By Joseph Luster
Crowd-funded video game efforts are more and more abundant these days, and developer Driven Arts has a big one on their plate. Days of War aims to deliver a “fiercely competitive shooter in a visually stunning WWII environment,” and is planned for release on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One sometime in 2016. While it remains to be seen if it will make that projected launch (more on that shortly), it would mark a welcome return to an area of WWII gaming that was previously so overabundant, pretty much everyone burned themselves out on it.
Yep, we’re talking about WWII shooters, which were a dime a dozen a decade or so ago. They’re certainly on the opposite end of the spectrum to the previously mentioned Sebastian Frank adventure, but we’ve also come back around to a point where the concept seems novel once again. In a time when Call of Duty games are getting increasingly more futuristic in design and concept, a World War II shooter seems, well, downright quaint.
Traditional Yet Fresh
Driven Arts’ Days of War is taking a ton of inspiration from Day of Defeat: Source, a team-based first-person WWII shooter from Valve (Half-Life, Team Fortress, Portal, Left 4 Dead) that originally hit PC back in 2005. Both keeping with tradition and adding something fresh, Days of War features an up-to-date look thanks to Unreal Engine 4 and mod tools that will be easy to pick up and use. Developing solid competitive play with plenty of strategy is the team’s main goal, and it’s being backed up with motion-captured animation, realistic physics, and immersive, faithful environments. The class-based combat should offer something for all types of play, and different game modes and terrain types will help keep everyone from getting too comfortable.
After cancelling its first campaign—aiming for a $100,000 funding goal of which it was projected to fall well short—Driven Arts launched a retooled Kickstarter campaign in March. That turned out to be a smart move, because at the time of this writing the Days of War campaign is sitting at a little over $33k of its $20k goal. That gets them to Early Access smoothly and on schedule, but there are still a bunch of stretch goals waiting to be fulfilled. $40k adds in British Forces, $60k adds in Russian Forces, and the Italian and French Forces will be added at $120k and $140k, respectively. If the campaign gets to $80k an Xbox One version will launch this year, and the same goes for PlayStation 4 if they hit $100k.
While the campaign will be way in the rearview by the time you have this magazine in your hands, we’re looking forward to seeing how Driven Arts attempts to evolve the fast-paced action of competitive World War II shooters later this year.
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