The story of the Who Dares Wins mod

Who Dares Wins started off in August of 2003. It had some strange beginnings...

Megaraptor had been dabbling around in modding, making some modifications to the RTS game Real War and later modding some content in Battlefield: 1942. He had released a skin pack for Battle of Britain, and a popular map for the mod Desert Combat called DC Black Hawk Down (which would later become WDW Battle of Mogadishu). He thought it would be cool to start a Bf1942 mod and came up with several ideas, including mods based on an alternate-history US invasion of Japan at the end of WW2, a mod based on the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, or a mod based on air-to-air combat in the Pacific Theater in WW2. None of these ideas got him really excited, however, and he got to thinking - wouldn't it be cool if there were a tactical shooter which covered modern special operations, not in a fictional setting like Ghost Recon or Rainbow Six, but in the historical setting of the recent past? And what if this game was not confined to one unit or one war, but included many different units from many different countries in many different wars, both large and small?

And Who Dares Wins was born, taking its name from the motto of the British Special Air Service. At first, WDW was a mod of Desert Combat. Megaraptor was the only team member, and the mod only used models from abandoned mods. However, before too long, Kruger came along and offered to develop a website to replace the ghetto FrontPage setup the mod was currently using. Despite his offer being initially turned down, Kruger made a website anyways, and his offer was accepted. He has been making and maintaining the WDW mod website ever since.

In the early days, we didn't know how to make mods very well. We had a lot of low-quality work, and got flamed for it. Plus, there was some confusion in the community about our mod being a Desert Combat mod, and people thought we were copying DC's stuff. We added a few more team members, but we were hampered by Megaraptor's 56k internet connection, which prevented him from getting the latest Desert Combat patches (which by November 2003 were being released every month and were topping 500mb). This became such a problem that the decision was made to leave DC altogether and become a standalone Bf1942 mod.

This meant that we had to add a lot more staff. Just about anyone who could model or skin joined, and this would come back to bite us later. Of those that joined in those days, only Kaltagesta, Nexusmax and Kruger are still active mod team members. The others have moved on, including Marcinko and JeisAi, who both joined the US military. We also gained quite a few beta testers, most of whom never actually tested anything, but one guy (Punk Rawker) stuck around on the forums anyways. We were churning out models like crazy, with varying levels of quality. However, we barreled towards our release point, which ended up being in June of 2004.

The first release (version 0.1) was widely downloaded and received mixed reviews, but overall it was a modest success. The criticism mostly focused on the quality of some of our models and skins. We were happy with this success and planned to move on to WDW 0.2, which would add a few more maps and armies, but no great improvements. Then we would port our entire mod to the new game Battlefield: Vietnam.

After a while, Megaraptor realized that the mod wasn't going to go anywhere if the quality of the graphics was not improved. He announced his plan to the rest of the team: Go through the mod map by map and remake everything that needed to be remade to a higher quality standard. The plan was agreed too, WDW for BF:V was junked and the long road to 0.2 had begun.

It was hard work, but the mod community, less 1 or 2 holdouts, became more and more supportive of our efforts. We remade maps, deleted a few (the map "Jessica Lynch Rescue" was out) and added tons of new maps, units, weapons and vehicles. Along the way, we discovered that Repeltje, a former beta tester from Belgium, knew how to skin. Staff came and went, Sir. R.I.P.P.E.R. and later Norjax joined the team and the mod marched on. We didn't have much of a plan, we would read about special forces missions, decide "this would be cool" and add a new map or a new weapon. There were no major incidents. Until March 2005.

First came SAS: Codename Bravo. SAS: CB was a special forces mod for Battlefield: Vietnam, but they had fallen off the radar. Then, all of a sudden, their leader emailed Megaraptor asking to merge with WDW. After a vote amongst mod team members we decided to go ahead with the merger, only to find out to our shock the next day that SAS:CB did not have any original models, and instead had been stealing work from the Counter-Strike fan site CSNation.net. The SAS: CB crew was quickly booted off the team.

The next week came an even bigger scandal. A visitor appeared on our forums from a CS modding site, claiming that we were using his stolen work. An examination showed that the Galil model we were using was in fact created by this individual, and he was sure that Nexusmax had stolen his model. A flamewar quickly developed in the forums and in the forums of this CS fan site, as WDW mod team members rallied around Nexusmax while friends of the individual making the accusations defended him. It turns out that Nexusmax had received the model from insane, a former WDW team member who had left the mod several months ago. An investigation showed that several of insane's models used in release 0.1 were not in fact his, and had been stolen from CSNation.com. This led to a halt in work on our 0.2 release, while we re-made every single model insane had "contributed" to the mod, just in case any more of them were stolen.

By late May, it seemed that we were stuck in a rut. Megaraptor was going to be out of town for the first 2 weeks in June, and the next-gen sequel to Bf1942, Battlefield 2, was set to be released that summer. So we kicked it up a notch. At the end of May, Megaraptor was working 16 hour days for 2 weeks straight, modding like crazy. Some stuff had to be cut. Other stuff was finished in time. Every hour counted at this pace. But by the last week in May, everything was ready for release.

We released in late May, and a problem hit. Players were experiencing crashes trying to connect to a dedicated server. Frantically, with the help of some kind server admins, the WDW team was able to get to the bottom of the issue within 24 hours and solve the problem, which was a bug in the server files. Patches (to version 0.21) fixed the bug. We then planned to make another version, with some of the content we left out in our rush to get 0.2 out the door, to be released later that summer. But work moved slowly, and work on a new version for BF2 was underway at the same time. At this time, we added Cees to the team, and he redid all the sounds to WDW 0.2, replacing almost every sound in the game. Who Dares Wins was also reviewed in the August 2005 edition of UK PC Gamer Magazine, and a copy of 0.2 was distributed with the magazine on DVD-ROM.

Work on the BF2 version was even slower. First the mod tools were 2 months late in being released. Then, we discovered that they were not very easy to use, and the modding potential of the BF2 engine was not that great. The structure of the models was difficult to work with, and the lack of an importer for BF2 meshes made it even harder. We started to hate the BF2 engine, and finally began discussing switching to a different platform.

Several games were suggested, but it was Kaltagesta that first suggested the Source engine. For a while, we contemplated making the mod a stand-alone game, before concluding that we didn't have the expertise to go that far. The decision to move to Source was decided upon in November, but kept under wraps while we worked on the next Bf1942 release (version 0.23).

It wasn't until January 2006 that 0.23 was released as a full install (to minimize technical difficulties with patches), and reception was overwhelmingly positive. Several servers were up and running (you can find WDW servers with the All-Seeing Eye browser), and quite a few people played online. An estimated 10,000 people downloaded the mod. After that release, we got to work with Source, still keeping our intentions under wraps. Then, our website (which had been hosted by FilesNetwork) was hacked and largely destroyed. Since we were going to have to redo the website anyways, we decided to redo it centered around the future Source versions of our mod, and to go public with our intentions. And here we are today...