With their recent acquisition of Massive Entertainment, and the World in Conflict intellectual property, UbiSoft have announced their plans for the development studio. Speaking last week at the BMO Capitol Markets Interactive Entertainment conference, Yves Guillemot, CEO and President of UbiSoft announced that Massive Entertainment will help the company "get closer to the MMO space."

Whilst Massive Entertainment have a considerable talent for developing strategy games, Massive employees are known to be massive fans of World of Warcraft, and other games with heavy online components. In interviews prior the release of World in Conflict, team members often joked that "half the team plays WoW, the other half plays BF2", and that they'd like to branch out.

Read full article by Steven Perdikis

if it's an MMORTS like you suggested it could be interesting but if it's another MMORPG i'll be sad never got into WiC, the demo seemed to have a heavy emphasis on micromanagement and in my eyes micromanagement=excuse for poor AI, never finished Ground Control 2 though

MMORTS?

I freaking love the idea!

BRING IT ON

There are a few floating around the internets. Beyond Protocol and Time of Defiance spring to mind. It'd be nice to see a well publicised, big budget game though

isn't that precisely what the latest tom clancy end war is though?

i mean it's practically WiC for console with MMO setting in that the fight are waged against ppl around the world with persistent effect on the strategic level.

if anything bring the Ground Control back... and if it has to return to us in the form of an MMORTS then bring it on.

I don't know as I haven't played it but isn't endwar just a bunch of MP skirmish maps that just indicate where in the world you are? I mean like it's only persistent in that it tracks who 'holds' each map

three MMORTSes that would pwn.

1. Ground Control Online
2. Homeworld Online
3. Dawn Of War Online

I hope this is Ground Control.

Relic hinted at this ages ago. I was hoping to god that the trailer at the end of Dark Crusade was this (showed a bunch of planets and explosions of war on them all).

Not sure if they're still working on it or was the CoH Online game being offered to Asia.

exe3: no not quite... basically when u finished a fight whatever unit you have that survived the fight are available to use in the next one if you chose so and whatever experience they have accumulated are intact as well.

units can also be saved by a recovery plane in the event that they are destroyed in a battle as long as the wreck and crew survivor are intact, if they are hit the second time around however they are permanently destroyed and disappear from the unit list for good, otherwise they can be used in the next fight though i am not sure if it incur a cost to replenish the unit strength back to combat level.

as far as an MMORTS are concerned that and persistent map area are all that it needs to be qualified as one.

so... really the only thing i am mainly interested from MASSIVE is if they have plan to resurrect ground control universe with this plan, that and to have it in PC of course since End War is not available on PC.

I guess my view is a bit different, when I think of an MMORTS I think of it just like an MMORPG only you control your units, so it's still a gigantic world only instead of controlling just a warlock etc you control a whole bunch of units

what you mention about the units is good though, I really liked that in Battle for Middle earth

well fundamentally MMO just means Massively Multiplayer Online

the simple fact is that MMORPG stripped of it's MMO is just that: an RPG.

so an MMORTS stripped of it's MMO should be exactly that: an RTS.

so in that regard MMORPG can't be used as a measuring stone on how MMORTS should be except it's MMO essence.

and as far as the MMO is concerned, persistent world, large online player base and participant, persistent units and the like already qualify it.

and End World in that effect also mixed in some RPG element into it by the fact that the units can be improved in different ways as they rank up essentially a mini RPG advancement woven into it, if that still doesn't qualify then i don't think any RTS can be turned into MMORTS ever.