No Rush: 2112 Blends MMO, RTS, And Tower Defense
Yes, yes, I know what you're thinking. No, there aren't any Temples of Syrinx in the announcement trailer for Emobi Games' 2112. I checked. I cannot, truthfully, speculate as to these people's general awareness of Canadian progressive rock - though that'd make a wonderful first email exchange. At any rate, 2112 sounds wildly ambitious on paper, and - while the footage largely consists of mechs marching and tanks making treads - it's certainly not skimping on dingy dystopian visuals. The short version? It's a "free-to-play MMO game that combines strategic base defense gameplay with deep customization and the visceral action found in RTS games." It's also sticking to the tried-and-true sci-fi strategy trope of three "unique" races. So no Rush, but maybe a little rushing? We'll see. Check out the debut trailer after the break.
Emobi also recently released 7554, an admittedly less-than-stellar FPS about the controversial First Indochina War. So, needless to say, fingers - especially the ones used for conniving gestures - crossed that the developer has a better grip on MMORTS tower defense than it does historically accurate man-shooting. Unfortunately, I haven't the foggiest idea of how all those puzzle pieces are going to fit together, and Emobi's keeping things extremely vague for now.
I'm definitely pulling for it, though. I mean, I really enjoyed Age of Empires Online until horrific balance issues resulting from a meta game that permanently upgraded units threw my big book of tactics in a woodchipper and beat me to a pulp. If Emobi can figure out a better matchmaking system and just generally design its strategic layer to be more compatible with MMO genre conventions, it might be able to craft something special. Or maybe it'll just make a half-baked, completely shameless StarCraft clone. Time will tell, as 2112's set to launch late in 2112 (minus one of those ones, maybe).