There’s no question that the development muscle at Massive Entertainment have done well for themselves; the Ground Control series was renowned for providing some top-notch strategic action (not to mention alluring co-op play, at least in the sequel), but sadly turned out to be somewhat niche titles. All that looks to change with Massive’s next title; World in Conflict. While not necessarily meant as a sequel to the Ground Control series, the developers have chosen to carry over the same style of gameplay and unit control that’s fared so well for them up until this point. While the game is promising to have a fun singleplayer storyline, the recent beta I had a chance to play focused more on the multiplayer side of things, so here’s my field report from the front lines.

To begin with, while there are a number of multiplayer gameplay modes planned in the release version, the beta focused mostly on a couple of competitive team-based styles; the first being a general “capture the point” kind of gameplay challenging each team to try and gain dominance over the map by securing strategic areas and holding them. while the other mode is similar to other, it works on a round-based attack / defend team allocation. At the start of a match, you must choose which team you wish to play for; the glorious USSR, or NATO / USA (depending on which map is being played). Then you’re faced with an even more crucial decision – your “role” in the fight.

World in Conflict provides four differing roles for players to use, and each one has an essential part to play in any battle. The “Infantry” role for example provides players the most direct access to swarms of soldiers that can be unleashed to bunker down in buildings, execute precision strikes against softer armor, or snipe off enemy soldiers from a distance. Meanwhile, “Armor” is the role meant for anything tank-related, and provides exclusive access to the heaviest of armored vehicles for a given faction. “Support” focuses on the deployment of assets meant to work behind friendly lines, including heavy-pounding artillery pieces and anti-aircraft vehicles, and finally the “Aircraft” role exists to field fast-moving choppers for rapid infantry transport or precision strikes against enemy units and artillery positions.

The catch is that the player can only assume one of these roles at a time, which means that any team bent on victory will be required to co-ordinate their roles and work together, or they won’t stand a chance. My first foray into multiplayer was a fine example of this fact: Electing to spectate to get a feel for the game prior to actually jumping in, I watched as one team deployed almost exclusively as Armor. While their initial advance was adequately impressive, their victory chants soon turned to tears of agony when they were blown to smithereens by a nearby mobile artillery team – a catastrophe that might have been avoided had somebody taken an “Aircraft” role to scout out and strike the artillery positions. Naturally it makes sense that some players might be somewhat turned off by this approach to “forced teamwork”, but fear not – it’s still possible to purchase certain units belonging to another role (such as medium anti-aircraft vehicles), but just be ready to bite the bullet on premium fees. This is important, because while your resource points will automatically replenish over time, this only occurs up to a certain level – a level which decreases drastically depending on how many units you already have in the field. Hence, you’ll be looking pretty silly if you hop into an Infantry role, and then call in a single sniper team and blow the rest of your points on a pair of attack choppers.

Since teamwork plays even more of a crucial role in this game than most others of its caliber, the designers of World in Conflict have also implemented a nifty little “Request” system. Simply hold down “Q”, choose a specific action, and then left-click at a plot of ground (this works very similar to the radial voice-macro menus in Battlefield 2 and 2142). This will send up a ‘very’ noticeable signal icon for everyone else on your team to zero in on. For example, you can request repairs to a specific tank from a friendly support player, or if you are being pounded by enemy aircraft, put out a request for friendly anti-air assets to move up. This of course requires that you have team-mates actually willing to pay attention and acknowledge these requests, but when everything lines up the way you want it, it results in beautiful execution. To this end, the game also has built-in VOIP chat support, which will give any properly coordinated team an insane advantage over any opponents who don’t bother to properly utilize these tools. Naturally it’s widely known that actually getting a decent team to play with can be a challenge in itself however, which is why the developers have taken the extra mile to seamlessly integrate the game engine with the server browser, and a friends / clan-list UI. This provides the benefit of making it dirt-simple to hop on to a server with a group of your favored colleagues, or schedule much larger scale matches. Assuming these systems receive the proper love and attention through to final development, this could very well be one of the biggest multiplayer RTS titles on the horizon – I just pray the developers listen to those of us who worshipped the co-operative mode in Ground Control 2 and give those of us out there a little love as well.

World in Conflict also has a pretty damned impressive graphics engine so far. One thing I especially loved noticing is how each and every projectile in the game seems to have it’s own proper physics, adding for a much greater degree of realism and graphical satisfaction when seeing shells or artillery pieces pounding a piece of armor into scrap. Pretty much everything in the game is physics-driven and backed by a heavy use of shaders, although this comes with the downside that the final release version will probably need a pretty beefy system to run it properly at full detail. Don’t worry too much however – the graphics will be tweakable to a great extent, (everything from draw distance, to the shader version used with the rendering engine), and I even spied some options for DirectX 10 support and an eyebrow-raising “dual monitor” toggle – both sadly disabled for the moment, but I expect the developers will be revealing details on the unquestionably awesome implementation of these features in the future. Oh, and in a nearly unprecedented breakthrough of programming prowess and UI technology, one other cool thing I found was that I could actually bind various game functions to my side mouse buttons! I know, I know – I’m as blown away as the rest of you that a game developer would finally break the long-standing tradition of blatantly preventing the majority of enthusiast gamers from taking full advantage of their mice when trying to optimize their gaming experience, but there you have it. I sincerely hope this is a trend future game developers take off with.