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World in Conflict Preview April 12, 2007 John JCal Callaham |
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Summary: Tired of the same-old RTS formula? Looking for co-op in an RTS game? Something new, fresh, and sexy? The Ground Control developers might just have it for you with World in Conflict...
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 2 ) |
The game's alternate history presumes that the Soviet Union never collapsed. Indeed, the country's military forces decide to fire up the factories and bring the fight over to the US in a full scale invasion. This isn't some Command and Conquer fantasy world, however. Most of the game's military units are based on real tanks, plans, and weapons - so no Tesla weapons in this game.
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Massive Development wanted to make the multiplayer game in World in Conflict much more action based than even their previous Ground Control sci-fi RTS titles. There's no resource gathering in this game, for one thing. Instead, the game uses a points system that players use to spend on their unit purchases. If you accomplish your various tasks in the game you get more points to spend on more units, which are flown in via waypoints that the players creates.
That's not the only thing that makes World in Conflict different. Instead of players controlling whole armies on the battlefields, this game actually lets players choose what kinds of units they will control on each of the two opposing sides (US and USSR) in a multiplayer match. In this respect, World in Conflict is less like a C&C game and more like a team based first person shooter like Enemy Territory or the Battlefield series; instead of controlling one lone soldier with one character class, however, players control whole classes of units.
One player could control the infantry units on a side while another brings up the armored vehicles, while yet another controls the helicopters and so on. It's definately a new way to play an RTS game and thankfully Massive and its publisher Sierra/Vivendi has given new players some detailed video tutorials that go over both the basic RTS commands and the new World in Conflict features. When you play a World in Conflict game with the maximum of 16 players (eight on each side) you can imagine that the gameplay is very fast paced and indeed it is.
| Multiplayer | Page:: ( 2 / 2 ) |
Bearing in mind that this is a pre-alpha build, the gameplay in World In Conflict is already highly exciting. It's certainly a different experience contolling a particular type of unit instead of having to keep up with all sorts of different units in a multiplayer match. At the same time, we found that getting people to work as a team in matches will take some doing which is understandable. You may have some great and powerful tanks that you are moving in to occupy the center of town but your enemies could set up some infrantry with anti-tank weapons to take you out. Helicopters could help take out that infrantry but the enemy could have a player controller anti-air defenses.
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We enjoyed this new kind of RTS gameplay set up; it certainly will throw long-time RTS players for a loop until they get the hang of it. Oh, and did we mention that the more points a team gets as they advance in the match, the more tactical points they get for even more deadly attacks, up to the dreaded (but still cool to look at) thermonuclear missle option.
Graphically the game looks as good as it has in previous demonstrations of the game (at last year's E3 and this year's CES) with impressive looking unit animations and modeling and solid map artwork. Again, World in Conflict is currently running on DirectX9 but a DirextX10/Vista version is in the works and we expect the nuclear mushroom clouds to look even better when that version of the game is released.
World in Conflict is still a long ways off (its due out in the fall of 2007) but even this pre-alpha multiplayer build is a lot of fun to play and that's saying something for a game that still has a lot of time for polishing and play testing. One thing we haven't got a lot of info on yet is the game's single player campaign, including the rumors of a third faction besides the US and USSR. We actually believe we will get some more info on the single player campaign very soon. Stay tuned as we hopefully will have some more info on that aspect of World in Conflict in the very near future.