Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising E3 2004 Preshow Impressions

Novalogic will have its team-based shooter for the PC, Joint Operations, on hand at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles. The game will let you play in online sessions with more than 64 players at once--in fact, the game's ongoing beta test has run play sessions on Novalogic's online service, NovaWorld, with as many as 100 players simultaneously.

Joint Operations will let you choose to play a specific character class (such as an engineer, medic, or heavy assault) and equip yourself accordingly using modern-day weaponry, including submachine guns, sniper rifles, and a great variety of explosives. While Joint Operations will be somewhat lenient with regard to physics and weapon handling, the game will model the weight of your equipment, so if you get too greedy and stock up on too many grenades, sidearms, and alternate items, you'll move at a snail's pace under all the equipment. However, the game will encourage team tactics in many ways, so you won't necessarily have to equip yourself to be a one-man army.

Four multiplayer modes have been confirmed for Joint Operations: advance & secure, team deathmatch, team king of the hill, and co-op. Novalogic hopes that the most popular of these will be advance & secure. This mode will require teams to capture control points on the map, but allows coordinated teams to capture points faster if they converge on their target in a group. To this end, Joint Operations will have many land, air, and sea vehicles that can accommodate large groups of players all at once--these include amphibious hovercrafts, armored personnel wagons, and helicopters. While these features may suggest similarities to EA Games' popular online shooter Battlefield 1942 (and its follow-up, Battlefield Vietnam), Joint Operations' vehicles are most effective only when manned by large groups of players, yet many of them are actually quite vulnerable to small-arms fire. As such, with a few exceptions, small groups of players will actually be able to severely damage or even take down enemy vehicles.

Joint Operations was recently delayed from its planned ship date in May--the game is now scheduled to ship in June 2004.