OH! WHAT A LOVELY WAR GAME


As the lead programmer on the seminal Command & Conquer and the founder and


creative director of Westwood successor Petroglyph Games, Joe Bostic knows a thing or two about RTS games. Richie Shoemaker interrogates him on the most recent


W


Joe Bostic, founder and creative director Petroglyph Games


hile World War I has provided fertile terrain for literature, film and satirical musical theatre, it’s


been a veritable no man’s land for games over the decades. Sure, there has been a steady stream of multiplayer FPSs in recent years, but it wasn’t really until EA and DICE went over the top with Battlefield 1 in 2016 that the first of them put its head above the parapet. On the strategy game front, there have been a


few hardcore releases for the grognard elite, but more mainstream real-time strategy franchises and developers have exclusively focused on theatres and timelines where armies haven’t been stuck in the same place for years with no end to the digital carnage in sight. It took Petroglyph Games to break the


deadlock, with it’s quietly celebrated RTS The Great War: The Western Front, which was


44 | MCV/DEVELOP July 2023


published by Frontier Foundry earlier this year. The game, developed by the studio that succeeded the great Westwood, manages to convey the bloodshed without being bloody, the interminable grind without being tedious or grindy, and offers innovative ways for players to advance in a conflict not known for anything but grim stalemate.


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