Rts Meets Counter-strike In World In Conflict

Massive Entertainment's World in Conflict remains unannounced, officially, but word on the latest game from the Ground Control developer has slipped into the public domain courtesy of the current edition of our good chums PC Zone magazine - which has surprised us with what it highlights as its core gameplay: a multiplayer-focussed PC RTS that, in the words of Massive CEO Martin Walfisz, "borrows heavily from first-person shooter games like Counter-Strike and Battlefield".
The developer is eschewing the sci-fi theme of the Ground Control series for its new project and presenting us with a setting a little more contemporary - the late 1980s and the Cold War. But Massive has opted to pen a fictional scenario for the new title, according to which the Soviet Union has remained intact and staged an invasion of US soil. Massive apparently decided on the setting partly because it "felt the Cold War era really hadn't been explored in strategy games before", according to Walfisz, and that it wanted to ensure the setting is "really accessible and understandable from the beginning - basically, World in Conflict is something that people recognise right away".

Elaborating on the core multiplayer gameplay, current info on World in Conflict has revealed that the plan is to support up to 8-player versus 8-player battles, players selecting to fly the combat flag for one of two teams in a hot zone and then assuming a specific role within that team. You might, for example, choose to command infantry, and once that's been decided, you buy units, deploy them in a designated deployment zone in a map and then command them in the ensuing fight.
Age-old RTS staples resource and base management have been avoided - as such, the focus is purely on the heat of battle. The objective of combat teams in the field is to take control of, and hold, the greatest number of command points that exist in a map. Massive says that each map in the game has a time limit attached - say 20 minutes - with players also able to drop in and out of bouts at will, much like in online FPS games.

Great, but what if you'd rather stick a pitchfork in your eyes than engage in RTS combat with other players? Well, there's good news for those who fall under that bracket as Massive Entertainment is including a single-player campaign. Details are a little scant on this, but hopefully more will be revealed when the game is officially announced - which will be by Vivendi, just in case you were wondering.

World in Conflict's destined to be visually striking judging by the early screenshots we've seen (which we're unable to publish here unfortunately - we'd be flogged, burnt at the stake, chopped into little pieces and sold off as cat food if we did), and the game's combat should be an explosive eye-feast, the developer promising an entirely destructible environment that has a real-time dynamic effect on combat and strategies.

It's an intriguing sounding game, and one that we hope Massive Entertainment can pull off. If you're hungry for more gameplay details, further word from the developer and - yes! - first screenshots, then go pick up issue #167 of PC Zone magazine, on sale now, as it features extensive coverage of World in Conflict.