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MMO. RTS. 51 players on a single map... and still counting...

I've played realtime strategy (RTS) games before, and I've played online against up to a handful of people. End of Nations is not that sort of experience. End of Nations is an MMORTS from Trion featuring a persistent world, with multiple "hot spots" where there is likely to be an ongoing battle when you get online to play. It will be up to you as to whether you want to jump into the fray (and, if so, in what battlefield, on what continent) or whether you want to jump into a private instance with some friends.

One interesting aspect of End of Nations is the unit building and customization functionality. Other games might let you choose types of units and combine units into a squadron or similar grouping, but End of Nations actually lets you customize the look and load-out of your units, forming specialized squadrons geared toward certain uses, and even save your load-out for quick selection at a later time. As you play End of Nations, you can recover parts and technology that allow you to unlock new units, gaining stat bonuses when you complete a set and use the completed specialized squadron.

Unlike most RTS games, you won't be able to create new units in the battlefield. You can spend as much time as you like at your base, customizing your units, building new units, researching technologies and setting up back-up, such as bombing runs, but once you've completed that phase and enter a war zone, you're limited to what you brought with you. Chris Rubyor, the Petroglyph Game Designer who demonstrated End of Nations for me, compared this concept to that of a collectible card game. The units you've selected and set-up, along with your back-up bombing runs, are similar to your "deck" that you've set up for a given battle. Once you begin playing, that's all the units you have to deal with. This actually increases the importance of strategy and coordination with other players on your side. For this reason, I expect to see heavy community development, similar to guilds seen in MMO games.

End of Nations' separation of create and destroy presents a truly interesting twist in this post-apocalyptic MMORTS game which may actually be more approachable to gamers who have a hard time juggling between building units and deploying and commanding them.

STAT BOX
Product
End of Nations
Company
Trion Worlds
Date
06/26/2010