Kenn Hoekstra updated his .plan with word that Soldier of Fortune Platinum has shipped to stores, and as promised, they are releasing the added Platinum content to owners of SoF and SoF Gold for free, the first portions of which are already available. Here's the portion of the plan update related to the new releases:

Tuesday, August 28th, 2001 - Soldier of Fortune Platinum should be making its way to retail outlets today. As with Gold, we're releasing everything that's a part of Platinum free to those who bought a previous version of Soldier of Fortune. The first part of that can be found here:
- Soldier of Fortune Platinum Map Pack (3.5MB)
- Official Soldier of Fortune 1.07 Patch (2MB)

The map pack contains five MP maps...four by Kevin Pochron, now of Raven and one map that I did back when I was a designer for Soldier. Kevin touched it up for me and added all of the startspots and weapons, etc. So, for all intents and purposes, you can heap your praise on Kevin for the new maps. ;) There are instructions for installing the map pack in the readme.

The 1.07 patch is essentially the same as Rick's 1.07f beta patch, minus all documentation references to the word "beta." If you have the beta patch, there's no need to update to this one as functionally they are identical. If you have 1.06 or earlier, the upgrade is recommended. As I noted in a prior .plan udate, the 1.06 Gold Patch is needed before applying this one. Confusing, I know...

Feel free to download and mirror the patch and map pack freely. If you have the earlier 1.07 patch, which was flawed or the 1.07f beta patch on your servers, please take them down and replace them with this official version.

I'll keep you posted on the Soldier 2 trailer and the strategy guide and let you know when they will be available.