End of Nations
Country retreat.
Private instances are akin to a classical raid or dungeon. This is where you group with three or four others to run a more scripted, sculpted and challenging mission, and where the commander classes come into play. MMOs are founded on class-based co-op dynamics and Petroglyph is drawing on this with its Tank, Strike and Artillery commander types who excel, in turn, at close-range, heavily-armoured units; stealthy high-damage hit-and-run tactics; and long-range shelling. Any commander will have access to a wide range of other vehicle units and tactical options; it's more a specialisation than a strait-jacketing restriction.
We're shown a raid on the Acropolis, an Order of Nations stronghold in the former USA defended by a giant wall like a futuristic Great Wall of China. The players are asked to help break a stalemate in the Resistance's assault on the base, and have to get a move on - if they take too long, the Order will break through and destroy their own encampment. Our guide describes the mood as "trench warfare on a tank scale" - the landscape blasted, gouged and scarred by fire.
After a dash across no man's land, the first choke point is a gigantic, temple-sized anti-tank Gatling gun ("everything the Order of Nations does is big") which we destroy by staying in range long enough to deliver a virus to it, all the while wearing down the garage "spawners" that keep a constant stream of enemy units trundling at our position.
After that, we battle past big dome cannons to a mammoth artillery unit that forms part of the wall itself. In a "Guns of Navarone type situation", this immense gun is firing tank-sized shells at another map altogether, so defeating it - as we eventually do by employing a napalm-strike super-weapon enabled by a building at our HQ - will influence the server-wide meta-game on the World Map. It's also the "boss" that represents the half-way point of this mission, opens the route into the heart of the base, and marks the end of the demo.
End of Nations' player-versus-player game will be unveiled at gamescom in Cologne next month, so our guide can't tell us much, but promises that Petroglyph is well aware how important PVP is to RTS gaming. He suggests that team-based modes, taking advantage of the commander classes and the possibilities of the game's peer-to-server rather than peer-to-peer set-up, will be its star attraction. We'll know more soon.
End of Nations may not be that eye-catching, superficially, and how well it meets the narrow, exacting requirements of RTS balancing and design is entirely unknown at present. But in the grand scale of the World Map and the free-form, large-scale multiplayer of its social instances, it's possible to catch a glimpse of something very rare indeed: a completely new way to play RTS games.