It’s been almost another four years since Derek Smart last talked about his efforts to resurrect the MMO shooter Line of Defense, but this time is different and more substantial, at least in terms of word count, as Smart has now elected to move the project to Unreal Engine 5.
The post mostly sees Smart recounting the move away from the game’s previous Havoc engine towards Unreal Engine 4, then discussing some of the bad luck in terms of timing as UE5 started to slowly become the best solution to making the game come back, which forced him to wait for the engine to launch.
Now that it has, he’s starting from scratch, but Smart assures gamers that this isn’t as big a project as that sounds on paper: He claims that the game is “over 95% dev complete, while being 100% content complete,” though it won’t be a simple direct port so much as a full rebuild of assets and gameplay from design docs. To help him out, Smart will be hiring a third-party team, while he projects development to take between 12 to 15 months. Who that team will be isn’t confirmed, as Smart is still in talks with several potential studios.
Once the UE5 upgrade is done, Smart plans to hand over the version to previous buyers of the game. He also has put together an internal build that lets buyers of the previous Steam early access version play a limited but “still 100% playable” version the game via their own local or remote servers; instructions on how to set that up are here.
