World in Conflict Wrap Report

High-Level Goals

There were some goals we really wanted to achieve, which were free camera, accessibility, destructibility and deep teamplay. We really wanted World in Conflict to stick out as a strategy game in terms of having it be accessible and action-oriented. We wanted to allow players to play in short sessions, with easy to use online matchmaking. In single-player, it was important to us that the player felt like a small but important part of a great war, where there would be other characters fighting alongside.

a test lab right here in our office. This gave us the opportunity to test things quickly, which made it easy to reconfigure features and content. It made us constantly aware of how players were experiencing our game.

We wanted the players to really feel involved, and to give them more short-term objectives that are easy to follow. All this and our focus on characters and character development probably represent something quite unique for strategy games.

Technology

Our goal was simply to make the world's greatest-looking strategy game ever, but also to make its visuals very scalable. That's been something that influenced our entire development in terms of technology, so while the gameplay was important on its own, we were very ambitious to make it look absolutely stunning.

To achieve this, we worked mostly with our own tech, but we also licensed some things like Havok, SpeedTree, Miles and Bink. Since we didn't want to develop technology just for the sake of doing so, we felt secure in licensing some minor parts in order to focus more on the engine and other technology. One thing that we were convinced we had to develop ourselves was the online interface and server browser. We wanted a complete browser and community client that made playing World in Conflict online as fun and easy as possible.

Development Timeline

We got greenlight status in May 2005, and our first deadline was set to sometime in early 2007. But as the development carried on, we were given the opportunity to push the deadline a little bit to create a full-blown single-player campaign, which really gave the whole team a lot of time to put some final polish on the product. With this extra time, we could add some more content and features, like a completely new user interface. The game ended up being released in September 2007, about six months later than we had initially planned.

Changes and Enhancements

Aside from the single-player campaign, the biggest additions were the Special Abilities and the increased amount of Tactical Aid. Once we had the gameplay down, it only made sense to flesh it out a bit with some neat abilities and weapons. Also, had it not been for the increased development time due to the single-player campaign, we probably wouldn't have succeeded in implementing DX10. It was something we wanted to do, but the extended development period gave us enough time to do it right.

Major Challenges

Even though the development of World in Conflict was surprisingly painless, there were some obstacles to overcome. The single-player campaign was one of them. Seeing as we had developed a pretty unique multiplayer concept, and had previously had the idea of the single-player mode being something of an introduction to the much bigger multiplayer portion, our gray cells were really put to test. We looked at a lot of other strategy games, but didn't feel any other take really matched with what we wanted to do.

The key solutions were putting a lot of focus on the story and cinematics, and also removing the role system, which only felt limiting rather than rewarding for single-player. We wanted to make a strategy experience that could capture the intensity of Call of Duty's campaigns, and once we had the phone call sequences and the loading maps in place, we really felt that ours had become complete.

Another obstacle was that the company grew with the game. Some of the people we hired didn't really have any development experience, which could have made it difficult to maintain our effectiveness when we dropped them into the middle of the project. But since we had already built a very strong team structure, the newcomers fell naturally into place, and the team never lagged behind in schedule. We were well prepared.

We also felt some insecurity in creating something with mechanics that didn't really fit with any conventional genres. It felt out of place to call it an RTS, so we didn't really know how we would communicate the idea of our game to the community. But since we put so much effort into having it be playable early on, we probably gained a lot by having it at various LAN events and conventions, as well as from our different online alpha and beta tests. What we felt we couldn't explain, we could at least let gamers try for themselves.

Best Decisions

One very important decision was getting a test lab right here in our office. This gave us the opportunity to test things quickly, which made it easy to reconfigure features and content. It made us constantly aware of how players were experiencing our game.

World in Conflict is also much better off with the complete single-player campaign we decided to implement, as it really utilizes the setting and gives some other dimensions to the game. In retrospect, it's hard to visualize it being shipped without this campaign because it has become such a natural part of what the whole concept is now.

Another thing that we can't forget is all the people who worked on the game; we definitely made some good decisions when it came to recruiting new individuals to the studio.