Trion Worlds and Petroglyph Games showed off End of Nations at E3. We stopped by the booth to get our hands on their upcoming MMORTS.

After entrenching myself at a captured factory somewhere in western Australia, one of my opponents sent in air support to wipe me out. Without a balanced team to back you up, that’s just the way it goes. Clearly, knowing and understanding the various unit compositions and how they fare against other types will be key to crafting the ultimate balanced team in End of Nations.

Each unit has a special ability. While development of End of Nations seems to be on track, the lack of hotkeys made quick selection and activation a bit of pain – especially when I was in the middle of battle. Given the diversity of units, hopefully Petroglyph will develop an intuitive way to let players access special abilities when units get clumped up and selected together.

Currently, Petroglyph is hoping to have the standard 1,000 to 2,000 players on each world server. Players will duke it out across the globe in cycles. The battle for the world won’t drag out forever, but simply reset once a conclusion has been reached. Currently, Petroglyph is estimating that each cycle may last as long as a month.

There will be a variety of maps that dictate different types of engagements. Petroglyph currently has matches planned that will go as high as 26 vs. 26 players. Even more interesting, Petroglyph didn’t rule out going higher, including the possibility of a 52-player co-op match against the AI (think of an MMO raid, but RTS-style), but for now that’s the limit. For an RTS, on a single battlefield, that kind of scale is simply incredible.

But to find out how End of Nations all comes together, we will need to wait until sometime in 2012 when it’s scheduled to be released. Until then, be sure to watch Trion and Petroglyph team members discuss the game's features in the latest trailer.

Christopher "Aurum" Wyatt