Frank

I played this game for approximately 15 hours the first weekend it was out. Absolutely loving it! It's a worthy sequel to Jagged Alliance 2, which is perhaps the greatest game ever made. I love how I will go to bed and it's still running in my mind, like I'm thinking "Should I head north-west and train more militia at the mine, or go south and take over the next town? Or maybe split up my team and hire another merc...?"

So far I'm loving it. I'm getting that crazy feeling I had when I played JA and JA2 for the first time: the joy of combat, the sense of freedom and exploration, the desire to just get through one more battle before going to bed. I've only played it for six hours so far, but I think that we, after a quarter of a century, finally have a worthy new member of the JA family.

I'm loving the game so far (six hours in), but yes the mine-fields are a pain in the ass. Old school JA had the mercs walk around them after they were discovered. Hope this will be either patched by the developers or fixed by modders.

I love the eye for detail shown here. The pre-order is done: counting down the days until the release!

This will probably not hold up in the gameplay, because it is surely the case that your merc can at times hit another body part than the one they were aiming at. This is especially true when using burst fire.

Thank you so much, dev team! The more I learn about Jagged Alliance 3 the more I am convinced that this is finally a worthy successor to the greatest game of all time. Also, this part... ...answered a burning question/concern I've had for a long time now, namely what the limit of active mercs is. So far, every screenshot and all footage I had seen had six or less mercs, making me fear that we wouldn't get that magnificent feeling you could get in JA2 when you invaded enemy territory with nothing less than a small army of your own.

"You could obtain the Chalice of Chance by killing the poor old guard, or take great effort to sneak into the museum and steal it." If I remember correctly, the best way to handle this situation was to simply have a merc sneak up on him and shoot him with a tranquilizer dart. You could also wait for him to leave his back office and then switch off the alarm. Man, Jagged Alliance 2 was just a playground of wild CRPG fun.

There isn't really a point in rating a game that we've only been able to look at while still in development. But if I had to make a prediction, I think I will end up rating it highly, perhaps 8/10. The game looks good to me. Yes, it's less serious than its predecessors, but JA2 was also rather over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek, and had a cartoonesque colour palette of its own. It's not that big of a leap for me. Furthermore, JA3 seems to have everything I expect from a Jagged Alliance game: a tactical and a strategic map, mercs with quirky personalities, action points, no CtH, the laptop complete with email and browser, liberating towns and training militia, a large amount of items that can be combined and, weapon customization, NPC dialogues with skill checks, side-quests... I think the game will be good. Not as good as JA2, but since that's the greatest game of all time to me that a trivial issue.

The absolute final boss original gangsta overlord of all JA mercs is of course Ivan Dolvich. People can have a different opinion about this, but they'd be objectively wrong. Just kidding, to each his/her own. 😛 Other than that, I have a special fondness for the merc you create, since this is essentially your avatar. And some mercs than deserve special mention: Steroid, Static, Fidel, Shadow, McGillicuty, and Len.

It's quite bizarre to see someone act so condescending and belittling to a franchise reboot that received overwhelmingly positive reviews and sold in huge numbers. XCOM 2 alone sold half a million units in the first week after launch. They didn't miss any mark. They simply went in another direction and it paid off well, both literally and figuratively.

But this topic wasn't originally about esthetics, it was a complaint about enemy AI and people were already comparing it to the finished version of JA2. And things like that can be fixed at any time with a patch. And concerning the feedback on the art-style, it's a bit grandiose to think that the devs are going to do an entire overhaul of the game's look - less than two months before launch, mind you - based on the complaints of a few people on a forum. The game looks the way it does, nothing is going to change that outside of the modding community.

Oh, come on. The game isn't even finished or released yet and people are already complaining about what's wrong with it. These images are from beta-testers, so it does not necessarily represent the final product. For all we know they already fixed it.

This is fantastic news. Mod support is never a bad thing. I absolutely love some of the things people have done for games like XCOM 2 or Civilization V. Moreover, it allows users to customize their experiences and adds significant play time to a game. Cheers all-around!

They do look kind of silly to me, but I'm expecting that as the game progressing, you will run into a different class of enemy soldiers who will wear a different outfit. Would love to see a more gritty, realistic uniform on those dudes. But either way, there's no esthetic problem that modders can't fix. As long as the gameplay is good, this is a minor issue to me.

I'm not sure about that. While it certainly helps to pay attention to feedback that fans give on your work-in-progress, I don't think it pays off to engage with the forum too much, because once people take it for granted that they respond to our messages it would be an endless task for them to keep up all the discussions. Not only that, but everything they'd say here would eventually be used against them. If I were on the dev team I'd lurk here, but I'd never respond to messages, except maybe in broad statements published as news updates on the homepage.

* topic * All I've seen so far is that a squad can contain six mercs, but how many squads can you take into battle at the same time? Is it a total of 18 mercs like in Jagged Alliance 2?

That was already a side quest in Jagged Alliance 2. They could do it again, but I fear it would just be one of those self-aware gags that is rampant in popular culture nowadays.

This. I played sci-fi mode the very first time I played Jagged Alliance 2 and I never did so again. Every other time I replayed this game (which happened too many times for me to count over the past quarter of a century) I opted for realism.

I would very much like to see adult content in JA like booze and porn tapes because it adds to that tongue-in-cheek, less politically sensitive 80s action flick style of the game. The brothel from JA2, however, was a bit uncomfortable to me because we learn from the story that some (possibly all) of the girls who work there were forced into prostitution.

I absolutely do not think we should want to erase an entire nation and culture from a work of fiction due to real-life events, no matter how horrific. It is not going help the people of Ukraine in any way and will instead only further the creatively restrictive on-going trend of putting politics first in works of fiction (which in a self-defeating twist is precisely what totalitarian regimes tend to do, just look at the communist principle of 'socialist realism'). As others have pointed out, the Jagged Alliance games take place in what you could call a time-line parallel to our reality. This is to say that they take place in a world that we immediately recognize as our own and is filled with true-to-life objects and concepts (from the items in the game to nations and historical events), yet which also incorporates fictional elements without giving them a second thought, as if Arulco and Grand Chien are just as much a given reality as, say, Great Britain and China. I very much like this kind of world-building and as such, I don't want the developers to bring me out of my suspense belief by bringing in clear political statements such as suddenly making the Dolvich relatives distinctly not Russian anymore. Igor and Ivan are Russian, and depending on the narrative of Jagged Alliance 3 they will fight under either the Soviet or the Russian flag.