Gomeler.com

Preview: World in Conflict

07.19.07 - 08:19pm

It is finally here! What am I talking about, why am I so excited? It’s the new wave of DX10 games for the PC! DirectX 10 hardware has been available for nearly a year now but there haven’t been many titles available that natively supported DX10. From August onwards we’ll have a stream of titles launching with DX9 and DX10 codepaths but today I give you a short preview of Massive Entertainments World in Conflict, a real-time strategy title with both DX9 and DX10 codepaths. I unfortunately don’t have the option to show you any juicy DX10 screenshots but I do have a few DX9 screenshots to whet your appetite.

General Information

World in Conflict isn’t a World War 2 sim or a futuristic sim, it’s based in the late 1980’s. There have been many novels that have speculated what the world would be like if the Soviet Union had gone on the offensive rather than caved in itself, what if you could command the Soviet, American, and NATO armies in a huge clash of titans during the peak of the cold war? World in Conflict lets you do just that. It is 1988, you are a field commander for your respective faction, and you must coordinate with other commanders(players) in order to take control of various scenarios. Currently the open beta client is available for the general public to sample and it is limited to two multiplayer maps and a tutorial so I won’t be able to dig into all the mechanics of this game but I can make a general overlook of the game.

A Fluid Battlefield

Before mechanized warfare hit the world battlefields were very static. You had your camp, the enemy had their camp, and the land in between you two was usually what you were fighting over. Tanks, trucks, and helicopters changed the face of warfare forever making it possible for large quantities of troops to be very mobile and this in essence is what makes World in Conflict unique compared with Supreme Commander and Company of Heroes(my favorite two RTS titles if you haven’t noticed by now). WiC doesn’t focus on commanding a large quantity of units or for tat matter a large variety of units. Each commander will generally focus on a select few units and only with communication and cooperation can these individual commanders become an effective fighting force over the very fluid battlefield. Both teams do have staging areas that compose roughly 1/5 of the area of the maps in which you can choose to receive replacement units however that is it. There are no bases, no player built structures, and no gathering economy. You focus on one single thing and that is combat.

Tactical Map

The Classes

Just like in the military there are a few different “classes” of sorts that you can choose to adopt. Armor will be your main ground force and these players will primarily focus on leading the fight. Working in close with the armor will be the infantry commanders, infantry are crucial to support the armor from other infantry, helicopters, and help in capturing territory. Air commanders will work on establishing aerial superiority with a combination of air-ground and air-air vehicles, scouts, and transports. Support commanders will perform multiple roles but primarily they provide your local artillery support and anti-aircraft support. Each class has a few units that they excel in using meanwhile they can pull units from the other classes with a penalty and a few units will be restricted to their specific classes. Balance is crucial in this game, a faction cannot with with all their players as Air or as Armor as each class has a class they are effective against and a class they are very weak against.

Class Selection Screen

Units

From my limited military knowledge the units that are available within WiC are all real military vehicles from the Cold War era. Because this is a video game and not a real-world simulator each unit does have a health bar and you won’t be seeing one-hit kills but a more balanced array of damage and health stats. For example the heavy American tank can easily dispose of four to five medium tanks in a frontal assault however two heavy tanks slugging it out will come down to the line with up to a dozen hits before one succumbs. Aircraft pack a huge punch, the Soviet Hind heavy attack helo will easily disable a heavy tank but two anti-aircraft missiles with turn a working Hind into a fireball. Infantry are rather effective against vehicles and helicopters but artillery will easily steal their lunch money. Like I said above, every unit has a weakness. In general armor is easy prey for helicopters, helicopters are easily shot down by infantry, infantry are easily shredded by support, and support is easy picking for armor. This doesn’t mean that support can’t kill armor, in fact artillery is rather effective but once armor gets in close then all support can do is hope some helicopters will come and safe them.

Soldiers in Woods

Woods, no more Soldiers

Tactical Weapons

How a commander utilizes their troops and tactical weapons will decide how their forces will fair. In general when you deal damage to an enemy or capture territory you gain tactical points. These points can be spent on a slew of off-map support ranging from paratrooper and light-tank airdrops, artillery strikes, anti-tank strafing runs, and even tactical nukes. These off-map weapons are very potent but they have a lengthy deployment time, artillery for example can take up to 15 seconds to reach your target so it takes a lot of planning and scouting to accurately utilize these skills. When attacking and defending you really need to be careful as the more units you send in that carelessly die the more tactical points you give your enemies which may result in them dropping a nuke on you.

Three Nukes detonating over USA reinforcements

Physics and Stuff

Company of Heroes really brought this cool piece of technology to the table back in 2006. Now in 2007 physics seems to be the new buzzword for new gaming titles and World in Conflict has fully embraced this term and concept. Everything on the map can be burned, bashed, squished, destroyed, and vaporized with forests turning into smoldering fields and plains looking more akin to a moonscape than a landscape. While I haven’t focused on testing the physics within the game I have seen enough times where my artillery barrages created huge craters and caused infantry and vehicles to fly all over the place. Some of the more powerful weapons will create enormous craters, the crater after a tactical nuke detonates is most interesting to observe asides from the radiation that polutes the area. Oh yeah, radiation is something you have to deal with so whatever you nuke cannot be easily occupied afterwards. Interesting stuff huh?

Gameplay

World in Conflict has been partially responsible for why I haven’t been posting lately. I don’t know exactly what it is about the game but I can easily spend 3 hours playing the multiplayer even though it keeps cycling through the same two maps. Each map has a maximum of 20 minutes of gameplay, my average game lasts 12 minutes. In the Domination mode that is available in beta you can win a match two ways. First off if you capture all the victory points on the map then the game-progress will begin to rapidly sway in your favor. The other option is to slug it out back and forth for the 20 minutes and whoever has more victory points win, not necessarily whoever has the higher score. I’ve seen matches where one team can be down a good 30% by player score but because of a few critical moves they win the match by securing victory points right before the match ends. Generally though both teams will enter the battlefield and slowly one team will begin to roll the other team. My biggest issue with this system is that you can really be kicking butt and still end up losing, too many times I’ve been sitting at the top of the player scores with a huge margin but my teammates aren’t capable of following up behind me and we lose. One single player cannot win a match, it takes the entire team. Unlike other RTS games I would actually recommend using a microphone during this game as the tide came change very quickly with a precise helicopter strike or armor column.

Hardware Requirements

Normally I wouldn’t address hardware but World in Conflict needs to have a few things pointed out. Unlike Supreme Commander which easily will swamp even the strongest computer, World in Conflict isn’t all that intensive making it possible to enjoy this game with 2 gigs of ram and a decently clocked processor. From what I could tell World in Conflict is single-threaded so I’d suggest having a ~3GHz processor to run this game, AMD X2 or Core 2. Graphically though it is very easy to kill your card, my 7900GTO is starting to show it’s age as playing at 1680×1050 with all settings on high and NO anti-aliasing produced a meager 24 frames per second average in the benchmark. I suspect a midrange 8600GTS or 2900XT should be able to handle this game on medium-high settings at 1280×1024 but you’ll need a 8800GTS/2900XT to really enjoy high resolution DX10 gaming. For those of you that don’t care about DX10 then a 7900GT or X1900XT should do the trick at widescreen resolutions, just don’t expect to crank up the anti-aliasing too much.

The Verdict

Sadly World in Conflict will be launching among a few other titles and it’ll have to compete for my attention. With Hellgate:London and Age of Conan launching right after World in Conflict I just don’t know if I’d have enough time to warrant purchasing this game. Just judging from this preview I can safely say Massive Entertainment has a winner on their hands but it just doesn’t impress me enough to purchase it and put aside Supreme Commander. If you are looking for something to scratch your cold-war world war itch then this is it, if you are looking to command hundreds of units then this is definitely not it. Check out the beta if you are even remotely interested, it weighs in at ~1800mb which is just the right size to give you a little taste of this game.

My statistics, ignore the win/lose ratio, I blame stupid teammates =D

Category: Articles, Gaming, Preview