You'll be pleased to know that Pinstripe's Mod v4.0 is currently in development. Or maybe you won't be pleased, maybe you were expecting some news that was better than that, Reheated perhaps? Well regardless of what you were thinking, my aim once again is to bring you, the player, yet another new hogs of war experience.
This time around I wanted to step things up a notch, not just in relation to difficult, but in regards to storytelling. Each mission in the original singleplayer campaign offers up some kind of vague synopsis. What I wanted to do in v4.0 was link each mission and island together through setting & story telling, so you feel like your actions in one mission can help affect the next one, all culminating into an ongoing tale of destruction and vengeance. I won't give away much here, but you can watch the intro cutscene below to give yourself a preview of whats to come.
There will be six cutscene videos in total that will come alongside the mod download itself. It would be great if I could, but obviously I can't put my own cutscenes physically into the game, so you'll have to watch them separately. Each video will be labelled, so you'll know when you should watch it in order to understand what is happening in game. The cutscenes will go hand in hand with the mission briefing screens, which I'm also remaking in v4.0. The biggest challenge with creating a brand new story in hogs is the fact that I'm not directly able to mention any of the teams/nations. If I did then things would get messy and not make much sense, considering how the game will randomly sequence which team you will fight against on any mission. The same goes for individual pig names. To get around that I've ended up using codenames instead that are used to generalise the specific pig in question, just as I did with 'The Wolf' Tank Commander on Mission 12 in Pin's Mod v2.0. So all the enemy nations you fight against are referred to as 'The Coalition', who are basically a group of nations that banded together, thinking they are better than everyone else. Oh and they control the worlds Swill supply, I know its kinda the same thing you've come to expect, but it does have more depth than that I promise! The story also continues into/provides context for Hard Mode, but really only from Mission 25 into Mission 1, then it just repeats itself as it usually does. Nevertheless, the story up until that point will have expanded on all the topics & characters, so it should all still make sense. I really do want to go into specifics but I'll hold my tongue... for now. I wonder if any of this would be considered canon?
Sadly one of the things I've realised when planning out this next mod installment is that my map pool has all but dried up. You can still expect 11 new/old maps in v4.0, alongside existing multiplayer maps, but after this mod is finished - I have no new maps to showcase, which makes me sad. Sure I can still mix up all the maps I've used previously on different missions, but new maps have consistently been at the centre of my mods, so where I go from here is unknown. There are still other areas that can be focused on, such as new classes that are given different weapons, but at present that feels like something thats just over the horizon, ever so slightly out of reach. The same can be said for the creation of brand new maps from scratch. Hogs modding does have a bright future, but its just going to require us to wait a little longer in order for it to reach its full potential. Till then I'll continue to try and create new & exciting campaigns for the community to enjoy, even if the next one takes me a million years to make.