The release of America"s Army, the free multiplayer shooter created and funded by the US Army, has been highly successful over the past decade. Now it looks like China"s People"s Liberation Army is about to release its own game, Mission of Honor. The news was reported by the China Daily web site.
According to the story the game has been in development for the past two years in collaboration with the Wuxi Giant Interactive Group. The story says that Mission of Honor follows the story of a new soldier through training, individual missions and team combat ending in a large military drill. The game is described as being "quite fun" to play by soldiers who have played the game already. The story said that Mission of Honor is currently in the "debugging" processes which usually means that the game"s content is now locked. There"s no word on if Mission of Honor will be played just by China"s soldiers or if it will be released to the general public.
The US Army"s own attempt to develop such a training and recruitment tool, America"s Army, was first released for the PC in July 2002 for free and can be played by anyone, even non-US citizens. At the time having such a professionally created game released entirely for free was a novelty. It was also the first game released that used Epic"s Unreal Engine 2 graphics engine. Since then the game has gotten numerous content updates and in 2009 an all new version, America"s Army 3, was released with Unreal Engine 3.
Photo credit: Xinhua