WWII Online

[iggi]

The goal is immersion. Not like the film total recall but as close as you can get with today's tech. It's about teams and team work. It will be the first game that will make me unwrap the microphone that came with my cpu and use it .

I think people might think it is impossible because they think it will be like halflife where everyone is running around in disorder. To give the game direction, I think officers should have the power to execute thier players for insubordination in the field. Of course a player couldn't frag an officer. It's about the what to do next panicky excitement. Halflife uses unrealistic physics and wwiionline will have missions as a guidline for players. How many times have I sneaked up to someone in halflife and shot him point blank with a shot gun only for him not to die?

What would be very cool in wwiionline would be the ability to create a scenario like say last defense, get all the players to volunteer for the roles and to play it out 1st person.

I love the massive scope. You can be a techie type and spend your time underwater in a sub, listening to sonar and reading panels, probably never seeing the players you conquer. Or join the dim witted infantry and thrill in the excitment of preparing for a daring raid under fire,(going to bed if it gets too late).

Every battle we fight in CM has scores of warstories that you can roleplay in wwiionline.

[M. Bates]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>The goal is immersion. Not like the film total recall but as close as you can get with today's tech. It's about teams and team work. It will be the first game that will make me unwrap the microphone that came with my cpu and use it <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

WWIIOnline is using 1:2 scale of the world. How can thousands of players be adequate for this??

Why don't they just simulate set battles?

For example, Stalingrad. You would have tanks infantry and planes, but at a more sensible scale.

[iggi]

I like that idea. You should suggest it. Although wwiionline is a strategic game with role playing elements, set piece historical battles sound good. I'm not sure they won't have that.

[This message has been edited by iggi (edited 12-14-2000).]

[Rebel]

Okay guys, you ask, I answer

First of all- regarding the scope of the project-

It is a 1:2 scale of any THEATRE. Where we're starting off is France vs. Germany, in 1940.

Now to all those who have compared it to half life/counterstrike:

Think again. Realistic ballistics, wind, and one shot kills will drive the quakemongers out. When they don't have their precious rocket launcher or BFG, they'll just leave. Fine by me.

On to the questions of orginization-

WW2OL sports a mission system. High-ranking players set up and submit missions to be accomplished. These can range from bombing a bridge, to taking a town. Squads will interact with each other, establishing placement of artillery, tanks, infantry positions, coodrinating air cover with the RAF, and what not.

On the other hand, you could go lone wolf- and scout ahead of the line, picking off Officers (don't think you'll live long. Arty type guys live for the "direct fire" command )

Any more questions, lemme know

------------------

-Rebel out!-

"The only thing more accurate then incoming enemy fire is incoming friendly fire" -Murphy

[Polar]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by iggi:

An errie silence has fallen over the city. Our squad has been cut off from the company. We are holed up in the basement of a burnt out factory. Temperature has dropped to -20 degrees. There's six of us left. That Russian tank came out from nowhere. Bloody almost cut our unit apart.

I passed the order to count ammo and redistribute. We're lucky we still have the mg42. A distance growl permiates the horizon. The battle is not over yet. "Saddle up boys, lets rock and roll".

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Ummmmmm... How would a World War II infantryman know what "Rock&Roll" was? :^)

Joe

[Polar]

Should be... "All right boys! Lets Swing!!!"... mmmmm... that sounds wrong....

How 'bout "All right boys! Lets BIG BAND!!"

Joe

[iggi]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Ummmmmm... How would a World War II infantryman know what "Rock&Roll" was? :^)<HR></BLOCKQUOTE> He wouldn't. A *virtual* World War II infantryman would.Good question, now give forty rounds to our machinegunner, he's liberal on shooting discipline .

[The_Capt]

Ok boys and girls this is going to be the last words I wast on this subject.

One. Joint military operations are the pinacle of the art of war. They are extremely complex, take weeks/months to plan for and require a tremendous amount of coordination.

Two. No online wargame will even begin to scratch the surface of this operation due to lack of training of the participants and time restraints. Inlike CM where a hasty Bn attack can be planned and executed within the scope of the game (ie 2 hrs) the Bliztkrieg of '40 will take years to even begin to do justice.

Three. WWII online as described is a wonderful concept but a piece of fluff. Fun yes but resembling nothing (except maybe the pretty tracers) to the world which it is attempting to sell us. I find it very strange that this discussion is even happening on the same forum where the turret speed of the Panther is a topic of heated debate.

Conclusion. Buy the game and pay the monthly fee but do not believe for an instant that you are being immersed in anything which resembles the military reality being "touted". No military simulation can be accurate if it doesn't take into account command, control and communication which will be impossible in the scope as presented for WWII online.

[Colin]

I'd like to try it but there is no way I'm going to pay a monthly/hourly/weekly/yearly fee!

I can play CM for one fixed price. WW2OL is going to have to compete with CM, Halflife, Unreal Tournament, Warbirds and at least a few other games. Maybe the flightsim people are used to paying fees for everything but I know the FPS, tank commanders and strategists won't. They can get what they need from other games. WW2 Online simply won't survive with a monthly fee system.

------------------

And if we abandon any platform, I can assure you it will not be the Macintosh.

-Steve

My website!

A major source of Wild Bill scenarios!

[Thermopylae]

Aftre a long, long look at the website I ahve decided on one other, small, tiny, inconsequential, INCREDIBLY BLOODY HUGE thing. In addittion to the player lust needed to run ANY sizable operation (more than a platoon)... There's no cover for the infantry! Look at the screen shots. While a grass texture mayvery well represent brush, dips, grass, and everything else usable for cover in the open in CM, that just won't do for the individual infantry man...I personally don't want to run three miles knowing I'm on a grass texture and nothing else. This brings us to CPU speed. Every tree in a forest will have to be modelled. the intereior of every house. A million bits of terrain. And it all has to be done over an area where at least tanks can operate. it'd require a mssive amount of Computer to do this, and if you add Human Pilots, wellllll....Its Just BIG tm.

[Guest grunto]

<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Vergeltungswaffe:

It'll never get off the ground, but if it does, you'll have 80% pilots, 19% tankers, and 1% infantry (the brave and witless). Don't hold your breath for this one.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

dude even if it made my participation 'short' i would like to have one of the following in no particular order:

BAR

MG42

MP44

MP40

Russian 7.62x25 SMG (drum fed)... yeah baby!!!

in a 'first person shooter' setting.

Andy

[Subvet]

For those that say they will never play a game with a monthly fee to play: I hope you never plan on playing a massive multiplayer on-line game. I don't think you will see any games like this that will be free to play. Every single MMOL game that has been released that I've ever heard about is pay to play. How do you think these companies would pay for the game if they didn't charge you? Do you want an advertisement banner at the top of your screen while you play the game to pay for it? I'm curious to know how you would pay for it without charging the players?

[Stefan Fredriksson]

Subvet, I'm not sure if I understood you correctly.

If you look at Novalogic (for instance), you buy the game once.

After that Novalogic provide servers set up for Delta Force 1 & 2, F-22, etc. I play some multiplayer on the DF-servers, and the only fee I pay is to my ISP. Novalogic is not getting an öre out of me, more than what I paid for the game.

[PeterNZer]

Stefan

you're making the mistake of confusing a server-based game with a massively multiplayer online game.

The requirements in terms of cost and servicing are quite different.

The servers for a game like Ultima online cost millions a month to run while a good multiplayer server for quake/delta force/whatever is peanuts in comparison.

I believe monthly fees are justified and the whole shock-horror "I'm not paying that!" approach a bit silly. If you don't want to pay it fine, don't. Fact is they need to charge to make money.

PeterNZ

------------------

"I can be quite pleasant, you know" - Andreas

"WHERE'S THE MOAT?!" - Jon

[Cav-Scout]

Bottom line guys..if you don't think it'll fly, then don't check it out.

1) To judge a game based on a few screen shots of a closed early-mid beta session is absurd. Its a BLOODY HUGE map, to which no few screen shots can do justice...and its not done yet.

2) To suggest its fluff, with no knowledge of how they are modeling the actual vehicles/planes is also absurd. Do you have inside info on just how the physics of the game will work? This game is coming to us from the guys who brought you WARBIRDS....hardly fluff I think. I would expect them to model the armor and planes as realistically, if not more, than CM does.

3) realistic military simulation? Immersion? So, having my Puma sniped repeatedly by a 60mm mortar is realistic? Face it guys, no game will 'immerse" you entirely and let you feel what it was like then..hence the "game" aspect of it. You want absolute realism, join the Marines.

4) How many people can you possibly go up against on DELTA FORCE, or F22? there is a reason why they charge..its a MASSIVELY MULTI-PLAYER game, not something you can throw up a server for and handle 50 people. That's why you don't pay to play stuff like Diablo, F22, and Delta Force. You can play those games alone..WWIIonline just isn't the same..apples and oranges.

5) Won't survive a monthly fee? Just as Air Warrior, WarBirds, and others haven't eh? Some of the FPS, Tank Sim, and others will stay..some won't. Do you also think these guys are new to this? They will price the game so as to insure they survive, and not run themselves out of the market. Who knows..maybe they'll count on having many more people, and thereby charging less than any other Online game, also drawing people for the savings in cost alone...won't know till it happens, but it doesn't do any good to cry over milk that hasn't been spilled yet.

Look back a while, when CM was in its infancy, and remember how some people thought, " An independent game company? surviving on sales by word of mouth and such? a wargame no less?" Thank goodness the guys who produced this game didn't listen. They had a goal, and they stuck to it. I imagine the same thing is going on with these guys...I wouldn't bet against. After all, they've already proven themselves once with WarBirds.

Lastly, my examples are not intended to pick on anyone, or embarrass anyone, and in no way am I taking away from CM. The game is the goods..best game out there. Lets just give others some encouragement, and hope they pull off what they set out to do..cause if they do, WWIIonline is going to be the real deal, which can only add to the wargaming community as a whole, and that's good by me.

Cav-Scout

"If you ain't Cav...you ain't"

[Stefan Fredriksson]

If I'm the one who got picked at, I wasn't embarrassed

I have always preferred tactic-games (SP, ToAW...) over hot online-games, so I admit my ignorance.

Just how many servers would you require for this massive online game?

[Bozza]

For myself I intend to watch the developement of this game VERY closely, because it's a dream come true.

Although some may say that it will never work for whatever reasons, I prefer to look on the positive side and wait and hope for the best.

Looking at the Videos on the site really got my mouth watering too.

My only problem will be the lag times I think (being from Australia) and if these are excessive enough to deny me reasonable gameplay I would be severly disappointed.

But if there is one positive post on this topic that supports your project 100% - it's this one! Keep it up guys!

[PeterNZer]

hehe Stefan

Um, well they require big-ass servers. That's all I know. For starters you need to have a huge fat pipe to your server farm, second you need to ensure your ISP type thing provides you with fantastic connection and so on, then you need the servers and routers. I understand a game server like a UO or an EQ server uses a few of those big $50,000 units.

A game like quake is fine with a fast pc (hell, or even a 486 for halflife and earlier I think) as well as the routing gear. You could set up a decent quake server for a cpl of thousand plus a connection

I used to know what they used, but I forget now. Since I just picked up UO again (w00t me) I will find out i guess maybe !

PeterNZ

------------------

"I can be quite pleasant, you know" - Andreas

"WHERE'S THE MOAT?!" - Jon

[Azuth]

Okay, there seems to be a lot of people that haven't quite seen the beauty of MMOG's yet. I'm a MMORPG junky. I spent a year in Ultima Online, another year at Everquest, and yet another year playing Asheron's Call. Each game had a $10 a month charge.

Disagree if you want, but $10 a month for a game like this is very very cheap. No one thinks about dropping $10 every day on lunch. No one thinks much about paying $7 to see 1.5 hours of a movie. I spent about 40+ hours a month playing these games. That boils down to $0.25 an hour. 99% of single player games come with about 30 hours of gameplay for about $40. That is $1.33 an hour of gameplay, over 5 TIMES the cost you would pay for a MMOG.

I'm also not expecting WWII online to be 100% accurate. Its still just a game. The game will about having fun in a WWII-alike setting. Nobody wants to work in the kitchens peeling potatoes. I even doubt there will be any of the boring support roles other than drivers.

No MMOG has been able to mix land and air, let along land, sea, and air. That single feat alone will be groundbreaking.

The battles may not have the strategic complexity of CM, but can the foot soldier really tell the difference? The players who refuse to follow orders(ex: the kids) will be fodder, then the real players are the ones that decide the battle.

It may be frustrating not having complete control over the entire battlefield, but that may just make it more realistic. The troops will be trained for their positions. Everyone knows how to operate their keyboard and mouse, right? There's no military training required for that.

[Jackson]

I’ve visited the website, and read articles in game magazines, and think this is a very interesting concept. I especially like the idea of playing on-line as a “team,” rather than one-on-one. I would have no problem being an infantry grunt, although I think the terrain needs to be thickened up a bit.

Let’s face it, who’s better than a CM player at squad-level tactics on the 3D battlefield? We will rule the roost. Let's team up, form a platoon with ScoutPL as the LT (or one of the other real-world commanders on this board), and kick some digital butt!