Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption Exclusive Hands-On - New Corruption Missions and Battles
Prepare to extort, intimidate, and bully planets on a galactic scale in this upcoming expansion pack for Star Wars: Empire at War
With Star Wars: Empire at War, LucasArts and developer Petroglyph delivered a cool and engaging real-time strategy game set in the popular original trilogy of the Star Wars saga. Empire at War let you command the massive navies and armies of the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire as you attempted to either liberate or conquer the galaxy. Now the two companies are looking to finish up Star Wars: Empire at War: Forces of Corruption, an expansion that adds new units and a new faction to play as. That's not the big news, though. There have been some major changes made to Forces of Corruption since we saw the game a couple of months ago, and they add a considerable amount of depth to the expansion. Thankfully, we got our hands on the latest work-in-progress version of the game to sift through all the new additions.
The focus in Forces of Corruption is on the new playable criminal faction. Since even the mightiest of criminal empires would have a problem competing head-to-head against the Galactic Empire or the Rebel Alliance, this new faction will require a new approach to the overall goal of conquering the galaxy. Instead of relying on brute force, this new faction must rely on a strategy that takes advantage of corruption in society. First, we should note that there's been a name change. Previously, this faction was known as the Underworld, but the developers felt that the name was too broad, since the seedy side of the Star Wars universe is so large. So out went Underworld and in came the Zann Consortium, named after Tyber Zann, the ruthless head of the criminal organization.
Playing as a criminal faction itself was originally supposed to offer the major new twist in the gameplay, as you have to rely more on guile and cunning and less on brute force and firepower. For example, while the Rebels and the Imperials rely on conquering planets outright to generate cash, the Consortium can generate money by corrupting planets. However, testing proved that this entire concept of corruption was a bit too vague. After all, when you get down to it, what exactly is corruption? To address this, the designers have expanded on the idea of corruption to flesh out the gameplay and make the experience of being a criminal more challenging and fun.
Now, when you dispatch an agent to corrupt a planet, you'll be presented with up to eight different options, each of which can have a unique effect. If you've ever wanted to be an intergalactic mobster, you can now dabble with racketeering, bribery, kidnapping, intimidation, piracy, and more. Each of these options has unique effects, and your decision may rest on the strategy you're pursuing. For instance, racketeering might generate credits for you quicker, but intimidation means that the planet's special ability is no longer available to the faction that owns it. Furthermore, three of the options will trigger a special tactical combat mission, because it was felt that there needed to be a risk-and-reward element in crime. Kidnapping, intimidation, and space piracy will drop you into a battle where your job isn't quite so much to crush the other side as it is to accomplish an objective. In an intimidation mission, this might mean fighting your way to the planetary governor and beating him up, while in a piracy mission you might have to take out an enemy vessel carrying an important official. Fail the mission and the planet remains uncorrupted, but succeed and you corrupt the planet and reap the rewards. To ensure plenty of variety, there will be approximately 30 different corruption missions, so no two corruption missions are the same.
Once you establish corruption on a planet, you gain all sorts of benefits. You get to siphon off some of the planet's income and direct it to your own coffers. And, your fleets can bypass corrupted planets and any enemy fleets defending them for a price, so you can send your fleets deep into enemy territory and attack where the defenses are weakest. And planets can have a unique black market, where you can purchase new technologies. This helps to tie corruption closely with the tactical battles, as you can unlock powerful new weapons and abilities that can help turn the tide. These can include buzz droids for your fighters. You saw these in action at the beginning of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, as these buzz droids can take apart enemy fighters and even damage capital ships. Or, in other cases, you might purchase entire new ship classes that can stand toe-to-toe with the best the Rebels and the Imperials have to offer.
The Rebels and the Empire can send agents and heroes to rid a planet of corruption, but if they do so, you can dispatch defilers and corrupt it again, perhaps with a different option. So if you previously were draining a planet of cash through racketeering and then it was cleansed of corruption, you might go back and corrupt the militia to make it easier to invade and take over the planet. Keep in mind that each planet will have, at the maximum, only three different corruption options, so you can't pursue the same tactics on every planet. Also, planets will offer different rewards. For instance, you might learn that if you accomplish a piracy mission on a certain planet, you'll be able to unlock a powerful new ship design, and so you might alter your strategy accordingly. The corruption gameplay adds whole new elements to the strategic layer of the game, but that's just part of what Forces of Corruption has to offer.
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- LucasArts
- Petroglyph
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- Release: Oct 24, 2006 »
- ESRB: Teen
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