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Victory Achieved: Petroglyph's Army Arena Battler Reborn

5-on-5 F2P arena army battles

Cast your mind back to the distant year of 2013, when developers Petroglyph failed to Kickstarter multiplayer arena-o-RTT-ish game Victory. The Grey Goo gang dreamed of 5-on-5 multiplayer online arena battles between combined arms armies composed and customised by players, but didn't get anywhere near their $700,000 goal. They did, however, say several publishers had shown interest so they might get to make it after all. And so they have!

The free-to-play game now named Victory Command [official site], and now co-developed by South Korean F2P folks Neoact, has been re-revealed and opened beta signups.

Exactly what Victory has become, and how much Command differs from the original idea, is a little hazy. It's still about five players selecting units from their collections to field an army capable of out-manoeuvring and generally smashing their opponents, without base-building or any of that. Watching the new trailer, I see terrain still plays a role, with tall grass providing some sort of cover. Weak spots, cover, height advantage, flanking, and all that were part of the original plan, requiring teams to carefully compose their armies.

Quite how its free-to-play model will work is a mystery too, and that's a pretty big unknown.

If someone were, hypothetically, to take this as incentive to grumblyrant about MOBAs, I might claim, only semi-facetiously, that Westwood Studios (the studio Petroglyph's founders came from) actually created the first MOBA in 1997 with multiplayer arena spin-off Command & Conquer: Sole Survivor. You'll feel embarrassed for me as you pick apart that spurious claim, so let's not.

Beta signups for Victory Command are on its site, and here's the re-reveal trailer:

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About the Author
Alice O'Connor avatar

Alice O'Connor

Associate Editor

Alice has been playing video games since SkiFree and writing about them since 2009, with nine years at RPS. She enjoys immersive sims, roguelikelikes, chunky revolvers, weird little spooky indies, mods, walking simulators, and finding joy in details. Alice lives, swims, and cycles in Scotland.

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