Söldner: Secret Wars

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Söldner: Secret Wars - often referred as Soldner, Soeldner, SSW or SMC - is a computer game, developed by Wings Simulations and published in may 2004 by JoWooD. The game can be played in first- or third-person. Players can control vehicles, planes and helicopters.

Main task is to fight against other players over the internet for reaching the goals, even if its described as a campaign mode on package, single player is just for train.

The game and the expansion set Marine Corps were rereleased together in North America by Evolved Games (Take2 Interactive) in may 2006, renamed to Semper Fidelis: Marine Corps to avoid previous bad press about Söldner. Marketing text from the original Söldner release was re-cycled with no effort from JoWooD to promote the new release on it's own merits. The game itself suffers from serious latency issues in the netcode especially in two person vehicles and the primary style of gameplay involves lengthy and involved campaigns of spawncamping and sniping.

Contents

1 Game modes
2 Specials
3 Söldner: Marine Corps (Expansion Set)
4 Bugs and errors
5 Development by Project Zero

Game modes

Capture The Flag (CTF)
Capture The Vehicle (CTV): Similar to CTF, using a vehicle instead of a flag.
Conquest (CQ)
Super Conquest (SCQ): Similar to CQ, but capturing of enemy's headquarter is not possible unless controlling all other checkpoints
Deathmatch (DM)
Team-Deathmatch (TDM)

All modes can be played on all maps.

Specials

Advanced gestures system (AGS): Player can use gestures for pointing to dangers or swearing at enemies.
Advanced destruction system (ADS): Player can destroy buildings, terrain and vegetation.
Unit customisation system (UCS): Player can arrange the outfit choosing from different clothes, boots and caps.
Maps: All maps are embedded in a nearly endless one, player won't reach borders (6500 x 3500 km)
Commander mode: Players elect one commander who sees battlefield from top, gives orders and manages the team account for buying heavy tanks or sth. else.
Mobile Respawn Vehicles: convert into spawnpoints if parked.
Chopper: Some helicopters (for example: Chinook, Blackhawk) can lift up vehicles.

Söldner: Marine Corps (Expansion Set)

Marine Corps adds ships and vessels to the game and brought new maps for desert combat. It also gives new vehicles.

All Marine Corps features are usable without the addon, but new stuff (weapons, vehicles, vessels) is not accessible, but if a player drops weapon or leaves vehicle it can be used by all players.

Bugs and errors

A few Bugs occurred in the first release so some reviewers did not rate the game until the worst bugs were repaired. Wings published a lot of patches to get things fixed.

Söldner was rereleased as Söldner: Reloaded in november 2004 including the first four patches. Still there were some bugs.

This problems leading to bad sales figures so probably this was the reason why JoWooD decided to close Wings Simulations in spring 2005. The game now will be further developed by a team of fans, Project Zero.

Even if there are some rumours about cheats that using an aimbot, there's no proven source telling that. According to earlier statements of Wings, cheating is impossible because of WACHE (german for guard, abbrevation of Wings Anticheat Protection), a system which compares local values of item files with the server one's marking all players that using other file-versions as cheaters.

Development by Project Zero

Project Zero provided their first patch (33668) in february 2006, changing balance of weapons and trying to achieve more team play: some vehicles can only be used by two players together; one as driver, one as gunner. The patch also adds a lot of objects (trees and houses) to the maps and expands the range of vision, but because of this, the game did not longer run on older computers. Some days later Project Zero reduces the sight again (33669), and four weeks later they announced a patch that corrected some errors in maps that occurred in some game modes by changing the spawnpoints (33670).

Still there are some terrain glitches allowing players to physically hide inside item buy boxes or stones.

To match the rereleased Semper Fidelis, Soldner now has version 33671, in which AGS was changed for North America: it is no longer possible to swear.

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