Original War

Original War is a Czech RTS with RPG elements. It had it rough in the world. It was released not long after Yuri's Revenge expansion for Red Alert 2 and some people were comparing it to RA2 (even though these two games are very different). Commercially, OW wasn't a success but in my opinion it has many rather unique aspects which make it well worth of having the word "Original" in it's title.

Let's start with the story.

The Story

Original War is loosely based on Jeschke Wolfgang's The Last Day of Creation. The novel tells a story of Americans building a time machine in order to steal oil from Middle East before humans even evolved. The game has a similar premise.

Instead of oil, everything revolves around newly discovered substance named siberite (after the place of origin - Siberia). Siberite has some interesting properties which makes it a catalyst for cold nuclear fusion. Simply drop it in water and the hydrogen in it fuses into helium releasing more energy than you will ever need. Americans do not build a time machine here, they find it during the first world war in Siberia. A device of unknown origin, which uses siberite as a fuel, transports anything on approximately the same spot approximately 2 million years in the past. And it's one way only.

Of course, an expedition is sent with a goal of mining the siberite and moving it to Alaska. Simple enough, you just need to keep an eye on hungry prehistoric predators. The problem is that once your character arrives in the past, people start to shoot at you, and they talk Russian. The thing is you already succeeded in your mission and these Russians are from different future. In their future Americans hold all the cards thanks to Alaskite but Russians found some really old remains of modern technology in Siberia including the time machine and small amounts of Alaskite. They put two and two together and start sending troops and heavy armor in the past to protect their Alaskite deposits. Throw in Arabian sheikhs who worry about oil loosing it's value and you get a three faction war with saber-toothed tigers running around.

The campaign is very character and story driven. The amount of people sent back in time is limited, therefore every person is important and this can be seen in both the story and gameplay design. There is an American campaign and Russian campaign. Arabian campaign was planned but never made because of unsatisfactory sales. Both campaigns are connected to each other with certain events and there is one big decision which branches campaigns into two paths. There are also plenty of small choices which doesn't change how the story continues but do change certain details.

The Enviroment

I would say that OW's graphics still hold up really well. Backgrounds for the maps were made by hand with hexagonal height map underneath. The flora is very varied and there are animals ranging from fish to mastodons. In addition to the varied enviroment, every faction has a distinct look to their clothes, buildings and vehicles. Together with the excelent music from Michal Pavlíček, the game has atmosphere like no other. Even if you have no interest in RTS games, I would like to encourage you to listen to OW's soundtrack.

Apart from looking good, enviroment also affects gameplay. Trees are obstacles which can be removed, hills grant more vision and range, rivers and swamps slow down units, tigers kill units.

The Gameplay

As I said earlier, every person is important in this game. Forget about barracks spewing out one soldier after another and buildings just rising up from the ground. You have a handful of people and you have to order them around to build structures, collect resources, research technologies and assemble vehicles in the factory - and then to drive them.

To help you with this you get an ability to queue orders for your units. You can queue almost anything, leaving your units to perform tasks on their own giving you plenty of time to pay attention to something else. And when that is not enough, you can also slow down or speed up the game and even pause it and give orders while the game is paused.

The game has in total 4 resources - shipments, oil, siberite and energy.

Oil and siberite is easy, you just need to find deposit and build a mine on it, it will never run out. For energy you will need power plants - solar, oil or siberite. That allows you to power more advanced structures.

The most interesting is the shipments. These are crates filled with useful materials sent to you from the future. During the game you will hear a lound bang, that is a sound of shipments materializing somewhere on the map, you just have to find them before the enemy does.

The fact is, the game has actualy 5 resources. The last one are the people themselves. They do everything around your base and they do get better at it. Every character has 4 skills which levels up as he does appropriate tasks, these are military, engineering (for buildings), mechanical (for vehicles) and science skills. You have to order your people around to do the necessary research, base building and eventualy attacking the enemy.

In the campaign, you will meet a good number of characters, each with their own personalities, commenting on what is happening in the game and having some character developement. The dialogs are great and their personality sometimes leak into game mechanics. A great example is in a mission where your character leaves to join a different faction and a certain character will reject joining you based on who else is coming with you.

When it comes to the actual weapons your characters can utilize, you have quite a lot of faction specific technologies as well as shared technologies. There are snipers, lasers, invisibility, remote and computer controled vehicles, hidden cameras, flamethrowers, remote controled explosives, drugs, small guns, big guns, double big guns, rockets, hacking, radars, rockets which can slow down time and teleport units, bulldozer, hovercraft, vehicles filled with explosives and of course the siberite bomb which can level the whole base - in comparsion RA's nuclear missile looks like a weapon of mass disappointment.

The vehicles you build are made of 4 components - weapon, steering, chassis and engine. As long as the chassis can support it, you can put together any combination of components, making just the right kind of vehicle for the job (or the worst kind).

Last but not least are the Apemen. These human ancestors can be persuaded for your cause making them into capable workers, soldiers, living bombs or even drivers. Yes, you can nail an Apeman to your vehicle, stick some wires into its head and send this freak of science to the frontlines.

The Problems

Alas, even such a great game as this one is not without its problems. While the real strength of this game is in the campaign (the story is great, characters are memorable, missions are varied and have secondary tasks for extra medals) the game has no skirmish, only multiplayer. The multiplayer is just tacked on, the game is obviously balanced around the campaign which makes americans stronger than other factions and certain weapons are outclassed by others. But these balance problems are not severe enough to break the multiplayer. What breaks it are two words - Synchronization Lost.

This game has very bad net code. Players dropping from the game is a common occurance, modding makes it worse.

There are also certain quirks to the game, like unit's tendency to change direction as least often as they can while moving from A to B, which leads to different path than a straight one, which can lead to unintentionally getting your units in range of the enemy (the pathfinding is not really bad, actually it's very good, it always finds a direct path even in complex enviroment, units just like to follow the grid).

And of course, the voice acting... The Czech voice acting is both excelent and hilariously bad. The bad goes mainly for the random supporting characters which you see only in one mission and never again, while the good voices goes for the recuring characters. The English voices are in my (probably biased) opinion worse. The tone is often completely different and some of the main cast are just awful. One of the reasons why the game did so poorly in the west.

The Conclusion

Original war is not the best game I played, but it definitely is my most favourite. It has that kind of atmosphere which is just right for me, an uncharted world of the past with an alien mystery to it. I have been part of the community around this game for many years, made some good friends, got involved in some modding... but we don't play much anymore.

The support for this game is just one guy in Scotland. He does a hell of a job keeping this game running but the game's source code doesn't make it easy for him, being written in Delphi in a mix of Czech and English.

Original War is still alive mainly thanks to our fellows from Poland. They are the ones who still didn't give up on the multiplayer and they keep modding. The biggest mod which they work on is our own official Arabian Campaign we never got. Getting what is left of the original cast to voice it would be like a dream come true. But I guess it's better to be informed than to live with false hope.

Also the astronomical clock in Brno looks similar to the time machine from the game. And one of our energy distributors is named EON. Coincidence?

I like the fully customizable vehicle part... Wish more games had it. Oldest game I've played with that sort of customization was MissionForce: CyberStorm. (a part of the Earthsiege and Tribes universe)

Really, a lot of the really cool stuff from older games was left out of newer ones, and some of the worst stuff was kept. (like small queue limits, or selection restrictions) What I want is fully customizable units/buildings/tech, RTS gameplay, tons of options, and fewer "e-sports" simplifications. IMO the only reason this type of customization has failed, is because they only ever go 1/10th of the way, never all the way.

I like the fully customizable vehicle part... Wish more games had it. Oldest game I've played with that sort of customization was MissionForce: CyberStorm. (a part of the Earthsiege and Tribes universe)

 

Really, a lot of the really cool stuff from older games was left out of newer ones, and some of the worst stuff was kept. ...

Couldn't agree more, RTS games often have severe lack of options. That's why I liked Supreme Commander so much, with the option of building missile launchers, artillery or nukes in addition to units and having countermeasures for all of them. Even defense towers were useful.

In RTS like C&C (and sadly in Original War as well) there are units which get outclassed by more advanced tech and you never build them again. And after you figure the game out, you just build tanks because thats all you need.

Customizability of vehicles in Original War is mostly a gimmick, it makes sense for selecting between wheels or tracks instead of having double the number of vehicles, one with wheels and other with tracks. But most combinations are just dumb and there are weapons which noone uses in multiplayer.

Static defenses are almost useless here, infantry is practically nonexistent, because you need people doing stuff and more importantly not die, so you always put them into vehicles. No ships or aircraft also limits your options in the game.

I looked into this and it's on Steam.