Bodyguard of lies

Here’s something different. It’s a World War II game. (You are forgiven for thinking that’s not different.) It’s a real-time strategy (RTS) game. (Again not exactly unique, you might observe.) But R.U.S.E.* is different. The clue is in the title. As Winston Churchill put it, “The truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”

Yes, R.U.S.E. covers familiar territory in terms of its genre and subject matter. You control an army. You issue orders to units. These manoeuvre around the battlefield blowing up the enemy - or being blown up by the enemy. Ultimately a virtual replay of the war is won or lost. What’s different about R.U.S.E. is that players can - and must, in fact - use deception to win the day.

Historical minutiae

In the interests of eventually making a point, let’s look again at one of the staple ingredients of the real-time strategy game. In normal RTS games, terrain is hidden from the player, until he explores it with one of his units. Games usually call this ‘fog of war’, which it isn’t. Long ago, in the prehistory of the RTS, a company called Westwood Studios developed the wonderful Dune 2*, which introduced this hidden terrain mechanic and misnamed it ‘fog of war’. The idea it represents is what the military calls ‘limited intelligence’. Fog of war, on the other hand, is what happens when you’re in the thick of battle, when the noise, the smoke and the confusion all add up to make it difficult - sometimes impossible - to tell what the guy next to you is doing. But this is academic. Far too many derivative games developers have repeated the original error and now everyone calls it ‘fog of war’. Anyway, refreshingly, R.U.S.E. doesn’t use it.

In R.U.S.E. you have a bird’s eye view of the battlefield to start with. In fact, when you zoom out completely, the battlefield is represented as a tabletop in a map room at your headquarters. Developers Eugen use a technology they call IRISZOOM* that zooms into the action, through the cloud layer and down to the level of individual, superbly detailed tanks and soldiers.

Eugen have dispensed with the so-called ‘fog of war’ mechanic for a reason. As a rule, when opposing forces go to battle, they know the lay of the land. They also know roughly where their opponents are. What’s far more difficult to determine is what exactly the enemy is doing. Is it ready for battle? Are the enemy soldiers infantry or engineers? It’s this uncertainty that goes to the heart of the game play in R.U.S.E.

You order your units much as you would in any other RTS but you can also supplement those orders with R.U.S.E. cards. These deceive the enemy, hopefully, and enable you to come up with a winning strategy born of your foe’s confusion. For example, ‘decryption’ enables you to intercept the enemy’s communications. This has the effect of giving you advance notice of the orders the enemy plans to issue to individual units. With this information, you can prepare the optimal counter-attack or ambush. By playing the ‘radio silence’ card, your units can slip behind enemy lines, avoiding detection. The key is to combine the right R.U.S.E. card with the right strategy.

This is not your run-of-the-mill RTS game.

The developers have eschewed the hyper-real, washed-out colours of recent war games, films and TV series. This is a game full of colour. It’s no bad thing either. Its art direction helps it stand out from the crowd. On the coding side, there’s been a lot of optimisation, so irrespective of the number of cores or threads you have available, R.U.S.E. should fly. On an Intel® Core™i7 it’ll be all guns blazing.

But wouldn’t you like to see for yourself, before the game comes out?

Be a beta tester

Intel Game On and Ubisoft invite you to participate in the forthcoming R.U.S.E. beta test. All you have to do is click on the link below. Doing so will send you to the official R.U.S.E. website where you have to register for a chance to win a multiplayer VIP key. The lucky VIPs will be contacted by email shortly before the beta test goes live. The email will contain all the information required to get into the beta test.

Good luck!

Apply to be a beta tester