It'll be a hero's journey, says Martin. We believe this will make for a better storyline and allow you to become attached to him. You'll see him grow both in terms of personality and in his relationships with other characters. Occasionally, you'll get to use him as a unit on the battlefield, but mostly he'll act as a commander. Having sufficiently grilled Martin, we turned our attentions to the action on-screen. Our mission - to capture an enemy stronghold.
Starting off on a breathtaking canyon ridge, we called down a dropship full of tanks, foot soldiers and mortars unlike in the original, you can now command these soldiers individually rather than just in groups. We then pounded the enemy from afar while the tanks rolled slowly in. As with every unit type, tanks come replete with a unique secondary function -extending armoured shields to allow ground troops to approach the enemy in safety.
Deploying these enabled us to gather our troops en masse just outside the NSA's base, while mortar fire suppressed their forces. Then, while we called in another dropship of backup units, the foot soldiers broke cover to infiltrate the base, while our tanks pounded it from outside. Zooming into the action revealed a titanic struggle, the battle seesawing back and forth as heavy armour was sent skywards by violent explosions and broken bodies littered the floor.
With three months left to tighten the screws on gameplay, Ground Control II is already looking like a masterful RTS, with more good ideas than a dozen of its peers. Barring total calamity, the earth will move this June. Real-time strategy games may be a hoot to play, but they're usually about as realistic in their depiction of war as Tetris is of masonry.
If such games were ever intended to duplicate state-sanctioned butchery, half the civilian population of the United States would be out chopping wood, breaking rocks and picking berries in order to supply their huge military machine. You can almost imagine George Bush Jr sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office, motioning one of his lackeys over to enquire about tank production, only to be told: "We're short about 30 loaves of bread Mister President, but as soon as the granary is built we should be OK to take out Eye-ran.
Anyway, the point is that when it comes to mass conflict of a heavily armed nature, field commanders shouldn't have to worry about harvesting ore or researching various technologies in order to feed their war machine, as the only resource that needs managing are the men and machines employed to kill the enemy. Such is the gorgeously simple premise adopted by the original Ground Control, and we can't tell you how happy we are that the sequel shares the same agenda.
Set more than years after the planet-wide war of the original, Ground Control 2: Operation Exodus focuses its attentions on the planet of Morningstar Prime, the last free world of the Northern Star Alliance and a prime target for forceful reintegration into the Terran Empire.
From orbit the draconian Terrans have mercilessly bombarded hundreds of cities, and as the game begins their troopships have started their descent to take out the few cities left standing. Your job as the military leader of the NSA is to halt their advance, or at least delay it until a lasting sanctuary or some technological mirac be procured. We've been playing around with some pre-Alpha code recently, and we have to say it's all looking rather impressive.
The mission structure is entirely linear, but developer Massive Entertainment is hoping that the strength of its story and characters will more than make up for the lack of freeform grand strategy.
Instead, the scope for open-ended gameplay will assert itself in the missions themselves, of which there are A 30 all told. The original game was characterised by rather featureless terrain. This time, as well as the undulating and varied landscapes, GC2's maps are littered with imposing landmarks.
You've got elaborate military bases that can only be overrun by co-ordinated attacks, dense forests capable of hiding dozens of shock troops, and vast ruined cities where soldiers can not only enter the crumbling piles of stone and metal, but take positions on various levels with firing positions set to ambush in specific directions.
This new feature is ably demonstrated in the opening mission, where a small team of NSA troops is sent in to retrieve an unidentified object from behind enemy lines. Posted into various buildings flanking a once glorious town square, the troops lie in wait to ambush a patrol, all guns trained inwards to create a merciless crossfire that will leave few Imperial soldiers standing.
Without full use of cover and surprise tactics the mission would be impossible. Like its predecessor, there's no troop creation in Ground Control 2. Further enhancements have been made to other parts of the game. For example, rather than expecting pre-assigned squads of reinforcements to arrive at preordained intervals, GC2 introduces a system whereby your success on the battlefield will allow you to call on more and better reinforcements at virtually any time in the mission.
The quicker you overrun the enemy and the more casualties you inflict upon them, the more Acquisition Points you rack up and so the more troops, tanks and close air support units you can draw from.
Reinforcements must however be brought in at designated landing zones, which more than likely will be in the control of the enemy. Hold the LZ for long enough and success is assured. This makes the dropship something of a pivotal unit in the game, yet it isn't just an elaborate way of getting new units on to the field of play.
Instead of filling it with troops and tanks, you can load it with missiles and bombs and have it patrol the battlefield. Or you could fill it up with sensor equipment and scout out the map. The more fuel you load, the longer it will stay aloft to pinpoint the enemy units. Of course, if your dropship is taken out you can forget getting any reinforcements for the rest of the level.
As well as the liberal freedom-loving forces of the NSA and their brutal Imperial aggressors, Ground Control 2 introduces a new playable race going by the name of the Virons no relation to the Vogons, more's the pity.
Pug-ugly, big and brutish, it would appear these nomadic invaders are there simply to fight over the scraps and add their peculiar brand of organic weapons and machinery to the mix. However, the appearance of the Virons is central to the story, as they are keen to exact revenge for some past transgression. Rather than having to rely on off-field support, the Virons are able to adapt from their stock of four basic units by melding units together on the battlefield.
An engineer and a tank will produce a repair vehicle, whilst a stock grunt mated with an alien hover unit they're still arguing over what to call these things will produce a kind of sniping hovercraft thing that fires gas bombs, the lethal clouds of which will drift across the battlefield with the wind.
It looks more impressive than it sounds and some of the visual effects that complement the alien weapons are cool as hell. One artillery unit sends out a kind of tectonic shockwave that ripples along the ground, flooring infantry and rattling vehicles beyond repair. Of course, the aliens aren't the only ones able to field interesting machines, and while the NSA favours traditional projectile weapons and tracked vehicles and the Empire enjoys lasers and antigrav hoverdynes, there are a number of unique and interesting units to look forward to.
Not least of these is the otherwise innocuous-looking minesweeper, a vehicle that flails the ground, churning up clods of earth as it ceaselessly searches for hidden mines, while at the rear it lays explosive traps for enemy infantry. Because of their lumbering speed, an alternative function is to extend protective wings that shield infantry advancing from behind.
It isn't just the units themselves that we're looking forward to though -it's the added functionality of these units as well. Snipers, for instance, can be posted secretly on high ground to act as spotters for distant artillery guns, while the engineer can not only mend damaged vehicles and buildings, but erect small fortifications and static gun turrets to aid in a hasty defence. Tanks, when asked to retreat, will do so in reverse, making sure their strongest side is always facing the enemy.
It's simple yet obvious features like this that make GC2 such a constant joy. One aspect that hasn't changed is the attention to detail in the graphics and the simplicity of the user interface.
The developers are once again making use of a free-floating camera that will allow for an almost unlimited scope to view the battlefield. You can zoom in close enough to each soldier to make out nasal hairs, or pull back to view entire battalions going hammer and tongs from above. Similarly, units will gain experience points as they progress, which will not only make them better fighters, but more specialised depending on their combat familiarity.
Line of sight and elevation will be central to success, although it won't be enough to be within a certain radius of the enemy to unveil them - your leading unit must be able to actually see them before they're revealed. Admittedly, aside from the visual makeover, new vehicles and added functionality, there isn't much that's fundamentally new in GC2. However, as was the case with Homeworld 2, the countless subtle differences look set to make a huge impact on the way the game plays.
Those who know the original and believe they can imagine what the sequel is going to be like may be in for quite a shock, as for pure tactical sophistication Ground Control 2 may well end up being the strategy game of the year.
Absent completely from the original game, the element of weather will now play a crucial role in how you plan and co-ordinate your attacks. A heavy downpour will slow down your entire army, especially vehicles, while various types of stormy conditions may short out electronic systems, reduce visibility or even damage certain units. Snow, while a bugger for your tanks and troop carriers, will actually speed up your ground troops, while high winds will affect the movement of the game's hover vehicles.
Weather patterns can also change in seconds, not from tropical sun to arctic blizzards perhaps, but the changes will be random - meaning commanders need to be prepared to change strategy if the skies darken. This should be. Yet somehow Ground Control II has managed to fall well short of expectations due to the fact that there only seem to be two outcomes to any battle.
The first outcome is prevalent when you first dip a tentative green-skinned toe into the piranha-filled cauldron that houses the Ground Control II community - also known as Massgate, developer Massive Entertainment's very own hosting server. In these situations, more experienced opponents generally tend to rush all of the map's Landing Zones LZs and Victory Locations VLs within the first two minutes of a game.
By minute three it's all over and you find yourself back at the menu screen wondering what happened. Especially so for someone in music and audio. There were no conventions to follow and no standards were set. I remember having this feeling of being at the forefront of both technology and entertainment.
It was very exciting. The sound system we developed was absolutely groundbreaking. Working in the games industry was still very exotic in the nineties […] There were no conventions to follow and no standards were set. The fact that we all came together and made a full game from scratch without any prior experience makes me very proud of Massive. The levels were often a kind of rolling, flexible battle-puzzle. Martin rememb ers fondly how the development of those kinds of puzzles came together.
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Die besten Spiele — handverlesen. Eine Auswahl grandioser Spiele, von aktuellen Hits bis zu zeitlosen Klassikern, die man auf keinen Fall verpassen sollte. Bei uns im Mittelpunkt: Du. Dein Spiel, deine Entscheidung. The company is fully owned by Ubisoft. They are best known for the Ground Control series of real-time tactics video games. They were acquired by Vivendi Universal in It has also been described as being the largest project for Massive Entertainment so far, with a huge budget.
The game was released on September 18, and won wide critical acclaim, including nominations for one of the best games of
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