End of Nations Message Board older than one year ago

Meet the factions of End of Nations!

#handson The promise of blending a real-time strategy game with legions of gamers around the world in a persistent online environment is great. But pulling off remains a challenge. More »

End Of Nations, the MMORTS from Trion Worlds, is not far away now. Trion are gearing up to explain how adding MMO to RTS equals a game that you might want to play, and they’re spooling up the hypecopter with a video, which you can see below. It talks a little about how progression in the game works, as well as mentioning customisation, persistence, and a bunch of other stuff in the overlap between pacey strategy and ongong MMOness. Also, those helicopters certainly absorb a lot of bullets, I would say.(more…)

Devs discuss merging RTS gameplay with a social MMO experience and show off some gameplay.

A few years ago around this time, Trion was suggesting to gamers that despite the overwhelming domination of World of Warcraft, there definitely was room for more than just Blizzard's opus in the MMO market, though the suggestion didn't raise much more than an eyebrow among those interested at the time. A few years later, Rift is out and stealing both players and mindshare, even getting hinted at on a conference call as one reason for WoW's numbers being slightly down.

As much as Trion has been able to do with Rift, that game is only the beginning of the company's plan. As we saw at a pre-E3 event last week, the next step is to break ground on a second MMO title, this one built as an "MMORTS" with veteran strategy developers Petroglyph. We only got to play through part of a short match, but what's there showed that Trion is aiming to do with this genre what it did with Rift, even if there's a long way to go.

#gamescom2010 Looks pretty nigh to us, as seen at the Trion Worlds booth during Gamescom. More »

Petroglyph's MMO and real-time strategy hybrid.

The first three connected worlds are Rift: Planes of Telara, End of Nations, and the Syfy action MMO game.

Last week, I got an early look at End of Nations, the latest RTS from Petroglyph, the developer of Star Wars: Empire at War and, more recently, Universe at War: Earth Assault. Founded by some of the principals behind the original Command & Conquer at Westwood Studios, the team is pouring its experience in the genre into End of Nations for publisher Trion Worlds. Due for release in 2011, the game is being pitched as the first "MMORTS" with a persistent game world, community features and player-vs-environment gameplay with support for 50 simultaneous players "and growing," according to the developer.

End of Nations will undergo many enhancements and a lot of fine-tuning before release, but even in its current state, the game is unquestionably impressive. Specifically, the scale of the action is simply astonishing. The demo map I saw spanned many (virtual) square miles, featuring an array of locations and topography. One second I was seeing a skirmish in a burning forest, and in the next, several players were working together to bring down a massive Panzer Hulk (think: battleship with tank treads) at a heavily fortified construction facility.

Ten brand new screens from Petroglyph's End of Nations.

That's the third biggest tank I've ever seen!

The first true MMORTS? You be the judge.