Command & Conquer devs tackle WW1 with The Great War: Western Front

In 2019, Mark Sheftall (a Bucknell University history professor) spoke out about a common trend in Great War stories. The vast majority, Sheftall said, “try to tell the story of an individual, when the real story of World War I is really about the mass.” If Battlefield 1, Verdun, Valiant Hearts Stories about individuals, futures The Great War: Western Front This is the former: A game about the determined but rapidly deteriorating masses that are fighting to bring an end all wars.

Petroglyph Games is a game developer, which was formed in 2003 from Westwood Studios remnants. Star Wars: Empire at War, 8-Bit ArmiesAnd Conan the Unconquered — games that were either overtly fictitious, or stylized to the point of being cartoons. Even the studio’s most recent release, the excellent Command & Conquer Remastered The CollectionThe focus of the film is on parallel universes. You can find it here. Alert RedHitler didn’t rise to power. Soviet Russia was able to expand throughout Europe and spark an alternate World War II.

All this makes it possible to: Western FrontPetroglyph has decided to release a new real-time strategy video game called ‘The Real and Bloody Conflict. It’s slated for a March 30 release, but I spent several hours with the game Playing a scripted historic battle and early turning of a long-form open-ended campaign this week. To its credit, the latter allowed me to maneuver soldiers, tanks, and aircraft across France and Belgium as I saw fit — feinting an attack on this part of the front, only to launch a surprise assault far to the North. As the historic titles of the Total War franchise and the forthcoming Company of Heroes 3, Western Front This allows you to modify the larger details of real conflicts. What’s more, battalions on the overworld map look more like wooden toys than detailed individuals. In these respects, Petroglyph seems to understand the weight of the source material it’s working with here, and is taking steps to distance itself from the complications of “pure” non-fiction.

Image: Petroglyph Games/Frontier Foundry

But, Western Front’s loading screens alternate between advertisements for war bonds and quotes about the cost of victory from military leaders. One of the historic missions zooms into the Somme River, whose banks became the location of more than a million casualties in the course of five months. Players can fire poisonous gas at enemy lines as field commanders. This forces soldiers to move out of their trenches in order for them to be sprayed with water-cooled machines guns. This is an alternative history.

Of course, I’m making these uneasy observations in retrospect. While I was demoing, my hand was on the mouse while my fingers were on the keyboard. It felt like time had gone by.

In gamifying the “war of inches,” Petroglyph is wise to avoid getting lost in the mechanical weeds. As opposed to ordering individual soldiers around à la Command & ConquerOverseeing the tactical movements of Special Squads in Company of Heroes Western Front Combat is all about high-level decision making. Pre-battle, gold is spent to purchase supplies and build trench networks. The better you defend the trench networks, the more troops you can put along them. Take a look at these ideas The enemy will attack. You can increase your defenses after the battle begins, but this will require more supplies.

Image: Petroglyph Games/Frontier Foundry

Combat is also hands-off. Highlight several battalions and click on an enemy trench, and they’ll go “over the top,” into no man’s land, and leap into the trench. Combat Inside The dwindling health bar of those in the trench indicates that the trench has been automated. If you win, the trench and its lines toward the goal will be yours. Next enemy dugout.

The thrilling flow of battle is what makes it so exciting. Western Front. I imagine strategy fans who enjoy “turtling” will gravitate toward Petroglyph’s newest outing — it’s as much about slow expansion as it is daring charges on supposedly vacant stretches of the enemy line.

Yes. I did see many pathfinding problems during the demo. (Instead of moving within a trench to capture a neighboring section, soldiers sometimes jumped back out into no man’s land, only to get picked off immediately.) Yes, the UI needs to be improved. (The white cones that appear on the minimap indicate where artillery emplacements are located. However, the team assured me that the demo version is still in its development.

Image: Petroglyph Games/Frontier Foundry

Western Front’s designers, in their time at Petroglyph and Westwood Studios before it, have honed their strategy expertise to a science. They understand the satisfaction of “painting a map,” and the joy of juggling resource management, troop movements, aerial raids, and scouting runs. In those moments when I’m lost in that strategy flow state, I’m hard pressed to think of a studio better suited to depicting, on a mechanical level, the movements of “the mass” in such an unimaginably brutal conflict.

But then, one of my charges across no man’s land ends in catastrophe, because I lowered my observation balloons during an enemy air assault, and thus, didn’t notice two newly placed machine gun nests along the very trench I had just ordered my troops to capture. Suddenly, four battalions of young men are wiped out in the span of a few seconds, and poisonous gas floods the trenches they came from, and I’m left wondering, What was the point? I’m curious whether Petroglyph is poised to answer.