DALLAS, Texas--Just when we thought we'd seen everything that World in Conflict, the upcoming stategy game about World War III, had to offer, developer Massive Entertainment manages to surprise us yet again. This time, at QuakeCon 2007, the company is showing off the new director feature in the game.

　　If you think it's a bit surprising to find a real-time strategy game at a first-person shooter festival such as QuakeCon, keep in mind that World in Conflict's multiplayer game features team-based gameplay that's not unlike the kind found in shooters such as Battlefield 2. There can be eight players on each team, controlling a small group of units and working in concert to destroy the other team. The action is furious, cinematic, and nonstop, as the game is designed so that there's almost little down time where you're not doing anything.

　　While we've seen and played the multiplayer game on plenty of occasions, Massive showed off a cool feature that you could use to watch and rewatch the action from many different angles. The game will ship with a director system that's not unlike the ones used in many television control rooms for news programs or live events. Let's say you want to watch a saved replay of a game to find out what went wrong or right. The director replays the game, but divides the screen into many smaller windows, each with a camera focused on a key area of the map. You can select any camera and get a full-screen feed from it, or if you have a second monitor, you can throw that feed onto the second screen.

　　This system will have all sorts of applications. If you're running a tournament and want to broadcast the action to a larger audience, you can use the director to switch between the action. There are full telestrator tools that let you then "write" on the screen to highlight important moments. If you want to learn how you lost a battle, you can use the director to replay the battle and watch from all the different angles. Or if you want to show off, you can use the director to create cinematic war movies. The director looks like a cool and useful feature, and it'll ship when along with the rest of the game this September.