World War II Online

World War II Online, or WWIIOL as it is known by the initiated is supposed to be a "massively multi-player online game" ( MMPOG is the current buzzword/ acronym) simultaneously depicting dismounted infantry, armor, aircraft, and shipboard combat in a simulated World War II environment. This is the first game to my knowledge to combine a flight sim, tank sim, and first person shooter (FPS) all in one package. The "virtual battlefield" promised by Spectrum Holobyte when they produce Falcon 3.0 back in '90 - '91. Sounds great eh? Only problem is the game shipped with an incomplete feature set, and more bugs than a cheap Detroit apartment.

The idea at it's core isn't much different than Operation Flashpoint (check out the review here), however the execution is nowhere near as good. The naval component is completely missing, the stategic system is inoperative, the game runs on several different servers, instead of one huge game world, and seems to slow to a slide show when more than about 50 players are within a couple virtual miles of each other. As of the latest update we just got satchel charges, grenades, and a new airplane (the Hawker Hurricane) for the allied side. Next update we are supposed to get the Blenheim bomber if Cornered Rat Software (The developers of this game) can keep to their schedule. The Rats as they are known have been busier than a one legged man at a butt kickin contest trying to fix the legion of bugs that cropped up with this game since its debut on June 6th '01. Yes WWIIOL was launched on D-Day, and thats part of the reason I am of two minds regarding this game. Is it the beginning of the end for CRS and WWIIOL, or the beginning of a new area in MMPOGs. My hope is the latter rather than the former. To date the only successful MMPOGs have been Air Warrior, Warbirds, and a bunch of fantasy role playing games (RPGs). Since I would rather eat a turd sandwich than play some spell casting nonsense resembeling Dungeons and Dragons, I'll stick to what I know, sims.

SIDEBAR: I sat in on a D & D session back in the early 80s. A bunch of guys sat around rolling goofy lookin 12 sided dice, and lookin in these huge and quite expensive books that looked like early church documents on demonology. I asked how to win the game, what the objectives were, and how to go about pounding the snot out of my opponents. (Benifits of a missspent youth, soldiering for Uncle Sam) I got a typical weak dick answer. It's not about winnning Tim, it's about the "adventure, shared experiences, exploring new worlds, etc" After stifeling the urge to vomit I stayed on for some more self abuse. What came next was one of the most pathetic things I have ever wintessed. These were grown men mind you, "casting spells" upon one another and argueing about how an evil, 7th level geek, with "magical armor" was more powerful than a chaotic, dweeb, with clerical abilities, or some such psychobabble. It was really quite nausiating. Kind of like watching Oprah Winfrey, live and in person. Something to be avoided at all costs. So needless to say if you want a review of Everbreast, or Ultima Online or any of those splendid products, look elsewhere, cuz ol' big Tim ain't doin it. Spells indeed! Gimme my virtual .50 cal any day of the week.

I've played Air Warrior in all it's incarnations, and chasing dots around the sky doesnt really appeal to me. Warbirds was a pretty cool game, but it didn't have tanks and infantry as does WWIIOL .(Well its kinda got jeeps and flakpanzers and such) Both games work a lot better than WWIIOL, but then again they have had years to perfect their particular game worlds. I remember Air Warrior "back in the day" with it's goofey interface, postage stamp screen with all the dials and gauges along the periphery of the screen, and I'm inclined to give the Rats the benifit of the doubt ....for now.

Being the free market capitalist pig that I am, I'm mad as hell that CRS perpetrated a fraud and released the game as a "finished product" when it is clear to entire WWIIOL comunity that we are indeed beta testing this product even today 20 August 2001.But, being of Irish decent, I am somewhat the dreamer, and hope this game lives up to it's potential and eventually delivers on it's promises. Thats the ONLY reason I havn't taken it back for a refund. I look at it as "capital investment". My $40.00 (US) might eventually pay off, who knows? Right now though it's just money down the "Rat hole" so to speak. (pun intended)

Community

That brings me to the best part of the game, the community. There are some great folks playing WWIIOL. To get the most out of the game you need to be in a squad.. Mutual support is the name of the game. You watch each other's posteriors if for nothing else than to "get the guy who got your buddy". This can be quite satisfying. Virtual revenge, cool concept. Also using Roger Wilco, or Battlecom is a great help when playing the game so you can have real time voice comms with your homies while taking vitual names, and kicking virtual butt.

Tank combat is one of the few viable options available at this time.The game is populated with a lot of teenage cannon fodder, so anyone with a rudimentery understanding of how to use the terrain, can ride around in an A-13, (by far the weakest tank in the game, in both armor, and armament) and maintain a 4:1 kill ratio against better armed, better armored german vehicles. (It really cheeses the krauts off when you rip their nickers in an A-13) You need to get around on mister Panzy's ass end, and back shoot him to kill him. There are a lot of vets who play the game but they mostly play on the axis side for some reason. Still puzzeling over that one.

The flight sim portion of the game suffers from bad frame rates, and unless you have DSL or better, dont even bother flying. Offline the planes fly great, but in the game world frame rates turn your gaming experience into a slide show. You get lots of "lag crashes" on strafing runs, or clip trees, buildings etc, that you could normally miss in offline flight, with this exception: The planes fly ok as long as nobody else is within 2 or 3 miles. Dogfights are awful because of the rotten view system- no padlock view, and no virtual cockpit view. They really need some work there. Combine that with the awful frame rate, and you have an exercise in frustration! Air to ground is a total suckfest, because the allied planes all have puny .303 machine guns and your chances of killing anything but your own A-13s are about the same as Bill Clinton becoming the next pope! The German planes have bombs, and heavy cannons, but the lag is so bad they always miss our tanks.

Dismounted combat is pretty fun. Crawling through the grass hiding from panzers can get real tense. You can ride vehicles to the front. Infantry is the "queen of battle" in this game, in that you may only capture structures as an infantryman. So combined arms is the key to victory in WWIIOL. Blowing up a Panzy (my buzzword for Panzers) with a satchel charge is quite a thrill. The german infantry is deadly. Snipers in church towers, krauts in the grass. Even with the lousy frame rates, this part of the game works relatively well, but not nearly as well as Op Flash.

There are also trucks to haul troops and pull AT cannons around. The german 88 is a terror! The frenchies finally got a decent AT gun in the last update. These are brittle weapons. They both reach out and touch somebody to about 2500 meters or so, but are relatively immobile and need prime movers (trucks or half tracks) to haul them around.

Specifications

All this provided you meet the minimum machine spec. I am running an Athlon 1.1 gig processor, and 500 megs of ram with a Geforce1 video card. When I had only 128 megs of ram there was a 10 -15 second lag between different game screens, and the frame rates were even worse. 256 megs of ram should be the stated minimum. My reccomended minimum machine spec would be as follows: GeForce 2 Ultra video card, 850 mhz processor or better, 256 - 500 Megs of ram. Try to play WWIIOL with anything less, and I'll say I told you so. The machine specs for this game are way too high ! All that and the graphics are about 3 years behind the times. I guess that's the trade off for the huge game world.

Theaters

Currently there is only one theater of operations available. 1940 France, and Belgum. Since the last upgrade there are lots and lots of trees to hide behind. The bocage region of France is currently not moddeled, and none of the coastal cities, or terrain are either. All the towns have a generic look as they all share the exact same type of buildings. Only the placement changes. The terrain is modeled well. There are "spawn" points from which you enter the game. There is usually a direct route between each spawn point as they are located adjacent to roads. Where the real design work was done however is that the terrain is modeled in such a way that there is usually a covered route into almost every spawn point that can be found if you look for it. I have found a "back door" to every spawn point I have fought at. I don't know if this is intentional or not, but if it is it's a stroke of genius. While all the Gomers are beating the crap out of each other on the main aproaches, a devious and crafty player can sneak in the back door, and raise hell. That part of the game works well!

Conclusions?

So all told its a mixed bag. Can I reccomend WWIIOL? Not in its current incarnation, but stay tuned for further details as this game is maturing quickly. Secondly since this site is based in Australia (and it would be the same for other countries outside the US - ed), there may be the additional problem with latency (lag). Im not sure if your phone lines to the states are fiber optic, or microwave/satilite uplinked over the pacific. Since microwave, signals propogate a little less than the speed of light, and the uplink to a geo-synchronus commo satelite is roughly 22,500 miles up, and 22,500 miles back that puts a minimum 1/4 second lag (1 way) on your data packets. Combine that with the traffic on the CRS servers, and my bet is the game is unplayable. If however your phone signals go over fiber-op lines the lag should be minimal. I guess you guys would know better than me, because you have to deal with the distance factor all the time, but it bears mentioning.

So there you have it, WWIIOL in all its flawed glory. There is a great game in there somewhere. The question is will CRS find it, and put it out to the fan base before they move on to greener pastures. That upcoming Medal of Honor, D-Day Assault may have a big impact on WWIIOLs survival. It will be very interesting to see how this all plays out.

Tim, aka porkchop


Thanks Tim, The game has not yet been released to the Australian market and there are indications that it may not until dedicated servers are available locally. It will probably be similar to the Ultima Online debacle that Australians suffered, in terms of gameplay. Yet there were those dedicated few who made it possible for us to have a dedicated server based here in Oz! I don't know if the game has been released in europe yet, but hopefully as the "beta testing" continues the game will become great. I was very interested in it when I first heard about it and would like to be involved in the game and community as the concept is great. Let's hope that it gets better and not worse! - Odd

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