With Blitzkrieg 3 you can play against the base you've created but it's an optional experience to help you check for weaknesses in the defence. It was possible to die and lose everything simply while navigating to your own front door.
In The Castle Doctrine Rohrer forced you to conduct self-testing to ensure it was possible to escape the house you'd created. If you know The Castle Doctrine you'll have picked up on the similarities – build, leave, assess, rebuild – although Rohrer's game has a provocative sheen thanks to how it touches on current contentious home/self defence legislation as well as how Rohrer chose to market the game, none of which you'll find in Blitzkrieg 3.Īnother element where the different conceit produces a different experience is the self-testing. Upon returning you'll find out how many attempts were successful and, crucially, be able to watch all the replays so you'll learn about different playstyles and their strengths and weaknesses. When you're done you can head off to work or, like, beginners' Russian lessons or whatever while people try to deal with your tanks and mines and other nonsense. Each unit you place fills up a portion of a bar which acts as a limit and prevents you just building a base that consists of five thousand tanks and turrets.Įssentially you're designing a mission which is intended to thwart other players. Green blobs on the map are the resource points the defending player is trying to protect, yellow blobs are extra resources which they can protect if they fancy and which the attacker can try to pick up to plump up their reward. The defences themselves are controlled by the AI while the attacking forces operate in real time under the control of the attacking player. If they're successful they can win some of your resources and vice versa. Once you've finished it becomes available so other players can attempt an attack. What happens this time around is you build a base and then pepper it with defences and traps.
"It wasn't asynchronous, it was live synchronised, but nowadays if you wanted to play a synchronised multiplayer you'd need to find a friend who matches you and then you need that person to have two or three hours to play with you at this exact point." "Base attack mode was probably the most popular in the previous Blitzkrieg games so this is why we decided to continue with this mode," says Anatoly.
That's what we're wanting to do – stay with strategy and bring that back for Blitzkrieg 3." Then came Nirvana and Kurt Cobain who actually stripped everything to the core and the music. Blitzkrieg 3 doesn't want to stray from these basics but Nival do recognise the shift in how players are willing to use their time, hence their current approach to multiplayer.Īs Anatoly Subbotin (Nival's PR director) puts it in our chat, "The hair and the costumes played a bigger role than the music itself. You peer down at battlefields, organising and deploying units, listening to barks and trying to achieve objectives. The Blitzkrieg franchise is firmly entrenched in Second World War RTS territory. I'll explain more about that in a moment but first an overview of Blitzkrieg.
My preview session with the developers, Nival, bears out that comparison and fills in some of the blanks. So far it's been billed as a blend of multiplayer and singleplayer that, as Graham pointed out, sounds a lot like Jason Rohrer's online multiplayer home invasion game, The Castle Doctrine. We have been playing with Blitzkrieg 3's asynchronous real-time strategy multiplayer mode. Obliterate all of Oleg's creations forever.Oleg is now my nemesis although I do not know enough Russian to actually tell him so. Then four people watch the big screen as the game runs through a replay of my failure. Four people watch as my last infantryman falls to lead producer Oleg Burenko's stupid (read: expertly placed) base defence systems at the Blitzkrieg 3 preview event.