It was my farewell gift to a game I loved too much.
But modding is a cruel mistress. The With Fire & Sword engine is built on a creaking skeleton of decade-old code. Every time I fixed a crash, two new bugs appeared. The Swedish Reiters would sometimes T-pose while reloading. The Crimean horse archers developed a terrifying glitch where they fired ten arrows simultaneously. And the Iron Priest’s steam cart—my pride—would occasionally clip through the map and fall into the void, taking a full company of grenadiers with it.
I released version 2.0 on Christmas Eve. The download page crashed three times. Players reported that the "Last Key" worked perfectly—too perfectly. One guy wiped out three Swedish fortresses and accidentally soft-locked the main questline because the quest giver no longer existed.
I downloaded it last week. I saw my old friend, Alaric von Teuffel, rendered in higher resolution than I ever managed. His clockwork musket had a new firing animation. His Iron Priest cart no longer fell through the earth.
