World in Conflict Multiplayer Beta

I think one thing to mention is the drop in gameplay in multiplayer. You can join a match at any time. Again, you don't have to wait to see friends or other people online to play: you just see a server and if it has available slots you just jump in.

The beta has two purposes. One is a pure technical development purpose. We want as many people to try the game as possible to stress-test our system, to make sure the game works and find any quirks our QA department hasn't been able to find. We have 10, 20, 30, 40 QA staff, whereas tens of thousands of gamers is obviously a much better testing ground.

Obviously, another part of the beta is just to let people try the game. When you read about the play mechanics it can be a little tough to really understand how they work. I think once they spend ten or 15 minutes with it and get used to the camera, then learn how easy it is to call down units and attack and move, I think that's when they realise that this is actually a whole new type of RTS game. It's action RTS, or action strategy, as I like to call it.

No other reason than to many, many people it's more fun to play against human opponents. Especially in the RTS genre, the rate of people that play online versus the amount of people that play in single-player is lower than in first-person shooters, and that's something that we hope to change with WiC. It is really a strategy game that is just as accessible to get into a match as Counter-Strike or Battlefield.

We learned a lot from the Ground Control games. One thing important is that we realised - and this is a sort of game design epiphany - that you don't have to develop a game that has every feature under the sun. It's better to stay a little more focused and make the features you do very good instead. That sort of realisation from the Ground Control experience was that Ground Control I and Ground Control II were a little bigger than they needed to be.

Exactly. I mean the ambition is much bigger. Compared to Ground Control II, I think, we're talking about four times as much resources on the game. But we've focused on a sort of smaller set of features and made those excellent, instead of a wider set of features in which some of them are good and some of them are so-so.

Of course we're feeling the pressure, but having developed games for 10 years I think the biggest pressure comes from ourselves. We've been doing games for so long. We've received critical acclaim and we're very happy with that, but with World in Conflict we feel that we finally have a game that is for hardcore gamers, gaming connoisseurs, but also fits people that are not hardcore gamers.

In a way yes, because we're a company that develops one game at a time, so every game we release is defining the future of the company. We'll see what happens, but I have very high hopes that things will go very well with World in Conflict. I'm not worried.