Talk about a journalistic conflict of interest: We’re the British. Across a thin stretch of oceanic blue sits the American fleet. I’m a Brit, but I’m writing for an American magazine. There’s not even time to wonder about how the Americans got hold of a proper fleet of their own. With allegiances torn, how doesone proceed in such a situation? There’s only one answer: as swiftly as possible.
For months before Creative Assembly finally revealed to us the identity of their new game, we joked with them, back and forth, about its setting. “Hey guys - what can you tell us about Caveman: Total War?” we’d ask, and they’d deftly sidestep the issue, no matter how many beers we’d poured down their throats.“How’s WWII: Total War looking?” we’d pester down the phone.
War shouldn’t be this much fun. War should be hell and suffering, the debasement of mankind. It should be scooping beans from a can with the rib of a dead comrade then swallowing it into your dysenteric stomach. But not fun.
End of Nations is a self-described Massively Multiplayer Online Real-Time Strategy game from MMO developer Trion Worlds. If you visit gaming websites with any regularity, the phrase MMORTS probably brings forth horrible visions of the Sears catalog lingerie models used in those horrible Evony ads. But we promise End of Nations is about as far from that as humanly possible. And if the concept of an MMORTS alone isn't enough to sell you, it's also being developed by the ex-developers of the Command & Conquer series...
The first thing we thought when the developers at Petroglyph told us that they were making an MMORTS was “Damn…that’s a funny sounding acronym.” Muh-morts? The second thing was “how on Earth do you turn a real-time-strategy game into an MMO that supports more than 50 players at a time?” The answer, it seems, is to shift the focus from the economic footrace and tech-tree climbing most other RTS games are known for (aka StarCraft) to a leveling system that improves your entire base and remains persistent from game to game. But we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves...
It took a while to really "get" End of Nations. At first, it looked like it was a fairly typical RTS, without any really interesting elements to hold it up. But after playing in one of the game's 12 on 12 maps (that's 24 players controlling their own armies) it finally started to make sense, and we realized that the somewhat generic mechanics actually blended together into something much more akin to a MOBA than a typical RTS...
With 56-player battles, MMORTS End of Nations is set to change the scale of the RTS genre in a persistent war-torn universe. Find out more about how it plays as we take a look at the Resource Hog and Last Stand modes…
Stuart Black, one of the driving forces behind unique shooters like Black and Bodycount, is taking a stab at the World War II genre. But it’s unclear if Enemy Front has what it takes to stand out from the pack…
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