A WELCOME RETURN

Years after having put “PC Gaming” aside for “Console Gaming”…

I finally had enough of being boxed into a type of “genre group”. While console gaming is great at times the fact being that there some unique “Console Only” titles, quick and easy UI, and there are entire communities that stand behind their console banner. For me I was tired of multiplayer shooters and campy story driven games. I had grown up playing a lot of RTS games like “AGE of EMPIRES II”, “Battle for Middle Earth”, and of course “Stronghold 2”. These RTS style games usually never made their way to consoles because the distance between playing with controllers VS. mouse and keyboard is enormous.

The feeling of switching to PC was always an afterthought because from the outside looking in things seemed so complicated. I had heard of “STEAM’ through talking to other gamers so eventually I went and downloaded it on my laptop. After shopping around I found some cool RTS/SIM titles like “Banished” and “Stonehearth” (both of which i highly recommend, then, I finally saw it “STRONGHOLD 2 STEAM EDITION”. A rush of great memories ensued. I purchased the game booted it up and fell right back to form.

While I was aware there were new features it was mostly the same old test, trial, and error. I tried messing around with the “Map Editor” and made a few really bad practice maps, and then after a few tutorials some more sensible and balanced maps.

I went to the community options in steam and perused around, enjoying the MEMES and looking at some of the custom maps ( I still at the time of writing this don’t know how to upload other peoples mods).

In the community there were a lot of similar themes “Lord of the Rings”, “Game of Thrones”, and a few quality of life upgrades, but not many unique mods. After digging around on YouTube I did find a few people reviewing “STRONGHOLD II - IMPERIUM CONDITA” which was closer to the types of overhauls I was interested in.

Fast forward another few years after I had been planning on creating a YouTube Channel/Content Site, I didn’t have any general direction or projects really lined up. I had been working on graphic design, art, videography and editing, along with some minor code reading/editing. That’s when I decided to open up “Stronghold 2”, but this time I was going to see what I could do and how could I edit one of my most beloved games.

Continued in DEV-DIARY III …