RTS "World in Conflict" From a Design Perspective 57
Game Designer Manveer Heir has another installment of his "Design Lesson 101" series where he takes a look at a game from a designer's standpoint and attempts to learn something in the process. In this installment he takes a look at the RTS, World in Conflict that has an interesting twist on resource management. "World in Conflict has a simple resource management system. The player is given a fixed amount of resources to obtain units with. Shortly after you requisition units, they are air-dropped into the game, eliminating the need for building bases. Immediately, this leads to a unit-centric, tactical feel to the entire game. [...] When a unit dies, however, the resources that were allocated to obtain the unit are not lost forever. Instead, what World in Conflict does is return the resources to the player. Not immediately, however. Instead, the resources trickle back in over time. Your resources aren't constrained by how well or poor you are doing in the game (at least not constrained for very long). By doing this, World in Conflict avoids the snowball effect that exists in many real-time strategy games."