Monthly Archives: September 2010

To the misled and lonely traveller?

My Warden hit level sixty five in Lord of the Rings Online last night, my second character to the level cap, with a third, my Champion, sitting beardy (well, dwarves can’t sit pretty, can they) at level sixty three. Lummy though, it has to be one of the sadder and more despondent experiences of a ding I’ve had yet. There’s something slightly masturbatory about soloing in an MMO: you busy yourself with getting to the next ding, and it’s all pleasant and enjoyable enough, you’re happy to be ‘hunting for the boar in the undergrowth’. Bashing the bog-crawler. Exploring the depths of Moria. Skinning the cave-worm. Killing ten rats… no, that one doesn’t work. Then finally you reach that pinnacle of achievement and effort, an explosion of light and sound, an ecstasy of elation, and there’s nobody there to share it with.

“Masturbation is cheap, clean, convenient, and free of any possibility of wrongdoing — and you don’t have to go home in the cold. But it’s lonely.” — Lazarus Long

You look to an empty or perhaps non-existent guild channel and all you want to do is type ‘Yes! Yes! Oh my Diety! Yessssssss! Ah ha ha hum na hum na hum na mmmmmmmmmm ahhhhhhhhhh’.

Or ‘Ding’ — y’know, whichever way your guild celebrates a level-up.

There’s nothing quite like the gaping maw of silence to bring one’s exaltation of joy to an abrupt and premature end as it is gobbled up by the nothingness of the noiseless infinite. This isn’t the reason for my sadness though; I’m quite used to, and happy with, soloing my way through adventures, and although I think adventuring in the quiet company of people with whom you are comfortable is definitely the richer experience, there are those of us who are very happy with their own company too, and there’s still the, albeit quieter, internal glow of satisfaction when you reach the levelling plateau. As the saying goes: an introvert is never alone.

The sadness didn’t come from my own quiet solitary celebration, but the fact that the server was not in the midst of celebration and revelry itself. As a player on the European servers for Lord of the Rings Online and an inhabitant of the world wide MMO blogosphere, I am all too aware of the vacuum of excitement and revelry there is compared to our North American server cousins who have launched into a new adventure across distant lands in the free-to-play age, whereas our expedition has been unexpectedly waylaid by Saruman before it even got started. My solitary ding without fanfare resonated with the quiet of the server – a scourged Shire where a celebration around the Party Tree should have been – and amplified the frequency of melancholy until it distorted into a gloomy disquiet. I couldn’t help but pause to reflect on the debacle over Codemasters handling of Dungeons and Dragons Online, persisting for whatever reason to adhere to a subscription model in the face of overwhelming evidence that Turbine’s free-to-play experiment on the North American servers was a resounding success – evidence provided, in part, by the comparatively eerie ghost town that the European DDO servers have since become. Codemasters have promised that free-to-play is coming to their LotRO servers soon, but I’m not so sure. Even if they do intend to exhale the breath of free-to-play life into the servers, the current wealth of excitement already rippling through MMO blog sites will probably mean that the mass exodus to the North American servers has already begun. MMO gamers are impatient souls in the main, they wait for a thing as the flooding river waits for the dam: they are constantly searching for a way around the obstacle, frothing and building in a bubbling frenzy until the banks are burst and nothing but the destruction of developers’ dreams are left in their wake.

I did have an amusing moment in LotRO as I finished my final ascent of the levelling crag, however. I was running back to the ticket stall of Mithecad in Mirkwood, where the vendors dole out little ring-shaped bands to allow you to go on the various rides in that part of the park, and I was doing the standard player impersonation of a steam locomotive pulling a very long train of orc carriages, possibly with a warg caboose but I couldn’t really say: it was a very long train. I barrelled into the middle of the NPC-filled fort with an utterance of “Elven Guard of Mirkwood, I choo-choo choose you!” and imagined a dishevelled and somewhat distraught armoured elf being forcefully ejected from his Poké Ball home into the midst of what had now developed into a veritable horde of angry orcs. However, from past experience I knew that the guard was an excellent tank with a particularly well articulated “Yo Momma!” taunt that always grabbed the attention of anything that was following me. Having only ever had one or two orcs following me on previous occasions I therefore had no reason to suspect that the taunt only works on one or two mobs. So the valiant guard on the side of the fort from where I had entered, promptly grabbed the attention of two orcs, as was his duty. And the fifteen other angry orcs followed me on in to the fort. The fort filled with armed NPCs. Who apparently were on a tea break, or perhaps were having union problems, and who entirely ignored the Warden being beaten to a pulp in front of their very eyes. The Warden who had been running errands for them, helping them, healing them, and protecting them. With a rapidly dwindling health bar I ignored the room of Iscariots for the moment and ran out the other side of the fort where the other guard leapt from his casual slouch against the wall dropping his cigarette, straightened his helmet, and did his best to grab the attention of another couple of orcs. At this point I’d lost a few more orcs to the curious but thankfully prevalent epidemic of attention deficit disorder that plagues the mobs of Middle Earth, and I headed back in to the safety of the fort, rather than keep running and risk grabbing the attention of yet more orcs. Being the heroic figure of lore that my character is, and also a member of the incredibly overpowered Warden class (please don’t tell Turbine), I whittled down the remaining orcs using my tried and trusted Hedgehog of Attrition manoeuvre (patent pending) as the other NPCs watched blithely on.

I tried to picture what was going on in the minds of the NPCs, battling the forces of Sauron by proxy: happy to send adventurers off to fight the good fight, but entirely unwilling to lift a finger if the fight comes to them, and all I could come up with was the following:

“Gerald. Geeeerrrrrald! There are ruffians in our camp.”

“Just don’t pay them any mind, Marjorie, and they’ll go away eventually.”

“Do something, Gerald, they’re making a ruckus and disturbing the whole neighbourhood.”

“I tell you, it’s best to pay them no heed they… no, don’t look their way. Oh, now look, they’re coming over this way.”

“You got a problem Elfy?”

“Yes you young hoodl…”

“No! No Marjorie, we don’t. No problem.”

“Hur, hur. This your sword is it Mr Elf?”

“Now you give that back young man, this instant.”

“‘ere lads, look I’m an Elf. Lar dee, lar dee, dar. Oooo, me underpants are too tight and me hair is all girly.”

< Hur, hur, hur, hur, hur>

“Now look here, you give… th… that… hng… give it… ng… BACK! Oh. Oh my. I’m… sorry. So terribly sorry! I didn’t mean to…”

“You iz a dead man now.”

“Well technically I’m an elf so I can’t be a dead man but…”

“Get em boyz!”

“My wardrobe of fine dresses! Oh my beautiful hair brushes! Oh no, no, not my collection of hand creams! Ruined! This is all your fault Marjorie!”

“My fault?! If you actually knew how to use that sword rather than just waving it imperiously at any passing adventurer who happened to walk past.”

“Oh! Oh! So that’s it is it? You were quite happy for me to boss them around when they were fetching orc manure for your flower borders.”

“I can’t dirty my hands with manure! I’m an elf and an NPC, and a lady, Gerald, if you would only bother to remember this from time to time…”

“Oh not now Marjorie! Look, the adventurer is coming back. Quick! Stand still and pretend you haven’t noticed the ruffians looting the place – maybe she’ll fight them off.”

“Fine. Fine Gerald. But when the orcs are all gone, you get your sword… you get your sword and you command an adventurer to get me some shampoo and conditioner, I’ve developed quite the hedge of split ends over this whole dastardly affair.”

“<sigh>Yes dear. Oh not my collection of fine china dolls, you great green gits! That’s just mean!”

Finally, here are a couple of pictures of Madgala, Hedgehog of Mirkwood, resting-up amongst the golden leafy boughs of Caras Galadhon in preparation for taking the fight in to Enedwaith. The question remains as to whether she will have to do it alone.

Frodo: I cannot do this alone.
Galadriel: You are a European, Frodo. To play on a Codemaster’s server is to be alone.


KiaSAcast Episode 61

For those of you who are not monitoring our podcast RSS feed or stalking us on the Twitterverse, brace your main hats and hang on to your sails, because we’re pleased to announce that it’s time for KiaSAcast episode 61.

In this episode Melmoth accidentally picked up a set of headphone dopplegangers, which revealed themselves to be a Hiss Beast of the Snapcracklepop dimension only after recording had finished. The headphones have been sent to the prison dimension of Bin, and the show was healed somewhat with a +1 Vorpal Edit of Audacity, but it has still suffered a couple of negative frequency levels. Normal service should hopefully be resumed next week!

This episode of the podcast includes:

– Introduction

– Reader mail

– What we’ve been playing, including::

     – APB

     – World of Tanks

     – Warhammer Online

     – Age of Conan

     – With many and varied MMO topics in-between…

Download Kiasacast Episode Sixty One

But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.

Imagine a function that could take the defining elements of an MMO and plot them in various colours and patterns on a 2D plane. If we scroll in and out of the image we change the scale of it, and so let us make that scale the timeline of MMO development. What you see as you zoom in and out of the image is that although it changes, there are strong patterns of similarity throughout.

“Quasi-self-similar fractals contain small copies of the entire fractal in distorted and degenerate forms.”

It’s interesting[1] to imagine that what we have at the moment is a fractal MMO development system, where the original seed for our function was planted in MUD, and we have been applying recurrence relations to the system ever since. It has grown and branched out, our fractal tree, but every leaf is itself a small example of the same tree, and as you look through the history of the MMOs that you’ve played you can spot the fractal design in every one. The development process itself, for example, is but a fractal reflection of the Sisyphean efforts of the players within the game.

The problem[2] with this imaginary system is that although its perimeter has infinite length – we can continue to create new MMOs from this function for as long as there is energy in the universe – the area that it bounds is finite, and thus leaves a limited set on which to draw ideas from. Perhaps this is what MMOs are, perhaps finding a new seed and creating a new fractal will mean that we no longer generate the ‘MMO set’ any more. It might be the case that a complimentary set can be found, however, something which follows the function that has proven successful so far, but, where the current fractal of development is regular, this new set introduces chaos into the mix, breaking down the precise uniform repetition while creating new and unexpected branches.


[1] May not actually be interesting.
[2] Ignoring the major problem: that it is a bizarre analogy from the depths of my pre-coffee morning brain.

APB Post-mortem Breakdown: Alas, Poor Business

APB has continued improving, with patches fixing various bugs, toning down the automatic weapons that were beginning to dominate play a bit, and most recently overhauling the matchmaking system as outlined a few weeks back. Instead of teams and players being offered a mission which they could accept or reject (which led to cherry-picking, mismatched missions when only some potential participants joined and other issues), you now start out in a “Not Ready” state during which you can check mail, stock up on ammo etc., then you hit “O” to flip to being “Ready”, and when everyone on the team is Ready the system automatically puts you into missions. Judging by a couple of sessions since the change this has worked to make things generally more balanced, I haven’t been coming up against ultra-upgraded opponents nearly so often, and where they are present it tries to even things out with numbers. It’s working out well for me, dropping in once or twice a week for a bit of a blast.

Course the actual game changes have been slightly overshadowed by the problems at developer Realtime Worlds resulting in the company entering administration. Despite comment threads full of well reasoned and highly knowledgeable analysis of the problems with APB such as “lol it su><ed”, there might be room for a bit more consideration of what went wrong.

In August 2009 there was a line in the FAQ: “The actual price for the game itself is still under discussion but we’ll keep you up to date. We can confirm that APB will not require a monthly subscription”. My expectation was a Guild Wars-esque model, free play after buying the box, perhaps with expansions or DLC later, probably an item shop of some sort. Good move; many gamers are opposed to any sort of subscription for a game, and it fitted in with APB aiming to be a more fast-paced action game of shorter play sessions rather than extended grinds.

April 2010, full details of the payment model were published with a bombshell: an hourly fee. If subscriptions are off-putting to some gamers, hourly fees are about as popular as Conquistador Coffee’s ill-fated introductory offer of a free dead dog with every jar. Instant turn-off for a lot of people. If you thought you’d be playing a lot there was a subscription option as well, so at least players wouldn’t be running up insane bills if they got hooked, but after the “no subscription required” line it was a let-down. It was a bit like the FAQ had said “We can confirm that APB will not require you to be hit over the head with a cricket bat to play”, and that was later qualified with “… you can opt to be poked in the eye with a stick instead”.

It wasn’t quite as simple as just “give money for game time”; all transactions were done with “RTW points”, so you bought RTW points for cash (200 points for £3.99), then bought game time with RTW points (30 days unlimited play for 400 points, or 20 hours for 280 points). Hardly unusual these days, what with Microsoft Points, Bioware Points, Cryptic Points, Turbine Points, Sony’s Station Cash, Nectar Points, Luncheon Vouchers, Green Shield Stamps etc. In addition, items within the game could be sold by players for either APB$ (the in-game currency earned by completing missions) or these RTW points; the intent was to drive the player market using the customisation tools and offer talented designers the possibility of playing for free. Design an amazing T-shirt, list it for sale for 40 RTW points, and if you sell ten of ’em that’s a month of unlimited play for you. The full announcement also went into detail about how many RTW points it would cost to manufacture items to sell to other players, which, not having first hand experience of the system in beta at that point, all seemed terribly confusing (10 RTW points for a vehicle, 5 RTW points for major clothing, 2 RTW points for minor clothing, yada yada).

So, £35 RRP for the box, which comes with 50 hours of game time and 100 RTW points, then you buy RTW points for cash and spend RTW points on either hourly or unlimited game time. Oh, though game time only counts in the action districts, you can spend as long as you like in the social districts, where you can also design items, which cost RTW points to make, to sell for RTW points, which you can buy game time with. Or you can sell your stuff for APB$, then sell APB$ for RTW points. Or buy RTW points for real cash then buy APB$ with RTW points to buy other stuff. Clear?

OK, I’m deliberately obfuscating there, the basics aren’t that tricky: box comes with 50 hours, once you’ve played for those then either buy more, or unlimited time for a month if you’re going to be playing more than 30 hours. The market in RTW points/APB$ isn’t terribly dissimilar to something like PLEX in EVE, and gives a nice incentive for people to produce and sell desirable items. It’s more off-putting than the “buy game, play game” model of many competing online shooters, though. It didn’t take long for them to backtrack on the RTW point cost for manufacturing items, which simplified things somewhat, but wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of a carefully thought out cost model. UnSubject of Vicarious Existence has a remarkably prescient piece from a month before launch on the pricing.

As it turns out, the in-game marketplace is another example of the two halves of the game, the freedom of customisation and the fast-paced PvP, not complementing each other very well. To quote, err, me: “On the Venn diagram of “people who like small group deathmatch shooters” and “people who like composing theme tunes and spending ages making sure their shirt looks right”, APB is great for those in the intersection between the sets, but my suspicion is that’s not a very large segment”. If your main interest is in designing clothes and cars, you do that in the social district which doesn’t count towards your game time anyway, undermining the “play for free” incentive of earning RTW points. To unlock additional clothing and car options (which can then be customised, manufactured and put up for sale if you like) you need earn levels, ranks and rating in the (twitchy, shooty) PvP.

Another problem undermining the creative side of customisation as a viable play style in itself is that the marketplace lists weapons, upgrades, vehicles, clothing, themes and songs. Some of these have an actual, material affect on gameplay (more powerful weapons, faster vehicles), some are purely cosmetic and make no difference at all (clothes). Take a wild stab in the dark at which are more desirable, in a game where the only non-combat options are to hang around a ‘social’ area that largely consists of people standing at auction/design terminals… To round out the issues, the reason given for charging for manufacturing items was: “We believe the quality of the experience would suffer if the Marketplace were inundated with junk. The intent of the nominal Manufacturing charge is to prevent high volume of low quality items from crowding the Marketplace listings.” With the manufacturing charge withdrawn, guess what? If you said “a high volume of low quality items crowd the Marketplace listings”, award yourself five points. If you said “Henri Bergson”, you’re in the wrong quiz.

Actually I’m being a bit unkind again, it’s not that the marketplace is *completely* swamped with junk, it’s just the usual problem of user-generated content, trying to find the decent stuff. The only initial information you have is a very brief text description and a price, so shopping for a new theme tune (a 5 second snippet that plays to opponents when you kill them) you’re presented with a big ol’ list mostly of TV and game themes, popular chart hits and random strange gibberish that other players have come up with, and if you see something that appeals you hit “listen” to determine if it’s a godawful rendition that would shame a 1994-era mobile phone ringtone produced by a marmot tap-dancing on the keypad, or a half-decent effort. Clothes are similar, just the name to start with, if you want to see how an item looks you have to hit a preview option that takes a little while to stream down all the appropriate information, then shows you the item in a little preview window. For me at least it’s all moot anyway, even if I had the patience to work through a load of designs I’m perfectly happy with the clothing options I’ve unlocked for myself and the minor tinkering I’ve done with them, and I’m far more interested in saving up for fast guns and heavy-calibre cars.

Despite my utter lack of creative talent, I’m also making a decent amount of money and RTW points from the marketplace myself, simply from manufacturing basic versions of a couple of the more unusual clothing pieces I’ve unlocked and sticking ’em up for auction cheap. Since launch I’ve earned around 600 RTW points, not enough to retire to the Caribbean just yet, but it’ll cover another 40 hours of game time, if needed. From my perspective the payment model works out absolutely fine, but it does mean I haven’t given Realtime Worlds any money after the initial box purchase, not so great for them.

Talking of money, though, some frankly extraordinary figures emerged as a buyer was sought for APB. Direct quote from the press release:

“The figures reveal 130,000 registered players, with the average player playing for 4 hours each day, APB’s unique business model sees paying players averaging $28 per month, a combination of game time and user to user marketplace trading.”

Now we all know the fun and games of MMOG press release terminology, of “accounts” and “characters” and “registered players” and “active players” and “average revenue per user” and “average revenue per *paying* user” and “number of people who might have looked at our website or maybe mentioned to a friend via instant messaging our game or at least a phrase that sounds a bit like our game”, and that without a full and detailed breakdown of precisely how every word of a press release is defined they’re basically just “Look! Numbers! BIG numbers! Big numbers good!” Even by those standards, I’m struggling to work out what’s going on.

130,000 registered players I’m presuming to mean 130,000 box/download sales (or at least 130,000 people who bought the box and then created a game account). I don’t think there’s another way of being a “registered player”, no free trial or anything like that. All fine so far.

“Average player playing for 4 hours each day”? Seriously? *Average*? Bearing in mind the dangers of anecdotal evidence and everything, since launch (about two months) I’ve spent 30 ‘action’ hours in the game, maybe another 10-20 hours footling about in the marketplace and customisation. I saw a comment somewhere from someone who said they’d spent about 180 hours in the game, and thought that was pretty hardcore, but (over two months) that’s still only an average of three hours a day. I know several people who bought the game and have found it’s not really their cup of tea, barely scratching the included time; are there really enough people spending ten plus hours every single day in the game to make the average up? Even if there are, to be honest I’m not sure that’s really a stat you want to be trumpeting; for someone looking to buy the studio it might say “our game is so brilliant people are really hooked on it!”, for a potential new player to a PvP game it says “hey, here’s a basic pop-gun, now why don’t you go and try and shoot that bloke over there who’s spent the last 240 hours honing his skills to being a deadly killing machine, and significantly upgrading his weapon, durability and vehicle in the meantime to be much better than yours!”

There is one game element that might make a bit more sense of it: the Fasionista and Tuner unlocks. These are in-game achievements for spending time in the clothing and car designers respectively, and there are 15 levels for each. The first few levels are awarded every five or ten minutes, building up until each additional level takes an hour; earlier in beta time alone would unlock the first nine levels, then for 10 to 15 you also had to manufacture a certain number of items, so obviously another incentive to people to spend time designing great clothes, then manufacturing them to sell on the marketplace. In reality ten hours AFK, then you made about 600 socks and either destroyed them or listed them on the marketplace, making beta a very exciting place for people keen on picking up sock bargains. Before release the manufacturing requirement was dropped, so it was just a case of spending time in the editor, *even if you were AFK*. Yes, after about 15 minutes the system would flag you as AFK, but still you’d be there in the editor, and still the time would count towards Fashionista/Tuner. Why bother? Well firstly each rank unlocks another piece of clothing or two, so you can kit your character out in that pair of sunglasses you’ve been after, secondly at launch each rank also awarded you in-game currency, the amount increasing each rank, winding up with a pretty substantial amount (maybe APB$ 10,000 for rank 15, I don’t remember precisely). So to make money fast you just created a character, logged in, opened the clothing/car editor and went AFK, until they removed the financial rewards after a couple of weeks. 4 hours per day per player still seems pretty high, but not quite so gobsmackingly insane if a good chunk of it was spent AFK.

Finally, “APB’s unique business model sees paying players averaging $28 per month, a combination of game time and user to user marketplace trading”. Seems a bit strange again. “Paying player” is more usually associated with free-to-play games, denoting the (usually small) percentage of players who actually pay for e.g. cash shop items compared to the larger general user base. If by “paying player” they mean someone who’s bought RTW points on top of the box cost, it looks like a ludicrously high number; one month of unlimited game time is $10, so the *average* paying player is not only covering that, but *another* $18 on RTW points for marketplace trading? I honestly can’t believe that; you can’t buy yourself a massive advantage, as items have rating restrictions (there’s an excellent guide to the various “levels” in APB at Combat Archaeology) and you only unlock character upgrade slots as you go, so a brand new player can’t equip an amazing weapon or car. Better players receive rewards just for playing, and enough of these trickle down through the auction house to make very affordable upgrades for everyone, so there really isn’t much of an advantage to be gained by splashing cash around. Maybe you can give yourself a few percentage points advantage over somebody of a similar rating, say I can only afford a 3% damage boost for my gun and they could buy an 8% upgrade, but I’m really not sure that’s an attractive enough proposition to get people spending an average of $18 a month on. Most curious. As far as I’m aware, though, all APB players at least bought the box/downloaded the game, with a $50 RRP, so if that’s being divided over the two months since launch it could account for (up to) $25 of the $28.

There are intangible realities which float near us.

The Tortage Formation Floating TeamHere we see a classic display by the world famous freeform synchronised floating team of Tortage Volcano, performing one of their signature manoeuvres: the Shinkansen. I’m not sure why characters in Age of Conan seem to spend a lot of their time floating off the ground, perhaps the belts that are worn during the Hyborian age are more than just simply a tool for holding up one’s trousers or skirt, and are in fact part of a powerful magnetic levitation system that runs throughout the land.

It has also been hypothesised that the average diet – consisting of rare-cooked meat and large quantities of vegetable matter – caused an excessive build up of methane in the digestive tracts of the people which, when ejected at pressure from the body, combined with the rigid tough leather kilts of the time to generate the effect of a rudimentary hovercraft. Further weight is added to this theory when one considers the general grumpiness and aggressive tendencies of the vast majority of the global population at the time, something which could very well be attributed to the daily assault on the senses that they suffered. Although the era of peace that followed was attributed in great part to the reign of King Conan, an alternative theory suggests that it correlates more closely with the invention of the nose peg by Hieronymus Pimhole II at the turn of the century.

Another less well supported but similar theory suggests that foot hygiene at the time was so poor that people walked around on a permanent layer of funk. The observation that people living in the Hyborian age were able to stop floating and fully submerge themselves into water as soon as their feet were wetted (and therefore cleaned) does add some credence to this supposition. The theory also sheds some light on the writings of several natural philosophers of the era, including Stoltin the Mature, who described most of the natural world in flavours of cheese, and whose most famous work – Memory of the Horridly Persistent Ammonia Honk of a Rose – shows clear signs that the people of the Hyborian age had trouble penetrating the incredibly powerful hum that their feet produced.

The theory that it’s a cheap trick of perspective used by naughty gods to make people look like they’re walking on the floor unless viewed from close to ground level, is clearly bunkum, however.

Lies, damned lies, and ballistics

(Title shamelessly stolen from RPS). After a couple of open beta events that focused on the multiplayer skirmish side of things, there’s now a single player demo of R.U.S.E. available on Steam. It’s a rather different prospect to the earlier betas which basically chucked you onto a map with a base and said “bad guys over there, go get ’em!”; the single player demo is highly scripted, leading you through a series of tasks like eliminating enemy air defences and capturing a base while a bunch of NPC units storm around the rest of the map. It’s a much more structured introduction to the game, more or less a tutorial, well worth a look if you weren’t thrilled at the idea of jumping straight in against other human players in the betas.

The demo also includes cutscenes, which I wasn’t entirely convinced by. RTS games seldom have the most engaging and convincing storylines at the best of times, tending towards “Oh no, (aliens/foreigners/creatures from another dimension)! We must fight! Oh wait a minute, it was all a terrible misunderstanding, they’re on our side really and we should fight together against that lot over there who are *really* bad (and have different unit types and thus present a new challenge). Oh, and at some point we’ll have bit of a civil war or mutiny or rebellion ‘cos it’s quite interesting battling your own unit types. And then in a sequel or expansion pack we can find out there’s a more powerful demon/undead/alien force still that we’ll all have to band together against.” As a World War II game RUSE doesn’t exactly have much flexibility in the story, though it’s not slavishly faithful to history if the presence of nuclear artillery is anything to go by (I suspect that might just be an “I Win” button to finish the demo battle). It seems to be trying to work in a narrative about tension within the allied ranks judging by the demo cutscenes involving some attempt at a femme fatale and rather cross army types spouting hackneyed dialogue (in rendered graphics rather than live action, so you don’t even get to enjoy the acting talent and/or breasts of an A-list cast). Still, the story and cutscenes very much secondary compared to the actual battles, which played just as well as the previous betas, so I’ll be grabbing it on release next week.