Project G is an MMO real-time strategy game from NCSoft

I have learned to be suspicious of the MMORTS genre, because experience suggests the blend is about cramming free-to-play energy limits and microtransactions into acts of base and army building. That could still be the case in NCSoft's Project G, but it looks like it's delivering the kind of massive-scale warfare that should be inherent to the genre.

Here's the trailer, which apparently consists of entirely in-game footage:

The press release announcing Project G is a little vague. The trailer above apparently depicts melee and ranged fights between different fantasy races, "objective and territory conquest wars", and individual battles which "expand into massive warfare." Project director Minseok Seo also says that Project G features an "MMO-based massive-scale battle system", and that, "Players will be able to experience the quintessence of strategy games, coupled with various units and worlds unique to Project G, making the gameplay itself the fun factor for the players." Mm.

I can't tell from the trailer whether this would be fun to play, because in combat scenes I can't tell what the player is doing beyond giving move commands. I do enjoy how many units are on-screen at once, controlled by seemingly different players, and the ability to zoom out Supreme Commander-style until everything is just an icon on a map. An RTS operating at this kind of scale is a kind of dream, even if it proves once again to be one that can't survive contact with reality for one reason or another.

Project G has been revealed as part of "NCing", NCSoft's public R&D initiative. It's the same initiative under which they revealed similarly slick MMO shooter Project LLL late last year.