Heavy: This War Of Mine Is A War Game About Civilians
All is fair
"In war, not everyone is a soldier." That's This War of Mine's tagline, and while you wouldn't know it from playing videogames, it's definitely true. 11 Bit Studios is designing a game around that idea, with a core focus not on mowing down every gun-toting, evil-mustache-twirling ultra-terrorist in your way but instead on simple survival. You control a group of a civilians in a wartorn town, and the rest, well, that's up to you.
No real gameplay yet, unfortunately, but here's the basis of how it'll work:
"During the day snipers outside stop you from leaving your refuge, offering precious time to craft, trade, upgrade your shelter, feed and cure your survivors. At night you can scavenge nearby areas in search for food, medicines, weapons and other useful items."
"In TWoM you have to make life-and-death decisions based purely on your conscience. Try to protect everybody from your shelter or sacrifice some of them in order to prevail; there are no good or bad decisions during war. There's only survival."
The game was apparently inspired by real life events, so that ought to lend some interesting perspective to the proceedings.
Previously 11 Bit worked on solidly unique games like Anomaly: Warzone Earth and Anomaly 2, but this sounds like quite a departure from RTS-ish tower-defense-but-in-reverse antics. I'm interested to see more, and do that I will during GDC. Hopefully I'll also have Yoda extracted from my brain during that time.
This War of Mine will be out sometime this year. There's tremendous potential for both thrills and chills in its concept, so I'm crossing my fingers for something special.