Carl Sagan would have hated Sierra’s brilliant war game, World in Conflict. Sagan spent a great deal of effort trying to convince us to think of the Third World War as something different than all the wars that have come before: It was a war that no one would survive. We boomers grew up in fear that someone would decide to test Sagan’s notion that the superpowers were like two men sitting in a lake of gasoline threatening to throw a match at the other.
Sierra’s gamemasters have postulated a different world war: In the eighties, after a war in the Europe that didn’t go well for the West, the Russians have now invaded the US, sweeping in from the West. For reasons left unspoken, the President doesn’t play the nuclear card immediately. Oh, there are nukes in World in Conflict – and they are depicted just the way we imagine them in our nightmares: That awesome flash of white, the mushroom cloud, the devastation. But, we’re always outside the blast. We survive. And, that is why Sagan would have objected. World in Conflict makes a game of nuclear war. Its awesome graphics makes us marvel in wonder at the “beauty” of it all. World in Conflict is about the unthinkable: the survivable nuclear war.
“Rethink everything” seems to have been the battle-cry for World in Conflict’s designers. They rethought the very nature of what it is to be a Real Time Strategy game at a time when the genre seemed to have fallen into inevitable variations on a theme with all too familiar game-play (gather resources, climb the tech tree, fire, rinse, repeat), Sierra has obviously been doing more than just rethinking “war”; they’ve come up with an entirely new form of game: an action RTS.
They’ve replaced traditional the traditional RTS model with fast paced multiplayer rounds that reward aggressive teamwork. In fact, on a battlefield littered with scores of weapons of mass destruction, the most powerful one is not the atom bomb, it’s the microphone. Players who can communicate verbally (over the excellent built in voip) have a massive advantage over other teams. It is the game equivalent of the invention of gunpowder: teams with voip trounce those without.
Once you jump into an on-line multiplayer battle, you’re instantly in charge of units specializing in one of four aspects of battle: support, armor, air, or infantry. You have a fixed number of points to spend on units (this keeps the total number of units you control to reasonable numbers). As your units are killed, the points are slowly replenished, allowing you to bring in replacements. So your most important resources are the troops themselves.
As you excel in combat, you gain Tactical Aid points which give you access to rain down fire from above in the form of air strikes, artillery, and even tactical nukes. Again, teamwork is often the key to using these points effectively. Players can share their points; coordinated cooperation within a team means bigger, better weapons on the field earlier, often as the decisive factor in an engagement. Multiplayer games are fast and furious, almost always favoring players willing to commit bravely to the battle. The Third World War, we were told, would not be fought in months and years, but in minutes and days, so there is no time for base building. You gain tactical aid points by securing locations and killing opponents; there is no advantage to holding back and climbing a tech tree. In fact, the tech tree grows as you gain points from combat – the more points, the better the weapons.
It may seem incongruous to praise the artistic merits of a game that focuses on the moments before the apocalypse, but the consistent excellence of the graphics (from the modeling of the maps to the animation of the weapons, smoke, and flames) to the audio must be recognized. Play this on a DX9 based machine and you may find yourself wondering whether your computer has been silently upgraded to DX10 – it is that stunning.
The relatively easy single player campaign is less well realized, particularly where it deals with individual characters, as opposed to massed battles. Set against the stunning “realism” of the tank battles, the animated talking figures seem somewhat crudely realized and their dialog clichéd. However, the single player mode does provide a chance for you to hone your skills before you enter the on-line universe.
It goes without saying that this is an adult game, a game that makes entertainment out of doomsday. This was the war we fought in our nightmares, a war with staggeringly powerful weapons that could sweep aside armies and even cities. Part of the emotional impact of the game is that it even “one-ups” the fears most of us shared about the war: instead of setting it in the European theater as Clancy did, or in Korea, as did Larry Bond, World in Conflict puts the third world war literally in our back yards from Seattle to New York City. Suddenly, game play isn’t just about taking a “hill”: we’re fighting in front of the Statue of Liberty and the, gulp, World Trade Center.
Somehow we avoided this war. Playing it as a game is kind of like whistling past the graveyard. Perhaps there is hope here, too. There were certainly days of the cold war when it felt as if civilization could not escape destruction. Somehow, we made it, both Soviet and Americans. Can we take some hope from the past as we contemplate the war on terror? Perhaps, civilization can survive even when the militarists on both sides seem so intent on using every weapon in their arsenal to prove their might.
Inevitably, when a game is this good we begin to think of the sequel. In Tom Clancy’s novel about the next world war, Red Storm Rising, there is a horrible moment when we realize that even the massive firepower of a Navy battle group won’t be enough to defend itself against a doomsday attack where the Soviets hold nothing back for tomorrow. We hear the Phalanx point guns begin to rip the sky open, taking out the leading edge of the Russian cruise missiles. The Soviet wave becomes a tsunami; nothing is held back for a second attack. It would be great to see these giant naval battles in World in Conflict 2.
