Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Heroes and Generals



A new development studio, Reto-Moto, is making this intriguing World War II fps persistent online PC game. One that will run in browsers with surprisingly good graphics and boast many large scale tactical features, like those of World War II Online. Reto-Moto is made up of a bunch of veteran developers who worked on the Hitman series. World War II Online is an old game and one of the only games to try to mix FPS and the grand scale of a real war, complete with commanders, drivers, infantry, planes, tanks, at crew and damn near everything that should exist. No other game required players to be truly selfless by doing things like driving infantry to a battle, in a troop transport truck, and then returning base to pick up more. World War II Online did not have good graphics or the best system, once you picked a role you could not switch until you died, so if you were a tank driver that was all you could be, same with a truck driver or infantry. What it did do great was have a massive map of Europe, all of which had a persistent online map that everyone used to coordinate large scale attacks. It had great potential, but it was before it's time and it really needed better technology to properly realize it's goals. Heroes & Generals looks like they are going after similar goals to WWII Online, with tank/infantry/plane combat and a persistent online experience that involves a great deal of strategy and planning. They have just released a bunch of new news and brought the game into alpha testing. I had never heard of this game before, but it looks as if it was previously kept hidden.

Heroes & Generals will be played entirely in browser, thanks to the Retox engine that they reworked. They say that they wanted the game to be in a browser so it would be incredibly easy for players to provide feedback and be involved in the community. It was there hopes that a browser game would merge the two together, since the community will be just a click away and something that will probably be fairly hard to not be apart of. The game doesn't sound like it will be as open as WWII online, more like it will have various missions and modes to take part of. Each battle will matter in the outcome of the war and it will matter to your character. Each character will be customizable and persistent, gaining rank and options throughout the game. Each battle location will be represented through the strategic map (below) and there will be hundreds of different locations to fight over. 










There will be three main focuses for Heroes & Generals: Strategy, Action and Casual. The action will be coming in the form of the FPS combat, which will involve defense, assaults, sneaking behind enemy lines, sabotage or gathering intelligence. Everything a player does, or requests, will be pushed through the chain of command and to the players handling the strategy portion. The strategy portion will have players creating plans and tactics, while also managing combat support and logistics. The casual part has to do with smart phones and being able to help in some way even through something small like that. They don't say exactly what you will be doing through phones, but probably some kind of mini-games that do something for your team (sorry, it is that vague). They wanted to add the casual gaming so that players could feel involved whether or not they had a decent PC right in front of them. Check out this alpha footage. 

Heroes and Generals - Alpha Footage

If you watched the alpha footage you may be thinking that infantry combat looks awful, it does indeed, but the game just got into alpha and they have a lot of time to work on making that better. The general concept of Heroes & Generals is fantastic, it brings back some of the old grand strategy ideas from WWII online, something that no one has been able to replicate in ten years. I can't wait to see how big maps are, how plane combat works, how tank combat works and how everything is planned on the strategic map. At the very least, this game has high aspirations and I'm more than happy to support such ideas. The game is about to start Alpha, which you can participate in, all you have to do is go to the website (below) and create an account. They will be emailing out alpha keys for the game, but I'm not sure how closed fist they are going to be with keys, we will see. Thanks for reading and for more info, plus alpha sign up, check out the main website below. 
Main Website: http://www.heroesandgenerals.com/landing/
ModDB Page


-Written by Sean Cargle 
Posted by Lokai at 9:41 AM
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