I'm sitting on the grass at Biggin Hill, my Mk 1 Spitfire silent but for the odd boorish joke crackling across the radio. It's the skipper keeping up morale. All 12 of us in 610 squadron know that Biggin was the most heavily bombed airfield of the second world war; no surprise then that we're itching to leave the ground.
Welcome to the virtual reality of WW2Online, a massive multiplayer online game (MMOG) with a three-year heritage and a fanatical subscription-paying following. I've enrolled as an Allied pilot in Day of Eagles, a two-day event designed to give hundreds of desktop propeller-heads a chance to re-fight The Battle of Britain. It's part of a strategy from the Texas-based Cornered Rat Software to keep its ever-expanding chunk of the MMOG market loyal and distracted.
The scale of what CRS and its partner Playnet are offering is difficult to visualise given the "car park" dimensions of FPS (first person shooter) multiplayer titles like Counter Strike. WW2Online's playing area is the largest single-world online environment of any MMOG, measuring 921.6km by 998.4km and taking in most of 1940s northern France, Belgium and the south of England. All key towns, roads, airfields, forests and mountains of the period are modelled along with most of the weapons available to Axis and Allied forces.
My weapons of choice, eight Browning 7.7mm wing-mounted machine guns, have been idle for 20 minutes or so; just enough time to double check the detailed mission objectives in my inbox and map myself an escape route, should I run into the Luftwaffe. Finally, the commanding officer, Cubes123, yells "scramble" and 12 deskbound Douglas Baders lurch into the air, in something like a formation.
There are over 200 massive multiplayer titles trying to garner a foothold in the mass market that their single-player contemporaries enjoy. Until recently, lack of bandwidth has kept titles like Everquest and Ultima Online on a tight leash. While many have been impressed by Everquest's performance (subscriptions topped 450,000 in mid 2003). Sony points out that its release of Everquest: Online Adventures for broadband-enabled PlayStation2s, opens the door to mainstream acceptance of persistent world games. Also from the Sony stable, Star Wars Galaxies, released in the UK last Friday, brings thoroughbred brand loyalty to the battle and talk of ports to 2.5G and 3G mobile phone platforms.
Meanwhile, back over the channel things are hotting up. We've mislaid two of our posse: one failed to bring up his gear during takeoff and impaled himself on a pine tree, the other got lost in cloud. But the men of 610 are ploughing on. Rich23, a 33-year-old art teacher from Sweden, Bueford, 39, a sheet-metal worker from Seattle. All life is here, chattering zealously over the freeware-powered Teamspeak 2 voice server and horizontally scrolling text channels. Then commander Cubes relays the good news from fighter command, we're turning back to Whitstable in Kent where a Royal Navy convoy is getting a hiding.
Naval operations and in particular the inclusion of large cargo vessels for the transportation of men and machinery are WW2Online's latest attraction. In order for a subscription-based entity to remain fresh, the project is subject to vigorous upgrades.
"We're marathon runners rather than sprinters." Says Playnet Inc executive producer Al "Rafter" Corey. "Imagine running a marathon with thousands of pit bulls chasing you but no sign of a finish line. That's the life of a development, production, support team for an MMOG."
By pit bulls, Rafter is referring to the voracious consumers of this uniquely historical online experience. I can feel history bearing down, as me and wingman Rich23 circle a line of Allied destroyers and gun boats; history and what looks like three of the afore mentioned dogs of war dressed in Messerschmitt's clothing.
Re-enactments like this are hosted on a separate server cluster to the standard 24/7 persistent gaming world, ensuring that life goes on inside the A13 tanks, Opel trucks and machine-gun nests of everlasting 1940. Theoretically the servers offer a ceiling of about 10,000 simultaneous players. Lucky for me then that only two 109's are on my tail, announcing their arrival with a few rounds through my right wing. Moments later, I'm belly up on a beach south of Eastchurch.
I may have lost my battle, but did we win the war? Well, when all the skirmishes from two days of sea and air action were tallied, the in-game gazette The World @ War led with the crushing headline, Major Axis victory. Computers can be so pedantic.
<A HREF="http://www.wwiionline.com"" TARGET="_NEW">www.wwiionline.com
