End of Nations

Its story of near-future dystopian rebellion, in which the old countries of the world are rising up against a global superpower called the Order of Nations, is only notable for its contemporary twist: the worldwide chaos that gave rise to the Order was caused not by a nuclear bomb or environmental catastrophe, but by economic meltdown and rampant inflation. The game's artwork is a conservative and not particularly attractive run of the RTS mill, with unlovely, angular and strangely eighties units that at least benefit from colour and decal customisation options.

End of Nations doesn't have a particularly strong character, then, but in massively multiplayer gaming it's your character that counts. Here Petroglyph has made an interesting and potentially clever choice: rather than trying to distil the disembodied, godly commander of the RTS into a hero unit or avatar, in End of Nations you become your base.

Your HQ doesn't have a physical location in the world, as such. Indeed, End of Nations doesn't boast a single persistent landscape like World of Warcraft's, being an instance-based game accessed through a world map and War Room menus. But that suits both the RTS form and its story well enough. Your base, which is accessed from the War Room and which you can invite friends to view, represents your advancement through the game's role-playing-style progression system.

As you harvest experience from missions and level up, you'll unlock new units and abilities that will all have a visual representation here; buildings might unlock the ability to launch a super-weapon or grant you a passive bonus. Most importantly, its visual magnificence will represent your stature in the game. MMOs are all about bragging rights and climbing the social ladder, and there's no reason a strategy variant should be any different.

The War Room, which Petroglyph views as a massively multiplayer evolution of the RTS lobby, also has panes allowing you to view open missions, a news ticker updating you on friends' and other players' activities, social features like a friends list and Coalition (i.e. clan), and intelligence reports that will highlight dynamic special events occurring on the servers.

The War Room is a functional interface at first glance, and unromantic compared to the wide-open landscapes of a World of Warcraft. But it's when you see End of Nations' World Map that you understand that this clinical, distant but thrillingly comprehensive overview just happens to be what an RTS persistent world looks like. Updated in real time, the World Map shows the state of the global struggle on your server, borders shifting in the changing winds of the strategy meta-game, and it twinkles with dozens of live "public" instances that you can join or just watch as a spectator.

The public instances are huge maps that might be populated by some 30 to 50 players at a time. They're typically fairly free-form, player-versus-environment scenarios where players battle together or alone, grinding, running missions, exploring, harvesting loot for unit manufacture and interacting socially with each other. This is End of Nations at its most MMO-like; a public instance is roughly comparable to an open questing zone in an MMORPG.