Reflections of a Third World War: A ‘World in Conflict’ Retrospective

Written by Scott W. Murray

‘World In Conflict’ – Released in 2007 – Dev: Massive Entertainment – Pub: Vivendi Games (Merged w/ Activision in 2008)

Real-Time Strategy (abbreviated as RTS) is a gaming genre that continues to hold onto a sizable cadre of dedicated fans. Even though they don't release as frequently as they once did, and only a few franchises still publish, the RTS community continues to be active and healthy. Lately, as Company of Heroes 3 works up to release, and Age of Empires IV brings another old name back to life, I find myself drawn back yet again to one of my favorite RTS games: World in Conflict.
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Developed by Massive Entertainment, they moved away from the sci-fi of their previous Ground Control games and stepped into the real world for World in Conflict. Set in a fictionalized version of the 1980s where NATO and the Soviet Union are waging World War III in Europe, the story picks up with a surprise Soviet invasion of the northwest United States. You command a US Army platoon over the course of the northwest US aspect of the war, and even get to flashback to some of the fighting in Europe. An expansion pack, Soviet Assault, lets you play as a Soviet officer and interact with the story from the other side of the battlefield.

Making full use of the modern-ish setting, reinforcements can be called in mid-battle and delivered by air, even heavy vehicles. There is no base building or production to manage, just a pool of Reinforcement Points and a variety of units to select from. More powerful units cost more points, and all your reinforcements are air dropped into an LZ you choose out of the areas of the map you have secured. Air support is mostly hands-off: although helicopters are in-game units you can direct just like ground forces, all other air and artillery support is called in from off-map with points you earn over time or by defeating enemies. Artillery works the same: a few artillery units are available to deploy and command with pinpoint precision, but most artillery is called in from out of sight. These artillery and air strike locations are marked with red smoke; you see a timer showing when allied strikes will arrive and want to try to keep your enemies in the kill zone. Enemy strikes are marked with smoke but have no timer; you've got to fight your way out of the blast radius before the ordinance arrives if you want to keep your units alive.

This creates an ever-shifting tactical situation, requiring frequent maneuvering and re-positioning, and helps prevent fights from stagnating. Additionally, what kinds of units you have available to reinforce, your air and artillery options, and even whether you can get reinforcements at all are affected by the story setting: if you are fighting a desperate last stand, you may not have many friends to call on, or if the weather is bad planes may be unable to deliver reinforcements or bomb enemies. Using these tools to set the tone for each story mission creates the feeling of a dynamic living world outside the battlefield that impacts your ability to fight and adds an implication of consequences for that outside world that depend on your success or failure in battle.

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There are plenty of good RTS games out there, and I'm looking forward to Company of Heroes III and eagerly wondering where the Total War franchise (traditionally a mix of Real-Time and Turn-Based) will go next. But I keep replaying World in Conflict even as the years go by, because of the fun multi-faceted gameplay, the slick controls, beautifully-realized setting, and the enticing story. If there's one RTS name I'd love to see resurrected for a sequel, this is it.
 
By far one of the best things about World in Conflict is how it handles infantry. Balancing infantry in a modern setting, or even in most real-world settings from about WWII onward, brings a host of difficulties. Infantry are slower than most vehicles, less durable, and wield less firepower than almost every vehicle used in warfare. Compare a rifleman squad's ability to shoot, or endure enemy fire, or run, to the abilities of tanks, APCs, armored Humvees, or any air vehicle. Those of you who've seen the movie Jarhead have some idea of the problem: infantry left trailing behind, outclassed by airpower or rapid mechanized forces. Even when carried within vehicles, the skirmish might be over by the time they've climbed out of their seats. The Company of Heroes franchise, a World War II RTS series, uses infantry at the squad level as their "standard" size unit, allowing them to come in many different forms and flavors, utilizing their variety of handheld weapons to be relevant in any fight. The result of this is that armored vehicles all come in some form of "bulky behemoth," and even some of the lightest vehicles tend to be relatively sluggish or un-maneuverable compared to infantry squads. Because the vehicular technology of the time wasn't quite as dynamic or refined as it is today, this makes infantry important and versatile, but it does leave the game feeling very infantry centric. Another WWII RTS, Faces of War, takes a more dramatically and purposefully human-centric approach where every vehicle or piece of equipment must be crewed by individually commanded soldiers. The tank isn't a unit unto itself, alive and moving on the battlefield to be commanded, it's just an object that you have to actually put infantry into if you want it to be useful. Individual crew members can be killed in battle too, reducing the effectiveness of the vehicle. This makes people the most important thing on the battlefield and lets you bring damaged units back to full strength by replacing crew losses but can also create an environment of micromanagement.

In a modern setting, where vehicles are more prolific than ever, these problems can be even worse. World In Conflict handles this brilliantly by scaling everything up: making small-medium vehicles the "normal" size unit and thus turning infantry into special subclass of sorts, one you might call "small" or "flexible." They exist only in "squad" size, not as individuals, and though squads can lose members and be reinforced in the field, their combat effectiveness isn't as dramatically affected by their numbers as it is in Company of Heroes, where larger squads can spread individuals over only as much tactical space as their numbers allow. Instead, the infantry squads in World in Conflict are more like single blobs. The soldiers are smart enough to handle things like cover on their own, so you can step back and handle larger units, logistics, and other parts of the battle. This approach is similar to 2005 RTS Blitzkrieg II, but Blitzkrieg didn't center their focus as definitively on any one-unit class, so infantry was left feeling like just another niche unit with extremely specific uses, rather than as one of the valuable cores of your force.
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The result of World in Conflict's approach is a tactical setup that fully appreciates contemporary technology: modern militaries are highly mechanized and the ability to move your forces around the battlefield at will, either to answer the enemy or to set the tone yourself, is incredibly important. But because even the slow units have important tactical value, how you combine your forces to support and move each other plays a major role in how well things turn out. It's the first RTS I played where I truly felt a need to understand the term "combined arms." It feels like a natural evolution of the "rock-paper-scissors" feel often at the core of strategy games that adjusts it to accommodate modern technology while also blurring the edges of unit classifications. It's a game where knowing which units automatically beat others is less important than knowing the on-the-ground capabilities of your units and how they compare to the enemy.

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Another thing the game did right was player controls. Strategy game controls are generally pretty set-in stone: use the mouse to select units, give commands, and move the screen, and keyboard shortcuts can expedite a variety of commands if you memorize enough of them. Using the mouse to select units, command units, and control what you can see is sometimes clunky, like trying to type on a keyboard with only one hand. The arrow keys can be used to navigate the camera in most RTSs, but bringing your left hand over to them is uncomfortable at best. In World in Conflict, you use the WASD keys (and the Q and E keys) for almost all the camera movement you could ever want, leaving your mouse free to focus only on unit selection and command. This was a revelation in speed and efficiency that immediately made all other control schemes feel clunky and slow. I now customize my RTS controls whenever I can to more closely mimic the World in Conflict layout. Of course, with keyboard customization (or a tolerance of your arrow keys) you can mimic this efficiency in other games, and I wouldn't be surprised if another RTS used these controls first, so I won't declare them as being unique to World in Conflict, but it's the default control scheme and the game that opened my eyes to the possibilities.
 
Lastly, the story World in Conflict tells is... just plain Really Good. There are some RTSs known for their great storytelling, Starcraft, Homeworld, Halo Wars, but in many RTSs they're an afterthought, or made awkward by the limited way in which the player can interact with individuals on the ground. RTS games often struggle to make you care about the faceless grunts you command or fail to lend gravitas to the overall battle by asking you to care about towns or people in other places, off-screen. World in Conflict focuses instead on the officers in your company: player character Lieutenant Parker, company commander Colonel Sawyer, and fellow platoon leaders Captain Webb and Captain Bannon. Lt. Parker is silent in-game, and you never see his face, since he's the player's stand-in, but in the voiceover narration between missions (where Parker is narrating events after the fact) he's given life and empathy by none other than Alec Baldwin. Focusing on a brewing dissension between Captain Bannon and Colonel Sawyer, these characters go through true character journeys over the course of the campaign, and the way they change as people reflects the outcomes of your story missions, helping to add weight to your in-game actions and make the outside world feel more connected to the in-game battlefields. Occasional glimpses into the lives of some of the soldiers on the ground or to politicians or generals elsewhere add some perspective and further bring the world to life. In the expansion, Soviet Assault, there is a similar approach with the other officers in your Soviet company and a touching main plot, but the shorter length leaves less time to fully develop the emotional core.
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Although most of my love is for the single-player of World in Conflict, I will point out one interesting aspect of the multiplayer: it split player roles, limiting your available units to infantry, armor, transport, or artillery, thus necessitating cooperation and coordination between multiple players on each team. This could get annoying if you didn't have enough people to fill the roles but created a uniquely dynamic cooperative environment when everybody was on board.
 
There are plenty of excellent RTS games that do all kinds of things well: The beloved stories from the Starcraft and Homeworld franchises, the unique factions and units of Star Wars: Empire at War, the fluid command system in the Halo Wars games. I enjoy them all and I'm glad the genre is maintaining a foothold in the games industry. For me though, no other game I've played merges all these aspects together as smoothly and beautifully as World in Conflict. Massive Entertainment mostly works on the MMO The Division 2 these days and is apparently planning an open-world Star Wars game, but I'll keep hoping for a sequel. I'd love to see what happens to Lieutenant Parker and the rest of the company, and how World War III resolves.

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