World War II Online
From Freepedia
| World War II Online | |
| Developer(s) | Cornered Rat Software |
| Publisher(s) | Strategy First |
| Release date(s) | June 2001, Summer 2005 |
| Genre | MMOFPS |
| Mode(s) | Multiplayer |
| Platform(s) | Windows, Mac |
World War II Online is a massively multiplayer first-person shooter computer game that was released in June 2001. Set in World War II Europe, it is a combined arms, online simulation that immerses the player in an unforgiving, action-packed 3D environment, where anyone can command or crew a variety of accurately modeled vehicles, naval vessels and aircraft, or fight as foot-soldiers with their choice of infantry weapon with or against literally thousands of other gamers.
World War II Online is the first and still the only game of its type that covers a ½ scale map of Europe with accurately modelled terrain. It allows players to fight alongside British, French and German forces 24/7 in a persistent world in which character advancement and career paths provide an RPG layer and strategic systems are driven by player missions and command structures.
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Developers
World War II Online (abbreviated WW2OL or WWIIOL) is continuously developed by Cornered Rat Software, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Playnet, Inc., which hosts the game servers. The development staff, who are affectionately known as "the Rats," includes members with experience developing World War II flight simulations such as WarBirds, Aces High, and Air Warrior.
A Rocky Start
After a lengthy closed beta stage, World War II Online went live on June 6, 2001. (The release was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the D-Day invasion.) It was a controversial and admittedly disastrous beginning for the game, largely because it was rushed out to stores while still in a "beta" state. Opinions are split on whether this was due to financial problems at Strategy First, the original publisher (CRS' public position), or because of overly optimistic reports from CRS on the state of the code. It became glaringly obvious at the time to buyers of the new game, that it was unfinished, when they found that their newly purchased software required an immediate and lengthy 60 MB patch to be downloaded before it could be played online, even as the developers worked feverishy behind the scenes to complete other promised features and fix other bugs on the "gold" CD.
The game saw an unexpectedly high volume of sales during the first week. Three days prior to release, the co-location (network) facility used by CRS went into bankruptcy. The new facility had a bad optical cable that caused the 10k player server cluster to drop players at the 1200 mark. It took 3 days and 2 Cisco Engineers to find the problem and several more days to fix it. Playnet's temporary solution was to set up multiple copies of the "game world" on different servers, spreading the load out across the servers, but at some cost in gameplay. This solution lasted for several months before the developers finally worked out the server-side issues and were able to merge all of the servers into a single game-world.
Despite around-the-clock efforts by the tiny, besieged development staff, many of the features advertised on the game-box had to be crudely implemented (and some not at all). This combined with the server problems resulted in a substantial feeling of resentment from the public against Playnet. Game boxes were returned to stores in large numbers, and others simply dried up on the shelves.
Playnet, for its part, did everything they could; they waived subscription fees for the first several months until the major problems with the game were resolved. This helped to retain many of the players, especially the long-term fans of the project, but it was not long before Playnet again had financial problems. They filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in late 2001 to buy time while they cut costs to the bare bone, mainly through painful lay-offs within their already undersized staff.
Re-release
The game is scheduled for re-release under the new title Battleground Europe. It will be distributed in the US and across Europe in late summer 2005 by the game's new publisher GMX Media.
The launch of Battleground Europe is seen as a fresh start for the game which suffers something of a bad reputation from the circumstances surrounding its original release. But this time, all of the features in the new box-release have been thoroughly tested by existing subscribers, who downloaded the product as a 200 MB patch.
Patches have proven to be a strong feature of the game. After a series of patches over the 4 years the game has been around, the game now barely resembles the original release version. These patches are released on average every 6 weeks and include a wide range of updates to the game. Everything from new weapons and vehicles to audits of the performance of those vehicles as well as updates to the terrain and buildings have been included in these patches. Understandably these patches have become extremely popular with all of the players, and "patch day" is always a hot time in the WWII Online community. Unfortunatly, as often as not bugs and performance problems are routinly introduced with these patches, some being allowed to persist for several subsequent iterations of the game. Very often these bugs will unbalance gameplay, or make the performance of the program unacceptable.
Performance of the program itself is an ongoing issue, and generally this game fails to run adequatly on mainstream hardware at modest settings. The player battles lag, stutter, and crashes as much as other players. Just when CRS seems to be on the verge of performance breakthroughs, new "features" are added that put performance right back into the black hole it has been in for over a year. New players of this game should expect to shell out regularly on hardware upgrades in order to maintain their current level of performance.
Accolades
World War II Online has received numerous industry press awards including GameSpy's 2001 Gamers' Choice Sim of the Year and IGN's 2001 Persistent World Game of the Year. These awards are many times based on internet polls however, and an active effort is made in the official WWII Online forums to pack such polls with pro WWII Online votes.
External links
Categories: 2001 computer and video games | First-person shooters | Massively multiplayer online games
