14 Years of Flames is largely just a concept demo, still far from being playable.
The Defiant has invited some gaming bloggers to experience the demo level. It's been revealed that their pipeline is already set up and they're moving into the scaling phase. The release date remains unclear, but I guess it will be July 7, 2027. Trailer's stuttering wasn't due to a performance issue, but because they mistakenly used the Windows XBOX game bar for recording.
That being said, I think it's still difficult for historical FPS games to make new breakthroughs, sales are largely limited by the Chinese market. Fortunately, the Chinese gaming market is large enough.
IMO they should try to do something a bit new. Historical FPS games the world all over IMO have not had enough of a character or story driven approach. Those types of games have almost always been sci-fi instead of historically based.
I have some thoughts on such a historically based character/story-driven game. You would have a game where you follow the story of a single soldier born in Nanjing, deployed to Shanghai for the opening battle of the war. This will serve as an introduction to gameplay with your typical WWII FPS elements. He then retreats to Nanjing where he conducts more covert missions and witness the tragedies there including the death of his own family. He would subsequently exfiltrate to Changsha, where he experience the first major victory of the war. Throughout the aforementioned process he would witness KMT corruption and have brief contacts with CPC heroes, but he refuses the call to switch sides due to his sense of loyalty.
Then at the height of elation after the victory at Changsha he would be sold out by KMT officers and handed over to the Japanese for the missions he conducted in Nanjing, only to be rescued by CPC agents and escorted to Yanan where he's fully convinced of his purpose in life. He would then participate in the Hundred Regimen offensive, and perhaps one more major WWII battle.
The game's finale would be of our hero participating in the Huaihai campaign liberating his home town of Nanjing. He would find and kill one of the KMT officers who sold him out, but another would've fled to Taiwan. None of his relatives in the city are still alive and the only person he knows there is his childhood love, forever scarred by war. He wishes to pursue the KMT officer who escaped, but was convinced by his love to stay and build a new life as there's been enough war and bloodshed for many a lifetimes.
This type of bittersweet ending with an overall anti-war message would IMO play well world-wide.
