

It's a neat way of justifying the split between the Echelon's near-future technology and the Sai's more spiritual psychic powers and beast units, but we doubt it'll play a major part in most players' experience. This gives rise to the schism between Stormrise's two factions: the vault-dwelling, recently emerged Echelon and the surface-surviving, post-human Sai. Underground vaults are built just in time to host society's great and good, whilst the less fortunate are locked outside to fend for themselves. It's something to do with global warming and a weather control system which goes wrong and a giant storm which rips the world apart.

They probably didn't spend a lot of time on the storyline, anyway. There were probably some other bits in-between, but that's the nub of it. But once the prototype was up and running, the idea was seen as having real potential. Whip Select was purely a conceptual idea, an answer to an engineering challenge which bored Creative Assembly statistician Ken Turner posed himself. In fact it was never meant to be a game at all. Originally, Stormrise wasn't meant to be a console title. The environments we saw were all fairly dour post-apocalyptic cityscapes, but there was mention of potnential map-based DLC. However, speed and efficiency don't always equal ease of use, as so many developers who have produced console RTS games have discovered. We weren't allowed to go hands-on with the game, so we can only report that it all looks faster and more efficient than traditional control systems. On top of that you need to have an awareness of where your units are on the map and how they relate to the camera position to navigate with accuracy. Identifying the small icons can be tricky and the rapid camera changes are disorientating. Initially, it all looks a bit bewildering. In the PC version, holding right click and flicking the mouse will have exactly the same effect, which means less scrolling. You can jump right from one side of the map to the other with one quick flick, or switch rapidly between all your units to keep track of events. Direct that beam over one of white icons, let go and the camera will jump across the map to that point. Pressing the right stick produces a yellow beam. Units and resource nodes are shown as white icons. The system works like this: the camera settles naturally into a third-person view behind your current unit.
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Having watched Bhopti zip around Stormrise's post-apocalyptic cityscapes with quick flicks of the right stick, it's something we're ready to believe. He's just announced that Stormrise's Whip Select control system means using a control pad is even faster and more efficient than using a keyboard and mouse. Bhopti scans the room to see if what he's just said has sunk in. He natters amicably throughout the two hour presentation for real-time strategy title Stormrise, dropping in anecdotes stories, technical details and expletives with ease. Creative Assembly PR Vispi Bhopti is a talkative bloke.
