Kixeye’s Next RTS, War Commander, Due Out in August
Yesterday at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle, Kixeye developers Paul Preece and David Scott gave a small preview of the company’s next real-time strategy game, War Commander, due out in August.
War Commander is a military-themed game set in a modern era with a higher degree of realism than Kixeye’s preceding games, Battle Pirates and Backyard Monsters. The game also implements more traditional RTS gameplay mechanics established in classic games like Command & Conquer; the ability to select and control individual units or drag the cursor over a group of units to select and control them, for example. Players will have access to 27 different unit types at launch.
Kixeye’s history on Facebook is a strangely low-key one for a developer whose games are all about blowing stuff up. Back when the company was still calling itself Casual Collective, it took a cautious approach to the Facebook platform by designing Backyard Monsters for a wide audience with cutesy graphics married to well-balanced combat. About six months ago, Kixeye decided to “get hard,” as Preece and Scott put it, ditching the cutesy look for edgier monsters and a persistent world where the damage players did to one another didn’t just vanish into a pop-up notification of “So-and-so attacked your base.” As a result, the game went from being 40% female to 96% male and now has excellent retention despite shrinking overall in monthly active users.
Battle Pirates, meanwhile, was aimed at a male audience from launch. Like the revamped Backyard Monsters, the world was persistent and players could attack each other at any time after a tutorial period expired. Preece and Scott report emergent gameplay behavior from Battle Pirates players where they will work together to coordinate attacks on bases. We’ve also personally experienced Battle Pirates players policing themselves for bad behavior (i.e. griefing), though Kixeye does have systems in place to prevent players from picking on each other too much. The game has never enjoyed Backyard Monsters’ size, but it has shown steady overall growth in MAU and daily active users in the last 90 days.
July 22nd, 2011 at 5:28 pm
Have you guys fired Will Harbin yet?
July 22nd, 2011 at 9:34 pm
Dont you think you should fix battle pirates and actually make it work like it should. Game has lots of problems and are getting worse daily,just read the forums. I love the game but what good is it if we cant play it?
July 23rd, 2011 at 4:52 am
If it is a cash cow stick with it, but FB RTS games are about as boring as it gets.
July 25th, 2011 at 4:53 am
@first post
I hope they did
July 25th, 2011 at 4:27 pm
What’s with all the Will Harbin hate?
July 25th, 2011 at 6:42 pm
Casual Collective for life!
July 27th, 2011 at 8:22 am
I like the nicer Backyard Monsters. What is wrong with a high percentage of female users?
July 30th, 2011 at 10:05 am
Will Harbin was the first sign of the CCpocolypse. What I honestly think, is that they should bring back the CC as a completely unrelated website to KIXEYE because, well, it IS completely unrelated. Just make it a side project. As it is now, it feels like the site could be deleted any time with no warning, but it still has many loyal members and GREAT games, just for different interests. Now that you’re making money from facebook, revive the CC!!!!! D: pwease?
August 3rd, 2011 at 5:52 pm
[...] time, the developer has launched Battle Pirates and is set to bring out a third Facebook-only game, War Commander, later this summer. The total size of the developer has gone from 3 to 60 in the last 18 months and [...]
August 15th, 2011 at 7:01 am
[...] Kixeye, meanwhile, is working on a game called War Commander that resembles the real-time strategy games such as Command & Conquer. In such games, there is fast-and-furious action as users control lots of military units from a birds-eye point of view. The game has a high degree of realism compared to Kixeye’s previous Battle Pirates and Backyard Monsters games. [...]