Playing On Foot

The lowly grunt

What about being on foot? In my brief time playing at Camp EA (only 6 machines were set up; the rest of the battlefield was populated with bots), it seemed as though being a lone-wolf foot soldier was an impossible and pointless task. If you weren’t lucky enough to hop into a vehicle at your spawn, then you are really forced into coordinating your movements with teammates who are driving the tanks, for protection. This doesn’t mean that foot soldiers are useless. Your mere presence and ability to stay alive in certain parts of the map can be a boon to the team as you'll see later in the preview. Indeed, the game objectives are set up around the idea of team play and coordinated attacks.

Pull the pin when you're ready

While there is a flag on the map that you can take and bring back to your own flag, stealing the enemy’s is not simply a matter of running up and touching it. Your team actually has to be in control of the area surrounding the enemy flag (control is determined by the computer as some function of how many troops of your team are alive and fighting in the area as opposed to the number of enemies) before you can bring it down. This unfortunately means that there won’t be any heroically swift and daring solo raids in to snatch flags right out from under the noses of an entrenched defense as you get in other games. It also means that in my time spent playing, I never saw anyone actually GET a flag, let alone capture one (if you think getting one is hard, imagine trying to carry it back all the way across a huge map).

German takes aim at a plane

So how do you win? In the gameplay mode we were in, each team is given a number of points that tick down. Every enemy you kill removes one tick from the other team’s score. However, the fastest way to make the other team’s score tick away to zero is to maintain control of the neutral bases in the center of the map. Again, “control” of these bases is determined automatically by the computer as a function of how many of your players are in the surrounding area vs the number of enemy troops. If the opponent launches a large enough attack at one base, the base will be considered in contention with no one considered in control until the battle shakes out one way or another. Control more bases, and the enemy team’s score will start dripping away like water through a sieve.