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Asymetric Warfighting - Beyond War

Special Weapons and Tactics

Before people get worked up who are unfamiliar with actual war, tactics, and events not often seen due to the dramatized nature of war in film and television, let's be clear: War is Hell. And you should run from Hell.

In mobile war, attacks are not executed in a fair or balanced strategy. Assaults begin on inferior positions which likely cannot hold, and the decision to remain in the field is often denied to the defenders or their resistance necessary only to allow time for other forces to organize and prepare a sustainable response to overwhelming opposition forces, remove assets to safety, and protect civilians.

These concepts are not part of classic entertainment war games, which focus on fairness of forces and equal chance to balance small tactical battles in an entertainment aspect.

Therefore, when combat occurs, you will not find 10,000 steroid amped brainwashed career soldiers pouring from the sky to storm heavily fortified defenses like Greek Gods in classic tapestry poses. That shit isn't real.

Beyond War features ordinary soldiers with extraordinary weapons and experience at hand to hand and close quarters combat that for some can span 20,000 years of conflict, simply walking into the middle of an enemy capital and up to the leaders of a planet with a letter even if a tank batallion was left to stop them. There are no teleport technologies. There are no shields or magic medical cell phones that put your arm back on after they beat you with it. The violence is offensive and disturbing, and can on first glance drop most professional soldiers who live less than 200 years in the instant they see their point man folded into a pretzel.

How do we get away with that?

The same way H.P. Lovecraft did - with inferred off screen and radio screenplay work. Imagining the image and the scene to the best of the audience ability is often more effective and correct than pushing any physical special effects buttons. Story telling and screenplay techniques make for a more engaging story, and also ensure that details missed in shock are not created later in the presentation layer of animated virtual environments for players. You see what you have the ability to see, and these layered details ensure that some players receive different data than others based on their character, backstory, and events which are not readily disclosed or accessible to the player. 25 years of pen and paper roleplaying experience aided the developers in this constructive evolution of setting the scene for visceral and unusual events - including the wisdom that telling the audience what did that or how they stuck that guy to the ceiling only relieves the tension of the moment that a writer is building.

An emotional and internal response is the goal, and can be much better achieved with techniques not found in many other game titles.

As such, seeing a battle by the numbers on a map does not convey what rounding the corner into a phalanx of oncoming ground troops or scene of carnage and automatic fire in the dark on a hill convey. METRO EXODUS made excellent use of this in the 4A engine, and our project would recommend you try that as well, before you bite off the ideas in Beyond War. We share many values.

Among those are the fact that enemy units standing around to die and get shot in interesting ways like a high-end first-person shooter don't really do justice to the insanity and attention of war. War is, ten seconds in Hell and 9 months of waiting for that moment, which never comes when you want it to.

Therefore, like EXODUS intermission scenes, we try to set the tone and break up the violence with as much content as possible to keep the users oriented on the aspect that actions affect other players and story elements are not simply "a quest tree with a series of tasks and pies to deliver" like other MMO RPG games.

To be certain, you won't be picking a fight with an enemy army head on - and most if not all of your missions will involve the ability to get a job done without losing forces or taking fire that leave permanent injury. Some factions do not have this handicap, and it sets the fighting styles of the two completely apart, making a variation in tactics and force protection a vital element for long term play as character gains are inherent in the characters they possess and as easily lost due to enemy action.

Again, because there are consequences like any MMO PvP, this classifies Beyond War as a "serious game", and subject to certain minimum age and connection reliability issues. There are of course simulation-in-the-simulation sparring and testing tools, but unlike other games - those tools do not work the same in the protected mode (pretending a fight) to the actual battlefield. So while your tactic works in simulation, the outcome in the real player-versus-player mode may suddenly not perform the same way. This "artificial defect in accuracy" is another part of Beyond War which prevents many elements of high-precision bot-like activity and automation built into the tool from overwhelming players.

You can take a team, find friends, but the model also does not benefit all of you shooting at the same monster/boss as is the practice in MECHWARRIOR ONLINE and virtually every other MMO on the planet. How that works, is something that you will need to learn on your own, and undocumented with hidden features unique to your character that make you unique and add value to the 'life' you are playing which cannot be replicated by player choices in character path or design.

In this sense, every character is unique, and so value is installed in the character which makes their loss relevant.

This is why you don't sacrifice a unit to just replace it with another unit if it falls. The next unit may not be as relevant, and the frequency at which this happens influences these hidden traits - rewarding players who act in a manner consistent with the roleplaying and aspects of their character. Again, this technology is proprietary, protected by trade secret, and unique to BEYOND WAR.

Therefore a mass engagement with highly lethal weapons is a sausage-fest of tragedy as well as a terrifying moment for players who lose their spot and role in a faction if they die. This "HARDCORE" mode was unheard of prior later deployment in MINECRAFT and online game based animated movies, which helped the public overcome a sincere fear of consequences and unfair end-user experiences due to dial-up and poor (unreliable) broadband like DSL.

With a fear of loss, sometimes just putting a bullet into an enemy character is enough to stop them. You do not need to "down" them. Just pop them in the leg, and make their side drag them off the field to triage.

The same rules apply (it takes three men to care for one injured man, versus two to carry him off the field dead at any time) in this sense. Only a military veteran would consider this an "improvement" on modern first-person shooter games, and fortunately such person is the developer of Beyond War. With this is also the right to violate the conventions of war, and the importance of not messing with people who are in rear areas for care - without denying that ability to players.

For this reason (and many more) the age requirement to use the game is higher than that of most states drinking and smoking age, as some maturity is necessary to appreciate the conditions and situation of other players before undertaking acts that would be themed 'war crimes' in any science fiction property not themed 'Total Unrestricted War'.

To be fair, and with regard to how terrifying that prior concept is barring sale through some channels and in some countries (like China), there are no sexual violations afforded or permitted whatsoever in Beyond War.

This is perhaps the only unrealistic exemption, and a decision by the developers to reject such acts as lower than even genocide by planetary and stellar annihilation, in the fair treatment of prisoners. On the contrary, enemy combatants can drag wounded off the field and return them to the other side - an unprecedented aspect of wargame design that ensures the equality of action is present for players on both sides, and defection among factions is also permitted (with penalties, some not evident to players but serious).

Combined with friendly fire, this makes things far more complex than any traditional wargame or FPS shooter service, and creates a situation where player organization and preparation prior actions can relate to similar community and infiltration aspects common in real-world warfighting and internal security of forces in-country.

One critic described the concept as "A Thinking Man's Space War", with ships, infantry, logistics, and a broad spectrum of technology and features that would discourage a console gamer due to the lack of "knowing with certainty every factor that influences the game as played".

On the contrary, the ability to play and simply be lost in the moment, without having to know why things are working (or not working) smoothly, creates the kind of frustration and confusion that the developers describe as the ideal "fog of war" in first person experience to the chaos of a Universe at war and primitive people milling about without a clue on worlds unable to break away from Hegelian religious beliefs in utilitarian socialism - including the value of a person and their rights being based on the benefit they offer to others solely, and by submission to these ideals to the exclusion of defending dissent no matter the moral questions.

The volume of work, preceding the techniques developed for this environment, would in a linear design and content pipeline break the budget of most triple-A games. Technology was required and has come a long way since 1996, including the first 6+ core processors in consumer computers and parallel ray tracing in new graphics cards which were described in the 1996 documents for BEYOND WAR.

The very limits of creating the complexity of scenes and enemies remain high level achievements, and tasks for which older conventional engines were unsuited at their basic level.

A type of game, between FPS And strategy, with better imaging and visualization core, was required.

For that reason, the tactics and mechanics of BEYOND WAR are certainly not found in other games based on older conventional FPS engines and solutions similar to their data structure. This has not stopped broad overreaching claims from seeking to infringe upon the BEYOND WAR claims, while failing to deliver a flight simulator that allows you to bank and barrel-roll nor acknowledges any direction other than the same plane as all other players (uniform xyz Cartesian Model). What may fool investors fails pilots and physicists who are intensely interested in this new dimension (4D) and artificial intelligence required to navigate it in dynamic battles that engage the full spectrum of facing, approach, gravity, and inertia free from "magic rudders" and other techniques pioneered by Industrial Light and Magic, and derived films.

To quote one UI Developer, "If you don't throw up on the ride, what fun is it?"

It also makes it very hard to get a clear polaroid of the MIG cockpit if you cannot go inverted in your battleship and jump on top of the enemy destroyer.

BEYOND WAR is designed to change the rules. To employ tactics not common in "battle royale" games, and a little upset by the wrongful adaptation of technology on par with "Flatland" adoptions of its 1996 "4D resource management model and presentation layer" by companies engaged in overt industrial espionage to defraud the American company and seek information in false job applications in the late 1990s, 2002, and 2008.

Be assured, you will if attacked either be running away or screaming for help on the communications network, or lying in wait as the enemy roll up completely unaware you are sitting in fleet formation waiting for a perfect shot as soon as you see their muzzle flash. This isn't metaphorical either, and describes the general cycle of combat and return fire which you must rely, making your reaction dependant on timing and acts of your enemy in seconds of engagement and exchanges. All of which is to make the game both more realistic and fun for everyone despite dramatic differences in platform hardware and capabilities. So the 240 frame PC does not really have any advantage over the 60 frame office computer running the low-end client abstraction tool or mobile app.

In a Universe where weapons hit so hard you may find your ship in two pieces after the first shot, this makes the world much more interesting. As does wondering who will drag (half) your ass off the field and which side got the other half.

Not one game plays that hard. Or makes the actions of any one player in a mass combat so deadly and important.

With that having been said, we hope to see you on the battlefield soon.

 

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