Ministry of War preview / beta testing

For the past two weeks some of the team, including myself, has the opportunity to try out the closed beta of Snail Games’ Ministry of War. This title is a real-time strategy (RTS) massively-multiplayer online game (MMO), and is hosted entirely via your web browser, making it accessible from any computer with a web browser, the latest version of Flash installed, and a decent internet connection.

I discovered the closed beta a few weeks ago from a press release put out by Snail Games and found that they were accepting applications for beta testers and applied. Snail Games has been nice enough to let us riff-raff in, and has hosted us for several days to try things out, in exchange for our feedback on technical issues. We have had unbridled access to the gameplay and available features, and to tell you a bit about what we think.

First, a quick overview of the game. Ministry of War is built to be a giant-scale historical RTS MMO in which players will rule an empire, choosing between playing as the ancient Roman, Persian, Egyptian or Chinese empires. Players vie for space on a real-world map, build their city, expand borders, enter into trade and military conflict with other players, establish guilds, and fight in arena type combat between each other. Players may engage NPC enemies in combat in order to earn experience, and train a plethora of military units as well as other support pieces, like merchants and missionaries. The ultimate goal is to be the most powerful empire in the land.

So putting in a couple of weeks now, here are some early thoughts and impressions.

Here are some early thoughts. I’m going to ask you this question only once. When this is released, why on Earth would you not PLAY THIS??? Seriously.  I’ll tell you why you better try it.

1) It’s free. What more reason do you need to try it? If you need more…here they come.

2) Its easy. The tutorial walked me through pretty nicely and I had the hang of it in an hour. Granted, I’m a buff for the RTS games, like Civilization, SimCity, StarCraft, etc etc. It’s not exactly like any of these, but has some of the same elements. So if you’ve played one, you can get this. And even if you haven’t, you can still pick it up.

3) It can be played anywhere (Except my HTC Incredible.) Honestly, if you have computer that has a browser and the latest edition of Flash, you’re good. No discs and no installations. It also means minimal compatibility issues. I even briefly tried this out on my parents old Dell computer (and old is relative, but it’s about a 5 year old model). Except for the screen being small, it ran almost as well on this old system (with a single core Celeron processor) as on my quad-core Phenom x4 system.

The graphics are phenomenal (for a web-based Flash application.) Music is appropriate, and there is not a need to have sophisticated sound effects, but there are some battle sounds, etc. This is a web-based app, so it’s not really fair to compare to the graphics and sound in an out of the box game. I will say this; I have been so far very impressed by the graphics and the execution of the visual platform in general

So “How?,” you ask, “How, if this is free… How do they do that?”. MoW will be a micro-transaction based game. “What is that?”  Players will be able to make purchases online in the game for various in-game items. They may range from weapons to supplies and other perks. Frankly, we don’t know exactly what will be available to buy through the “Mall” because that service has not yet become available. However, what it does mean is that players have control over their cost, and can invest as little – or as much – as they want.

As far as a release, there is no official date yet set.  I asked Mark Hill, PR Manager at Snail Games and about this as the website currently reads that August is the expected release time. He responded that Snail Games would be releasing MoW soon, once the beta tests concluded, any remaining issues are resolved, but would not commit to a specific timeframe. No problem. Do it right, not do it quick.

Bottom line is that so far it seems Snail Games is doing it right.  Set your browser favorites to www.world-gaming.com for more exclusives on this title.

If you are interested in registering for the closed beta of this title, visit www.ministryofwar.com.