Despite constantly running on multiple monitors, there were queues of people waiting to play End of Nations at the Eurogamer Expo throughout the day. Trion Worlds plan to do something different with their upcoming RTS, which community manager Lance James is keen to describe as “Risk on steroids”. Players will be able to buy cosmetic customisations, but money can’t buy you an advantage in the game. Why go free to play?
“The main reason is people hear the term RTS and are generally intimidated, think it’s hard to play. By going free to play, we’re really enabling a wider market, a wider group of people to try the game. When we say free to play we mean free to play; no level restrictions, no level cap. You get the full game for free.”
Trion Worlds are distancing themselves from the stereotypical RTS in order to pursue this idea of accessibility. “There are actually quite a few things we’ve changed and played around with that make it stand out above the rest. First and foremost, it’s a great RTS. We’ve put in the time and the work to make it a triple A quality RTS. More than that, we’ve taken all the best things from previous RTS games and put them all together – and this is what we came up with.
With that being said, we’ve thrown in a bunch of MMO elements as well. There’s a commander which you level up; with him you unlock new structures, new weapons, new units. On top of that, we have massive scale. Matches are 1v1 up to 26v26. The great thing about that is, we have clan server technology. That’s getting rid of all the server issues, getting rid of all the logical problems; and therefore making it fun again. Now you can play big matches, it’s not laggy – just really fun.
Finally, we have this Risk style metagame. It’s basically Risk on steroids, a persistent world. Everything you do for your faction will contribute to helping them control the world.”
Do they think that perhaps people might start asking ‘if Trion Worlds can make a triple A RTS free to play, why can’t everybody else’? “That’s the thing. We don’t just want to create a great game. We want to set the standard, we want to raise the standard for everybody else. We want people to think ‘RTS’ and think ‘End of Nations’.”
“You’ll get people who’ve never played computer games come over and play this.” says James, confidently. “One thing we really want to do is to make it accessible to a large group of people. There are all kinds of things you can do to make this game hard, to make it more challenging for yourself. Like for me, I’m a hardcore RTS player. If I wanted to, I could go nuts and have all these controls, all these abilities, all these structures. However, you could literally pick this game up and just play it with a mouse. If you know how to draw a box with the mouse and right click, you can play the game. Not just play the game, but you can be successful.
We’ve had people come up today who have never played RTS games before, start playing, and do well. It really reaches a broad range of people.”
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