, and the “new gametype” Control, a clone of Shields.
But unlike R2D2, the Shields gametype was released, but under the name Overcome within Frontlines, and of course, without the Star Wars theme.
It was released in 2015 and in January 2016 there were already videos on YouTube of people playing Frontlines in the truly new Overcome gametype.
A curiosity, Overcome was named Controle (Control in English)in its version for Call of Duty Rio, and has been present since its first Alpha version released on February 2018, 8 months before Black Ops 4.
And to round off the coincidences, the incredible Burg map created by Mapicted, which was a huge hit in Frontlines, had an extremely similar version released in 2013 at Call of Duty Ghosts, called as Stonehaven. Rumors claim that he also created this map, which is quite likely. He is also one of the Galactic Warfare developers hired by Activision‘s major studios.