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Battleground Europe: WWII Online 
Release date: 15 Sep 2005
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Once more into the breach, dear friends...
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Battleground Europe is the second coming of World War II Online, the massive multiplayer game that debuted back in 2001. It’s not quite a role-playing game, but it’s much larger than your standard FPS online games, carving it’s own unique niche. You can work your way up to a general, while at the same time, you can be killed by the lowliest of grunts.
In Battleground Europe you have to hold or capture key factories that could mean the difference between winning or loosing the war. These campaigns aren’t your typical FPS’s, where a mission arc might consist of three maps and limited objectives such as “whoever kills or completes the most objectives wins”. Instead, the tide is slow to turn and campaigns can last for weeks or even months, depending on the tenacity of the players. Each time you capture or lose a city, it affects your army’s supplies. These supplies are dished out through the high command, and will affect what you can use.
Lacking a manual, the learning curve is pretty steep. I spent quite a bit longer in the offline practice mode than I did in the online game. Once prepared, the game was still a bit barren, and I never saw more than a few enemy planes or tanks. At any given time, I was probably the only infantryman online. Naturally, once the game goes live on September 14th, more players should be on-line.
Getting on to the game was a bit of a struggle as well- the beta launch page only supports Internet explorer, and the start up would update then close out, forcing me to re-launch the game. This process would then repeat until there were no more updates. Luckily, thanks to the game’s dynamic nature, this does not happen all that often, but the process was still clunky.
At the time of the beta you could choose between three armies, French, English, or German. Sometimes, while playing, you cannot choose one or more of the three armies, because they are “on leave”. I’m not too sure of the reasons why this was so- perhaps the developers were taking various factions offline for balancing or bug fixes. Playnet has future expansions with more armies and weapons planned, which will add additional options for budding Generals.
The variety of weapons and vehicles is immense, but actually using them can be challenging. Unless you own a joystick, don’t expect to easily play with any vehicles. Ground vehicles are feasible, but reconfiguring your mouse will be required to properly use them. Lacking a joystick, I tried hard to get a proper mouse configuration to fly a plane, with absolutely no success. Realism seems to be a goal for the development team: my plane’s propeller bent once it struck the ground. Hopefully there will be some type of implementation for more casual players to fly a plane or drive a boat.
Seemingly because Playnet wants to be able to handle as many objects as possible, the game’s visuals seem to have been scaled back to a very bare-bones level. Graphics are of a level that would have been unacceptable in my college Opengl class, much less in a game that expects your money. Since the beta I have played is close to the release date, things do not bode well for updated graphics. Thankfully, the sound is capable of holding it’s own. The game uses noo ambient music- in its place realistic firing and engine noises fill the air. The Doppler effect is here, making coming and going planes sound like…well, coming and going planes.
But Battleground Europe is all about Player versus Player combat, and a large amount of it, rather than sublime graphics and flashy effects. It might not sound like much if you’re one person in a group of thirty or so defending against another group of thirty from taking your town, but if you have a good squad, you can not only defend your town, but regroup and push to take the next factory.
Because the game is so large, and relies so heavily on PvP interaction, if there is not a huge sign up crowd, the game will get dull quickly. Playnet is relying heavily on the participation of the many fans of games like Medal of Honor or Call of Duty, particularly those players who have been looking for a way that they could participate in an even larger scale battle. World War II aficionados are also part of the game’s core audience. There is a small part of me that thinks the game is too large, and it would require a very substantial user base to make the areas not seem barren. Playnet has the game world limitations listed at 10,000, and they will need every bit of it to have a dense map. Maybe a later expansion will add bots to the campaign, to fill out the roster.
The potential for fun in Battleground Europe is huge. Yet, because of the campaign style, casual gamers might think it’s a full time MMORPG. The game’s lackluster graphics are worrisome as well. Here’s hoping that when the game is released, people will see past those surface limitations to the deep, involved game play underneath.
Battle Ground Europe: World War II Online will be released on September 15, 2005 for the PC. For more information please see the official site.
Preview by Sean McCoy on 16 Sep 2005
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