R.U.S.E

Engine Room: We chat to Mathieu Girard, Senior Producer on RUSE, about strategy, tactics, and bringing something new to the RTS.

Some ideas seem like they should have been explored years before they appear. It's like someone has been playing a cosmic Jedi mind trick, forcing us all to ignore the obvious until it sits in front of our eyes. Spend a few minutes exploring what R.U.S.E. (let's go with just RUSE from here on, though) is bringing to the real-time strategy genre, and you will understand what we mean.

We're getting close to twenty years since the RTS first appeared, and the team at Eugen Systems and Ubisoft wanted to bring something fresh to the space. Inspired by a mix of sources from outside the videogame arena, RUSE aims to be a World War II RTS that puts information warfare at front of stage. As the name implies, clever use of deception can be key to winning the day.

"Sun Tzu and his Art of War were a great inspiration for the project, as we want to make a game where deception is a weapon," says Mathieu Girard, Senior Producer on RUSE. "Poker was also a great inspiration, both for the visuals and the gameplay, as it is the game of bluffing. For instance, unit concentrations are symbolised by poker chips stacks, the higher the stack, the stronger the army. So when you move a large army, it's like pushing in your chips when making a bet in Poker."

"We also did not want to have a classical fog of war in our game. You see all the enemy units but you don't know their types, you don't know if they're real, and some of them might be hidden," says Girard. "This is very reminiscent of the flop in Texas Hold 'Em. You have part of the information and you can think about probabilities, but assumptions must be made so you can still be fooled and bluffed."

As part of the layer of ten deception skills that give this game its name, you can create false information (decoy units and fake buildings), hide information (camouflage units, your base), or steal information from the enemy (monitor the orders he gives to his units). More Ruses will be announced as we approach release around March 2010.

World War II makes a lot of sense for these ideas. This was the era when the information of war was going wireless, and information warfare began to emerge. Cracking codes, dropping fake paratroopers, allowing false information to leak - all meat and potatoes stuff to operational commanders in the fourties.

The game will actually place you in genuine battles of that war, and the game aims to get in-game commanders to use strategies and tactics like they did in the real world. You have room to use your own ideas, but your mission objectives will reflect those of these pivotal events in the actual war.

It was also an era filled with units we know very well, and the developers have not only offered up 200 unit types for players to control, they have also built a new engine to offer massive environments to fight in.