Most Popular GDC 2012 Games
- 3. Diablo III
R.U.S.E. Exclusive First Impressions
Check out Ubisoft's brand-new WWII strategy game in our first-look preview.
Ubisoft's R.U.S.E. is under development by French-based Eugen Systems, which brought us Atari's well-received Act of War: Direct Action and Act of War: High Treason. R.U.S.E. will be heading to the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 later this year, and we got a chance to see it in action at a recent Ubisoft event in Central London.
We were treated to a teaser trailer at the beginning of the presentation, featuring two businessmen squaring off against each other in what looks to be a game of Battleships. Using a futuristic touch-sensitive table like the one from Minority Report, they were able to deploy battleships, tanks, fortified guns, and landing craft against one another. However, things got interesting when one of them used fake units as decoys, including stuffed mannequins, and stole victory in the process.
After this brief introduction, Ubisoft senior producer Mathieu Girard highlighted three main concepts the team has tried to include in the game: dimension, deception, and depth. Dimension is represented by the game's proprietary, purpose-built engine, Iriszoom. This real-time 3D engine allows you to view the field of play at several levels. There's a high-level view that represents the battlefield on a tabletop, a strategic overview of local troops within a 3D world, and a close-up view of the action above the ground, with each level also having access to different contextual commands.
Deception is how R.U.S.E. gets its name. By using various cards, you can activate a special ability on a chosen sector of the battlefield, such as deploying fake tanks and soldiers that appear real to the enemy. Another card inverts the appearance of your unit classes, so enemies will see heavy units as light infantry, and vice versa. You can reuse cards and redeploy them again, but you may be limited to the cards you have access to, as they're prechosen at the beginning of the game. The last aspect is depth, which is the team's focus on making strategic decisions rather than what Girard calls "click-fest micromanagement." There are six factions in the game, and each can build structures and output resources, but the ultimate goal is to get into battle. To this end, resources in each map are limited, meaning that players who like to slowly amass a sizable army might need to change their tactics to be successful.
Girard demonstrated one of the single-player campaign missions using the Allies. Based on the real-life Battle of Monte Casino, the Nazis have seized the hill and its monastery with five infantry and tank divisions. The ultimate goal of this mission is for the Allies to capture the monastery. Girard chose to do this by flanking them from the nearby town of Ausonia, but to do that he needed to take care of an AA division to allow the 101st Airborne division to parachute into the town.
There are two ruses you can use to help win this particular mission. The first is radio silence, which makes your units drop off the enemy radar intelligence, effectively granting them stealth. This allows you to sneak past enemy lines and destroy the AA division. The second ruse lets you intercept enemy plans, so you can see what the enemy is up to. The data, in the form of arrows, indicates where and at what the Nazis are planning to strike and can then be used to execute ambushes or defensive measures. One important note is that ruses can be used at only one sector of the map at a time, but you can redeploy them as many times as you wish on other areas.
