Best known for their MMOs, Jumpgate and Auto Assault, Netdevil is currently completing work on an impressive first person shooter known as Warmonger, Operation: Downton Destruction. In Warmonger, you'll play a Corporate Mercenary fighting in the ruins of American cities in the not-so-distant future. Mega-corporations are fighting over the resources of the world and have pledged their massive fortunes to take control of both the cities and the world.
Built using the Unreal Engine 3 (UE3) the game uses Havok, one of the leading middleware providers for animation, physics and other effects. In addition to the using the UE3 Engine and Havok, Netdevil has been working closely with AGEIA the makers of the PhysX physics processor to deliver a level of destruction never before seen in any game.
Using these tools, Netdevil has crafted a game with more destructible elements then possibly ever before seen in any game. While talking about the game with company President Scott Brown and Project Lead Ryan Seabury, they mentioned that with the help of AGEIA they have taken many of these tools above and beyond their original design. For example, the Havok tool has been known to support upwards of 60,000 destructible objects in the past; with Warmonger, Netdevil has taken this number to new extremes pushing it to more then 100,000 destructible objects.
What does this mean to the game? These really are just numbers; they could mean a lot of boxes to blow up. To demonstrate, an example we were given regards cover in most first person shooters - you generally just sit behind it until you're ready to come out, the enemy runs out of ammo, etc. This leads to the "Titanium Fence", where an entire squad can sit behind a thin wooden fence taking cover for an indefinite time, this just isn't realistic.
In Warmonger, this simply just wont work. Just as in the "real world", objects used as cover will only be able to take so much punishment before they will no longer provide any cover. Another example provided was the scene from the movie, The Matrix, where Neo and Trinity enter the obby of the federal building to rescue Morpheus. At several points during this scene Neo and Trinity take cover behind some of the columns in the lobby. As they do, that cover is slowly depleted by the incoming fire. This is exactly the effect they are looking for in Warmonger.
The game will be launched with 2-3 levels, most likely with a free to play model. Resulting costs (if any) of future episodes have not yet been determined. The game will require a very high-end PC to run; the current minimum specs are quite rigorous. We were told that the current specs are going to be an NVIDIA 8800 or Dual 7900 Series SLI (or equivalent ATI) series card with 2 CPUs and will require an AGEIA PhysX card.
What I found most impressive was the fact that the game has only been in production for less then a year with a fairly small team of between 2-7 developers. Expect launch soon as it's currently in final development though the release date hasn't been set yet.
Raised in Massachusetts and made move to south of the Mason/Dixon line to the lovely state of MD. I have been working Desktop support for the last 2 years for Games Workshop. When not working for the Galactic Toy Company I am playing any one of 8 MMOs or Numerous console games.
