World in Conflict Preview

The center of the gameplay pits two opposing teams against each other. (A competition centers on two opposing sides? This concept is so NEW, it is simply mind-boggling. - Ed) From what we've gathered, the sides appear to be evenly matched. And, balancing units is, clearly, important to the creators of World in Conflict. Once things heat up, players will find themselves in a true-to-life battle zone. The variety of units should keep a steady pace at all times. Most air units, for example, like Apache choppers, hover around the battlefield and keep an eye on a great portion of the map, offering strong support for ground forces. Of course, should you be leading a few helicopters, you won't get very far if you encounter anti-air guns, which are a serious threat. Artillery is also something to worry about, since there's a range of powerful long-ranged artillery units that can take out targets from a great distance. Tanks were thrown into the picture. However, a tank squad must also think about facing anti-tank infantry. In short, it's all about coordinating attacks and dealing with the situation and a variety of enemy threats.

It appears to be some sort of street carnival.

Whose side are we on again?

WoC does bring a few familiar gameplay concepts to mind. Capturing zones is similar to what we've seen in Company of Heroes and even Battlefield for that matter. Controlling a particular zone denotes the capture of several circles around that zone. Considering the variety of units on offer, matches may get quite intense and dramatic when teams start fighting over territory.

In order to find their way around, players can rely on an intuitive camera system that zooms out all the way to a satellite view and right down to a detailed close-up view, with graphical detail on a par with modern-day first-person shooters (well, according to the developers anyways). From an aesthetic standpoint, the designers are definitely going for a realistic edge. World of Conflict was described as having highly detailed and extremely convincing visuals. Unit models were designed with precision and care and the overall quality of the graphics in the game was said to be way better than, say, Company of Heroes. Havok 4.5 physics were employed to spice things up. Other additional make-up facets follow, such as enhanced water shaders, animated sky and basically all the latest DX10 features. On top of that, World in Conflict is scalable to ancient video cards like the GeForce 4Ti and ATi 9250 series.

The audio was given a proper amount of attention as well. They're planning to cram the game with around 10,000 lines of dialogue, which should be more than adequate to "color" the personality of each unit and character on the battlefield.

With all this on the agenda, Massive and Sierra are taking their time and are angling for a Q3 2007 release. Although the basic concept behind this game seems to derive from every other strategy on the market, the developers are obviously looking to take things a bit further in the genre. We really hope they pull it off. We'd hate to have yet another generic strategy on our hands.