While there have been MMO titles that have used the real time strategy gameplay none of them have been as successful as the many RPG based MMO titles. Developer Petroglyph and publisher Trion Worlds plan to change that with the upcoming End of Nations. The makers of his near-future title are hopeful it will succeed in bringing the RTS genre to a persistent online game.

Big Download got some of our questions about End of Nations answered via Petroglyph including why they feel an MMORTS title has not broken through into the mainstream and more about the game itself.

"First how did the idea for End of Nations come about?"

"The idea for End of Nations (aka, MMO-RTS) came from the thought of merging two great gaming genres. We love RTS games, but we also love playing MMORPGs. If I can step back in time a bit and talk about how the RTS genre came to being, the similarities might help with understanding how End of Nations came into being. At Westwood during the development of Dune II, we didn't set out to create the Real-Time Strategy genre. The end result was almost a surprise. We actually were taking elements of other contemporary games that we loved to play and wanted to merge them into a new game: the real-time gameplay of Populous, the combat strategy of turn-based military games, and the tech-tree advancement of Civilization. The mixing of these elements created a new product that was much more than the simple sum of its parts. In much the same way, the idea of MMO-RTS was formed. How do we combine the fun of RTS with the fun of MMO games. Combining the two genres was not, at first, an obvious process."

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