All June Models Released - Sincere Apologies (Patreon)

Hi everyone,

This is Gaetano (aka onepageanon), the creator of OPR.

Today we're happy to announce that finally the High Elf Fleets Avatar has been released, and with that all of the June models have been delivered. The models have already been added to the MMF group, so you can go download them right now. Thank you for your patience. :)

I am extremely embarrassed about the whole situation, and I wanted to take a moment to explain how we got here, as well as to dispel a rumor that I have seen go around.

There have been some members of our community who were rightfully concerned about the situation, and assumed that we prioritized our Worlds Beyond campaign on Frontiers, and that the Patreon release was delayed because of that. This is not true however, because the Worlds Beyond campaign is entirely made up of previously released models (besides 2 Titans), and so all it's being fully managed by our Marketing team, and didn't involve our Concept or Sculpting teams.

Our Patreon releases are our top priority, and any additional work, such as crowdfunding campaigns, new expansions, lore books, are all being worked on in parallel by separate teams, so that they don't affect our Patreon releases. Not only that, but our priority is always to allocate work to the Patreon first, and any additional work will be delayed as a consequence (since it doesn't hang on the monthly release deadline).

Additionally, in a few days, we will be releasing our new game Age of Fantasy: Quest, which comes with some new miniatures. Please note that the June release was not affected by that, because the High Elf Avatar was made by a senior sculptor that is not involved in Quest, and the heroes were made by freelancers that were not involved in the making of the Shadow Stalkers.

Now that's out of the way, let's talk about the big June delay. How did we get here?

This months delay was essentially the consequence of a never-ending series of events that started more than a year ago. I won't go into too much detail, because a lot of these are personal matters, but I will give you a rough overview of what has been happening.

Over the last year, we have had multiple cases of very severe health issues in our team, with team members that have had to go on extended leave of 6 months to recover. On top of that, there have been many random events that have happened, which have halted our progress, from illness, to equipment breakdowns, to loss of family, to natural disasters, and much more.

As a result, we decided to hire additional members, to try and fill in the gaps that were being caused by this, but we have not been very lucky. The new people we hired ended up having personal issues which prevented them from working with us, some of them committed to a certain amount of deliverables but ended up delivering less than half, some of them had deceiving portfolios and ended up having a much lower skill level and severely underperformed, and some of them straight up disappeared without ever getting back to us again.

All of this lead to concept pre-production being delayed, which then delayed concept production, which then delayed sculpting pre-production, which ultimately delayed final sculpting production (as well as rendering and pre-supporting). The fact that both VU and HEF were pretty complex armies to produce, and that we were not satisfied with the initial look of the Shadow Stalker sculpts also didn't help with delays.

Just speaking for myself, I have been dealing with a lot of personal issues over the past 6 months, got a severe ear infection over the last month, and then my house was broken into and my computer was stolen just a week ago. This is why the May stream was cancelled, and why I wasn't able to attend UKGE (which I was really looking forward to). :(

None of these are excuses for the delays, and I understand if you are upset about them. I just wanted to clarify that a lot of this has been out of our hands, and that we've been doing everything we can to improve things, but the issues kept piling up.

Now we are doing everything we can to rectify things, we have hired new artists which luckily have been reliable so far, we have completely re-vamped all of our processes to smooth things out, and we are working on building a backlog again so that there are no delays. Right now we are already well underway with pre-production of the next 2 factions (which will be revealed soon), and we are starting pre-production on 2 additional factions for later next year.

If everything goes well, we should hopefully be back on our feet very soon. Again, thank you so much for your patience and understanding, we are doing the best we can, even if sometimes it's still not good enough.

Hopefully we shall soon be back to having zero delays, and this will all be in our past. :)

Thank you,

Gaetano Ferrara