When Petroglyph Games showed me their new real-time strategy game The Great War: Western Front at Gamescom 2022, I thought: I know. exactly what to do different Then I felt a twinge of shame at the arrogance of the imagination that I could have done better than the best commanders of the time, but that attitude is generated by the way we teach warfare and Petroglyph’s invitation to play it ourselves.
World War I was an integral part of my education. In English, we studied poetry for several years, which he inspired, which, of course, He felt at least this way, and in history I did a big project on the new weapons released by industrialization and the challenge they posed to traditional tactics. It left me in my teens with a pervasive notion of the war: its tragedy was not only in the scale of human casualties, but also in the fact that it could have been prevented. If only the generals were more adaptable, more aware of frontline conditions, more humane. “Lions led by donkeys” and all that.
So this is the plan: I will not waste my life on useless attacks in no man’s land, but will fortify my trenches, wear down the enemy, and rush into the tanks, gas, and machine guns. What if I do? I’ll win?
“It’s an experience we want players to experience,” says lead designer Chris Packer. Your decisions in the game’s tech tree are the main venue for these experiences, where you can “relive the story or revisit it” by quoting one of the game’s catchphrases. In fact, I can attack tanks and deploy them long before they actually spawn. I ask them what they saw in their own tests, and composer Frank Klepacki shares his experience.
“I got the reality pretty quickly. Everything we do is based on what we research in history and the results of specific actions. It’s very important not to rely on one company as your primary tactic – you can win a battle against them if you’re lucky, but if you don’t support yourself properly, you won’t get the results you want.”
This is partly because the enemy is adapting. “If you hit the throttle hard enough, after a few rounds the enemy will have gas masks,” says Packer. “So you have to balance yourself, but you can try a non-standard strategy.”
Obviously playing with a seemingly effective strategy won’t be much of an issue, but if we’re right in thinking that World War I was bad, does that mean there’s a tension between good game design and historical accuracy? I guess that’s an unanswered question because we’ll never know how fast the two sides could adapted to what could be considered the “best” strategy.
You will also not have complete freedom to control the course of the war in the game. Players will be “field and theater commanders” of the Allies or Central Powers and will be able to make many important decisions both on the map continent and in individual battles, but the game’s event system “will force you to deal with some of the realities of the times,” as Packer puts it. . This may be an order to launch an attack that does not match your plan. In other words, some of this historically accurate stupidity will apply.
We handle such an event in our demo. The continent is depicted as a map of hexagonal tiles, between which the western front itself winds, and the command calls for an attack on one of them: Drokort. Success will reward a fair share of the national will: it indicates public and political support to continue the fight, and we will win the war if the enemy’s reserves drop to zero before our own. We launch a reconnaissance mission, verify that the balance of forces in the area is favorable to us and begin the attack.
Battles take place in real time with the ability to slow down and pause, but before you get to that there is a pre-battle phase which is months of fortification and hard work before “the offensive”. It is here and in the combat phase itself that the complexity and depth of the combat during this period of time comes to life in a way that I cannot recall in any other game.
You can place several lines of defensive trenches, as well as small communication trenches connecting them. It is important to consider where the enemy can attack and how efficiently your troops will be able to move from one location to another to respond. You can also place barbed wire and stationary weapons like mortars and machine gun nests to create kill zones. Once the setup is complete, the battle itself takes place in real time, which you can slow down and pause. You can use observation balloons to look around the enemy trench and see where their troops are gathering to attack and shoot down their balloons with planes.
When the enemy attacks, masses of infantry scale their trenches and spread out into no man’s land, bombarded by our artillery. The barbed wire slows them down as our machine guns swing open and rip through their ranks. When they finally reach our trench, there’s a bloodthirsty roar, and the animation at the beginning of the fight is detailed enough to convey some degree of horror and tension of that moment, yet there’s also something inhuman looking down on it. . For obvious reasons, it is different from other strategy games.
Our troops take some casualties, but eventually repel the attack. We redeployed some companies and detonated a trench mine, destroying some of the support and communications on their left flank, and counterattacked, the tanks leading our offensive. Packer unleashes a new form of artillery fire: Until now we’ve used precision attacks to deal direct damage, but now we’re launching rolling salvos to create a screen of mud and smoke to cover our advancing troops.
The petroglyph wants to emphasize that this was a lightly won war of attrition. The gains are measured by the spectrum. Our goal here is to capture the checkpoint on the enemy positions, but we can keep fighting even after that to secure a big win if we can afford it. We accept the point of view and propose a truce to “seal” our victory. The battle is won, but for now there’s a bit of melancholy in the score screen, which counts our losses in a coldly numbered way.
It captures some of the horror of war without saying anything too openly. The sense of place is most artfully conveyed with archival footage from Britain’s Imperial War Museum and licensed music from the period, all unintentionally mournful brass and oddly compressed vocals, scattered throughout.
It’s an unexpected twist from a studio whose last release was the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, a bright, shiny remake of two classic real-time strategy games that sizzled to Klepacki’s iconic soundtrack, but I’m officially intrigued. For obvious reasons, there aren’t many World War I games out there, let alone trying to depict strategic and tactical warfare in this level of detail. There’s deep and complex strategy gameplay here in this show, and Petroglyph’s handling of a major theme feels well thought out.
I doubt that the final game is exactly “fun”, but fascinating, challenging and even moving? There are all the possibilities. The Great War: Western Front will be released in 2023.
Source : PC Gamesn
