Fans of Massive Entertainment's well reviewed Ground Control series of real-time strategy games are no doubt waiting anxiously for the release of this fall's World in Conflict, which builds on the Ground Control formula and places it into an alternate 1980s world, one in which the Cold War escalated into World War III. Last week, I checked out a recent build of the game and spoke at length with lead game designer Magnus Jansén about how development is shaping up and how Massive came to the decisions they have made on World in Conflict.

"World in Conflict is entirely a reaction to what we didn't like about Ground Control," Jansén said. "People were tired of sci-fi. They wanted to do real-world hardware. We had military buffs saying, 'I want a God damned Abrams tank in there.' We had like five times of damage--electrical, plasma, normal, whatever--and five types of armor. Now there's damage, armor piercing ability, armor, and that's it. In Ground Control, we had strategic points, and the more you had, the more resources you had. That gave you that very typical RTS see-saw, where you at a certain point see that things are tipping over and it's just a downward spiral for the losing team. So we said, away with that. We still have command points for other things, but now your resources themselves remain constant. It's how you use them that matters. The match is not over until the last second. That's also a day one reaction to Ground Control."