There is a rumor that MiST land proposed a very drastic re-imagination of Jagged Alliance in a first version of the JA3D design document — it was more of a traditional RTS game, complete with large battlefields, light armored vehicles and artillery. Later, some of the ideas surfaced in another MiST land's game — Warfare. Can you either shoot down this rumor or confirm it?

VS: Yes, we planned to have long-range artillery, but it would be available only to enemy forces. They would be able to launch a strike if the player had failed to destroy artillery in an adjacent sector before taking on a next mission. We wanted playable tanks and some other vehicles. But we, as trite as it sounds, didn't have enough resources to pull that off, because it's really hard to realize this kind of stuff in a game where everything can be broken, destroyed or razed. That's why these ideas were saved for Jagged Alliance 3.

RT: I don't remember having been approached with a RTS model for JA3D. This is something they may have discussed internally and apparently did since they later came out with some sort of real-time version.

The idea that did come up was to have a 'smart pause' system fairly early on and MiST land's argument was that the game needed to evolve. To this I had to apply my veto, as I did not and do not want to have multiple Jagged Alliance games with different tactical rules and since the turn-based system of JA is not broken, I would rather build on it.​

It is not unusual when a new developer gets to work on a known game system or franchise for them to tend to steer its essence in another direction. I guess this is one way of appropriating the project, marking it with one's own touch. It is probably a challenge too to deliver something that would outdo the original making it a different beast in the process.​