It's very realistic, and of course it's, "unnecessary." We're talking about a freaking video-game here - it's all unnecessary! 😉
Just because it's too much for someone like you to be able to handle doesn't mean that it can't be done; there are several JA2 mods and campaigns that required as much work as these would, but I really shouldn't have expected anything else from you - 90% of your posts are negative.
I'm not suggesting something that hasn't happened before; someone created a mod for JA2 that effectively recreated JA1: https://thepit.ja-galaxy-forum.com/index.php?t=msg&th=20899
Yes, yes, you'll probably screech about how much less that required and how it's still glitchy, etc. - but it was basically done in a few months time by a handful of folks back in 2013, so imagine what a larger group of folks over the course of a year or so could do.
One last bit: "Do [you] understand how much work [it is]?" Yes, as someone who's been playing games and mods in the Jagged Alliance series for over 2 decades, and who has been involved in working with the code/graphics of a different game from 1995-1996, I do know how how much work it is. Do you? Do you do much of anything other than complain?
In any event, most of the other replies here were actually useful, so thank you to everyone else for that.
For instance, I do agree with @Stuurminator that importing old JA1, JA:DG, and JA2 characters would make pretty neat DLCs. The idea from @D13 for map packs, etc. from those games would also be as well!
There were a lot of speech extractors, map extractors, etc. made for both JA1 and JA2 modding, and I think I even heard that someone was working on a JA1 to JA2 map exporter - maybe something like that would be possible for JA2 to JA3, which would make creating those map pack DLCs even easier.
I'm hopeful that eventually, if they found those DLCs successful, maybe they could use that towards, "expansions," (or even official mods) that would allow us to play the previous games' campaigns/quests using the JA3 engine.
I really appreciated the RPG elements of the Jagged Alliance series, and considering JA1 is from 1994... Maybe it's due for a reboot? I'd love to see a JA3: Metavira, and a JA3: Arulco.
@Carmine , your point is a very valid one though; if enough folks don't wind up either really liking the game and seeing some modding potential, there's really no point in what I'm hoping for.
Anyway, if anyone wants to play JA1, there was an official 1.13b patch and there's also an unofficial 1.15 patch that seems to make it much more playable on modern systems: https://www.gog.com/forum/jagged_alliance_series/ja1_unofficial_115_patch/page1
By the way, I've noticed that a lot of the decisions that people seem to not really like for JA3 seem to be very similar to how JA1 works. I'm not just trying to get you folks to love Metavira as much as we all love Arulco; it genuinely seems to me that they're using ideas from JA1 as well as JA2 for JA3 (whether that's a wise decision or not).
