World in Conflict, the upcoming action-oriented RTS from Swedish dev house Massive Entertainment, has been garnering plenty of attention for its fast-paced multiplayer design, but few details have been released so far about its single-player side. GameSpot AU caught up with lead designer Nicklas "Cece" Cederstrom at last month's GO3 Conference in Perth, Australia, to talk more about what solo campaigners can expect.

GameSpot AU: Why has all the focus on World in Conflict been on the multiplayer side thus far?

Nicklas Cederstrom: When the project started out, it started as a multiplayer game. We wanted to get that right first, so we focused on that and spent the first 16 months on getting the feeling that it's going to be a great multiplayer game. When we knew what we had was really good, we started focusing on single player, and we've been working on that for over a year now.

GS AU: So is it a multiplayer game first and foremost?

NC: No, absolutely not. It's 50-50. It has a rock solid and very interesting single-player campaign, but with the added depth of multiplayer.

GS AU: Why did you decide to lighten the RTS elements in World in Conflict--such as having no resource gathering?

NC: First of all, we wanted to make a great game that a lot of people will play. Massive has done two games before--Ground Control I and II--and they both got great reviews, and everyone that played it loved it. But it didn't reach the mass market. This time around we decided to focus on a setting that we knew would draw more people, a setting that we all fell in love with from Red Dawn, the old '80s movie. We decided to make a game that's easy to get into and we focused on action--this is an action game. Personally, I don't even call it an RTS, because it's just pure action.

GS AU: If it's not an RTS, what would you call it?

NC: That's hard. Internally we sometime call it RTT--real-time tactics. But basically I would just say it's a come-together-with-your-friends action game. We want it to be the Counter-Strike of RTS gaming. So in multiplayer, we have 20 minute matches, so that you know when you get into a match it'll be 20-minutes or shorter. You can play two or three games in your lunch break--if you do a traditional RTS, you can be in a match for up to four hours or 14 minutes.