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Being one of the developers of the Project Reality mod for Battlefield 2 for the past 10 years, I can say I worked on it at first for the challenge of changing/fixing some stuff that I thought were broken in the vanilla game, and then for the potential of creating new gameplay with that foundation. I'm not an artist, as me being here on HN can already tell, so my work was on the gameplay aspect of the game. Changing or adding new things to do, with the focus that teamwork should come first, and trying to make things more authentic with real life weapons/vehicles/tactics. I can say we were pretty successful with that goal, even with all the limitations of the game engine, and it's amazing how different from the original game the mod looks and plays. We also saw people coming and going over all these years. By being a volunteer project, we get the cool thing of getting very passioned players that see the same potential that I did when I started. Not many will stay for long and that's normal, we only ask that people work on what they want. If something doesn't get worked on, oh well, so be it. The community can't really complaint, if they do, we can always say: "if you want to change that, learn how, and do it yourself". And that's pretty much our process of getting new team members. It requires a lot of commitment to get something done right, so in that time we help as much as possible and see if the person will be a good fit to join the actual development team. Not just things like the actual quality of the work, but what their attitude is, if they listen to criticism well, if they work well with others, if they have initiative, if they have the same vision as the project, etc. If they seem fit, they start taking part of the actual decisions for the future of the mod. My experience with the mod was priceless. It requires some strong leadership, like in any endeavor, and that leadership does change over time as people leave and others arise to the occasion. We have been managing it quite well, I would say, and it has been a fantastic project to have worked on. |