If anyone is more interested in the review than the article, here’s the text below. It seems like he was also making mods and patches for the game.

REVIEW: Important disclosure here: Prior to the release of BZ98R (and still to this day), I have been a player of the original game up until it’s final unofficial patch version 1.5.2.27 U1. This game is entirely based on this community patch. People who have played 1.5 are going to feel differently about the game than people who last played it 20 years ago (1.3, 1.31, 1.4…). The same goes for people who had never played BZ98 in any form prior to purchasing this game. This review involves numerous statements of objective fact but it was still written by someone who was playing 1.5 for years prior to the release of this game. I understand that the release of this game was the first many many people heard of BZ98 being alive but the truth is that it never ceased living - it’s good that it brought many back into the fold but it also basically killed the existing community surrounding it. When I heard that this was being made, I instantly experienced fear of what would happen to my beloved game… my fears were well-founded. What follows is my original review:

I’ve been intending to do this for a LONG time…

In nearly every way, BZ98R is inferior to the final version of BZ98 1.5 (1.5.2.27 U1) that came before it. If 1.5 had things like HUD scaling so I could play at high res and still be able to read text, I’d probably play it instead and advocate that others do so as well.

The graphics “upgrade” is hardly an upgrade when the most interesting feature of BZ1 was lost - destroyed ships flying into several pieces. There is a massive laundry list of SEVERE bugs that did not exist in 1.5 and I am not aware of any meaningful bug in 1.5 that was fixed by BZ98R.

• jump sniping is bugged and exploitable
• satellite reveals everything regardless of radar coverage
• various DAMNING armory-related bugs
• bug related to “perceivedTeam” that has wide-reaching consequences including mildly messing up a campaign mission
• the porting of The Red Odyssey was sloppy and a few missions are meaningfully bugged — If you look on the workshop you will see several LUA patches made by me that deal with many of these problems; I strong encourage people who want to enjoy campaign to subscribe and activate them.
• no “all nations” switch
• no “cloak disabled” switch
• bugged map list in MP (in Steam version, not GOG version)
• very poor netcode performance compared to the old game — I also have a somewhat successful patch for this problem on the workshop as well
• no TCP/IP or LAN option for MP - once Rebellion closes down their BZRNET server, MP is no longer possible.
• random crashes, mostly segfaults, occur at a very high rate
• The mission type that is the backbone of class non-scripted Instant-Action missions is broken and the result is that the game WILL crash about 30% of the time when you try to load a save. I’ve found ways around this (reimplemented ‘Inst4XMission’ in LUA) but it requires missions to be patched.
• The CLI argument parser is broken
• heightmap smoothing that is enabled by default when porting old maps (and affects stock ported maps) is detrimental to the terrain in several ways though I know how to override it — still not feasible to repair the mistake with regard to stock maps …

If it weren’t for the fact that this game’s release AND Rebellion’s policies KILLED 1.5, I wouldn’t be likely to have played so many hours of this (I idle a lot, I swear!)

I’m going to stop right here for now. I mainly do not recommend this to people who care much about multiplayer.

It sounds like in the end, he still really likes the core gameplay, but the community has been destroyed some unliked updates to the game, and he’s pretty sure that the devs are inflating the steam numbers through private matches with all bots. It’s wild how many hours that is, but he probably thinks the game is no longer worth it, amd has sour feelings towards the devs.