World in Conflict Multiplayer Beta
Massive CEO talks online. He can't be that big, surely?
World in Conflict (WiC) isn't like other RTS games, as developer Massive Entertainment has been at great pains to stress throughout its development. Set in an alternate reality where the Cold War went critical, the game purports to be the antithesis of Supreme Commander's mega-complexity. With a plot penned by Clancy cohort Larry Bond, the single-player game pits the player against a Soviet force on American soil, theoretically focusing on layering ease-of-use and bite-size gameplay over deep, fast-paced military strategy and the allure of tactical nukes.
While the full package releases for PC on 21st September (an Xbox 360 version's following at an unspecified date next year), you can now sign up for the open multiplayer beta. Which you should. Because we sat through a 20-minute demo of the tit-for-tat online play in LA last week and from what we saw there's every reason to expect World in Conflict to emerge as one of the PC games of the year. Sporting carpet bombs and an innovative resource-point reclamation system for bringing destroyed units back to the battlefield, Massive's pick-up-and-play ethic potentially belies what could be a sea-change for the genre's tried and tested staples: namely, in that you don't have to invest 400 hours of your life to be able to play it properly.
We took the opportunity to catch up with Massive Entertainment CEO Martin Walfisz for a bit of multiplayer chat. Check out our beta impressions in the article they're already calling World in Conflict Multiplayer Beta impressions.
I think that maybe the thing that's going to be a little challenging for some people is the camera. It's not a traditional RTS camera. It takes a while for people that are completely used to traditional RTS cameras to get used to it. I think that people that are used to playing both first-person shooter and RTS games, the camera is easier to get to grips with a little quicker. It's the same difficulty in both multiplayer and single-player.
Yes, without a doubt. That's what we saw. We had a closed beta about a month ago and that's exactly what we saw. The basics of the game are just to call down your units and then right-click to move or right-click to attack something. That's the core base of the game: you don't really have to learn how to construct buildings or use a tech tree, or stuff like that. So, in that sense it's much, much easier. Also, if your units die then your requisition points go back very quickly and you can rebuild, so it's never the end of the world if your units die. So in that sense it's much easier to get into than Supreme Commander.
I wouldn't go so far. I think there are tons of gamers that love those games, and rightfully so. They're really good games. But more and more people are realising that they don't have three hours to spend just to play one match, and especially the most important and difficult aspect is that when they start a match they don't know if it's going to be 30 minutes or three hours. That's one thing that we were very careful with when we were designing WiC: you always know the length of the match before you start, and by default we have it set to 20 minutes. It's our "20 minutes experience philosophy", that we want the gamer to experience the game in 20-minute chunks. So then you can either stop playing because you've had your fun in those 20 minutes, or you can continue on to another 20-minute chunk. It's always easy to stop any time you want.
Single-player is different in that you can play at your own pace. You don't have any other players depending on you who get a little annoyed if you leave. In that sense, single-player is much easier because you can save at any time and continue at your leisure. So yes, there's never one single objective that takes more than 20 minutes to accomplish, but if there were you'd just save in the middle and continue when you liked.