I was a HUGE supporter of INSMOD starting six years ago. If the forums were still up, I had literally thousands of posts there and made friends that have lasted me every bit of six years and going. I still talk to those friends today, outside of the internet. The community was phenomenal -- one of the best I've ever encountered -- at the start, but the development team quickly splintered and had awful PR throughout. Post-release, the dev team purposely left a built-in backdoor that allowed game moderators/devs to have full access to kick/ban players from servers they were not affiliated with, which caused an uproar. Not long prior to that, Argyll (AKA Andrew Spearin, original founder of INSMOD and Spearin studios) was ousted from the development team -- and for good reason at the time and banned from the INSMOD forums -- and went on lengthy rants on WordPress because he was enraged that he couldn't be a part of his brainchild. He demonises a fellow he calles "Spiel" or "Spiellmann" who went by the name "Dr. Spielmann" and was eventually the de-facto PR guy. As bad as the shoddy dev team was at PR, they put out quality work and many of them got hired either post-release or pre-release to well-renowned game studios. Jeremy Blum, current developer, wasn't really allowed a second chance at getting back on the dev team after he left. I'm not as confident in Mr. Blum being a saviour for Spearin's idea as Argyll is, but hey, it seems like he knows more about him than I do. Blum does, after all, have the whole "I created Red Orchestra" thing under his belt.

It looks like this time they've got their act together somewhat (definitely looking at a much more professional approach this time around, no doubt in large part to Blum), but I think most of us have a bad taste in our mouth left over from the original release which accounts for, at large, the low turn-out with Kickstarter. I, for one, probably won't even check it out with games like Ground Branch still in the works, which is a new and fresh game that didn't become vapourware once already.

Best of luck to the NWI team with this one though and it's good to see Blum back at the wheel.