GSC Game World on Monday announced it will release Cossacks 3, a new version of the popular real-time strategy title Cossacks: European Wars. It will be available for PC, Mac and Linux machines later this year.
Cossacks 3 is a modern remake of the original game that debuted in 2001. That history-based title was unique in that players could control hundreds of individual units at a time, vastly surpassing other games in the genre.
The original Cossacks: European Wars also was unique in that the game's designers opted to use the European conflicts of the 17th and 18th centuries as a backdrop instead of a science fiction or fantasy setting. During that era, colorfully dressed armies marched in perfect order on the battlefield and blasted away at each other in volleys. The developers at GSC Game Works opted to recreate that aspect of warfare in the game.
Cossacks 3 will build on that. It will include a greater selection of unit types with up to 10,000 individual soldiers on the battlefield at a time. The game will feature 12 playable nations representing the major European powers of the era, along with 140 diverse historical buildings, 100 scientific researches that can upgrade units, and improved physics to provide an even more realistic experience.
War College
When GSC Game Works released the original Cossacks: European Wars, the real-time strategy, or RTS, genre was one of the most popular on PCs and Macs. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a wave of RTS games from major studios including Electronic Arts, Activision and Microsoft, including such high-profile series as Age of Empires, Command & Conquerand StarCraft.The game play in all of them involved workers who could gather resources and build various structures, which in turn could produce military units, or upgrade the technology to improve the military units' fighting abilities. Players controlled their units and buildings, and used the workers to gather resources and attempt to fend off their enemies, all in "real time."
Despite the popularity of the genre, it eventually burned itself out -- largely because the game play was largely the same, even though the settings changed. Advanced features only made the game play more complex, essentially limiting its appeal.
Now, Cossacks 3 could introduce a new generation of gamers to the RTS genre.
"With games like this, it really depends on how well the game plays," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group.
The realism of the graphics and the relevance of the material are crucial, he suggested.
The material "may be an issue for the Western markets but should play well in Europe and Eastern Europe," Enderle told TechNewsWorld. "In addition, there are a lot of folks worldwide that like period games."
