14 DAY TRIAL // What better way to make sure that your game gets interest from hardcore players than to hire a hardcore player to look at the game and then say something nice about it? That's the approach that SEGA and Creative Assembly have recently used at the Leipzig Games Convention as they brought in Sanatana Mishra, who happens to be one of the best Warcraft III players in Australia, to play a bit of the new real time strategy game, called Stormrise.
According to Vispi Bhopti, who is the communications manager at Creative Assembly, Mishra was initially employed by the company as a tester for features of the game. It seems, if the company narrative is to be believed, that his status as a top Warcraft III and World in Conflict player was not known at first. He quickly became a full-time member and he was sent to Leipzig to present the game and talk a bit about it to emphasize how well the RTS mechanics were translated into the Xbox 360.
Mishra especially appreciated the way the control scheme will work in the game. The hardcore player said that "It's just faster" to play with the Xbox 360 controller than with a traditional keyboard and mouse setup. With his being a long time strategy gamer, this is a lot and could mean that Stormrise has chances to be one of the first RTS games to be adapted to the Xbox 360, which was considered a platform unconquerable by strategy titles.
The game, which is set to arrive at an unspecified date in 2009, is set to pit two factions against each other, on a battlefield where placement of units and line of sight is central to the strategy of the players. Tactics are to be complicated by the special abilities that most units of the Echelon and the Sai will gain access to.