The End of Nations Beta Test

First Impressions!

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 11:38:00 -0500

There has been a whole lot of press coverage on End of Nations during the past few days. I can now share my experience as well. I’ll try to limit it to specific items that are news to people already following EoN:

The game is looking good and very playable right now. There are some notable pathing issues and unpolished bits, but the base for a fantastic game is set up. I tried three maps, a 1v1 PvPvE, a 4v4 PvP, and a 12v12 PvP.

The 12v12 was Deep Hammer. The map is littered with things to capture and it got pretty chaotic. This is definitely the kind of map where strong team organization skills will lead to victories. The capture points that give your team access to nukes are sure to be a crowd favorite. It costs as much to launch them as to fully repair your units twice over, but the massive damage and speed with which they hit make them thrilling to use. There was some strangeness where I could only share view with 3 of the 11 other people on my team, but hopefully that will change.

The 1v1 was called Last Stand, a unique PvE map where the enemies come to you in waves, tower defense style. But, on the other half of the map is your opponent, facing the same waves. You generally can’t interfere with your opponent directly, the path for ground units is blocked. But you buy additional AI waves for him or her to fight, attack their units with commander abilities like artillery strikes, or send your air units to mess him or her up. You can also capture a few points for resources or an EMP superweapon. Artillery was very effective against the AI units.

The 4v4 map was Resource Hog. It was a fairly broad open map with about 7 capture points and resource points. Capture points give your team victory points over time and resource points give you the cash to keep going. Probably the most straightforward map of the three, it was my favorite. That may be just because Deep Hammer was too overwhelming on first play.

Changes to the unit info listed in my forum thread were numerous, but mostly consisted of which class got which units. We only had a handful available for us to use, so there should be more variety up ahead. The biggest change was the addition of hero units, which were beefed up versions of other units with a backstory and some other bonuses.

And if you didn’t hear:
Open Beta starts this summer
The game is released this fall!

The Gamer Day Community Event

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 21:17:53 -0500

Remember this thing? Trion flew a handful of community members out to San Francisco to hang out with them and play some End of Nations. I was lucky enough to be one of the few that were selected.

That’s me in the center. The other community members are Cyber, Aldones (with a sweet Liberation Front beanie made by his girlfriend), Starne, and Zhenya. You can see Erick Adams, Dave Luehmann, and Lance James from Trion in the pic, too. We also got to hang out with Cindy Bowens and a few other guys working with Trion. We spent a lot of time talking about the game over the course of the day.

I’ll post the important parts, my actual experience with the game, up soon.

EoN Testing Plan Update

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:45:17 -0500

Lance James just posted this. Basically, Closed Alpha has been going on under a friends and family format and now they’re ready to start expanding to handpicked forum members. If you’re not already a frequent poster, you’re unlikely to get in this. But! During the upcoming months there will be several beta events in which people will be able to play End of Nations. Each event will only be open for a limited amount of time, separate from the closed alpha. Beta codes are to start being distributed soon.

There’s a new contest to win early beta access for End of...

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 13:50:09 -0500

There’s a new contest to win early beta access for End of Nations. Five game modes have been revealed and Trion’s seeing who can make the best movie-themed posters. This is my entry. You can enter your own, vote on winners (by clicking Like on the post the post), or just see the other entries in this thread.

Prelude to the MMORTS Future

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 14:37:19 -0500

I’ve been eagerly awaiting it for some days now, and the package came today. If you’re not familiar with End of Nations, it is an in-development MMORTS that I am following closely because of my strong affinity towards the genre that I developed with Shattered Galaxy. It’s being made by Trion (MMO newcomer success story with Rift) and Petroglyph (formed from the ashes of CnC developers, Westwood) which should mean great things. Beta sign up is open right now, too.

Included was some free stuff in the form of T-shirt and issue 1 of the End of Nations comic along with the more cryptic promo letters. One, which I have seen sent to others, says to keep an eye out for the phrase “the end is near” along with “massive” and “conflict,” possibly hinting at further material to be shown on EoN’s facebook, twitter, and youtube accounts. The second letter was in character as a leader of the Liberation Front (one of the two player factions in EoN) and accompanied by a US Army geiger counter operator’s manual. I don’t know if there’s any information to piece together from the various other people who also got info containing seemingly random codes (they’re confirmed not to be beta codes) but I’ll be trying over at the EoN forums.

Beginnings of a Blog

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:16:09 -0500

Ah, the first post. I’ll add some preliminary thoughts soon, but this blog will live or die depending on what kind of access I end up being allowed and what kind of NDA goes along with it. That’s up in the air, but the fact that the beta is coming very soon is all but assured.