News from the Net By Alex van Kaam I have been mentioning a lot of MMORPG the last few issues and will probably mention lots more since they are the thing at the moment. But after reading this url http://www.time.com/time/interactive/entertainment/gangs_np. html, it sure puts a totally new prospective on MMORPG.... Five rough-looking men stepped out of a black sedan and burst into the Seoul PC caf‚ where Paek Jung Yul hangs out with Strong People Blood Pledge, his clan of online gamers. "Is the wizard here?" demanded one of the toughs, asking for the player who killed his character in an online game called Lineage. The "wizard" was there, alright, and he was feeling bold. He boasted that he had offed the gangman's virtual character just for the fun of it. Bad idea. The roughnecks dragged the 21-year-old into the urinal and pummeled him until he was covered with real-world bruises..... This is sad really and scary, but onto real game news..... http://www.unofficialtexmurphy.com/theater/theater.shtml has (at the time of writing) the 4th episode up, so go grab it !!! Eurogamer as a preview up for Final Fantasy X, although it's for the PS2 I think you can be fairly sure it will arrive on the PC too. http://www.eurogamer.net/content/p_ffx_ps2 Final Fantasy VIII had a lot to prove, coming off the back of arguably the best game of all time - Final Fantasy VII - and many people were disappointed with the result. The team hopes to prove that it can produce a classic with X, and with this in mind they have taken several gigantic steps forward, including the move to a polygon-based world. The last three Final Fantasies have relied upon pre-rendered backdrops and polygonal characters, but X will rely on a fully three-dimensional environment, retaining only the classic fixed camera perspective of the last three games. Another big change is the move to a Chrono Trigger-style battle arrangement, where battles take place on the same screen as the general adventuring. That is to say, practically every battle, because random encounters will still send gamers to a fight screen. Needless to say, this was a design restriction rather than a conscious decision on the part of the team. After a period of confusion, Square now seems keen to move towards a unified battle system. If you're a fan of the Final Fantasy series, the chances are by now you're fairly excited at the game's prospects, but make sure you take a seat for the next bombshell: Final Fantasy X is voice-acted. That's right, defying its traditional subtitle-driven roots, the team behind X is breaking new ground by using voice acting, with matching facial expressions. The voice acting and sub-titles can be toggled as you like, but we are expecting relatively big things from Squaresoft in this department. Anybody who watched the underrated Final Fantasy movie earlier this year will know that Square can handle lip-synch, and then some. Over at http://www.worldofmidgard.com/content/game/playing/ you will find all the info you need for (yet) another new MMORPG, at first I thought that this game had no chance with DAOC being out but after reading a bit more I feel that it might be pretty cool and maybe not so much focused on combat but more on living there.... Choosing a craft or trade (a profession) from a wide range of choices - a gatherer, for example, or a farmer, woodworker, or blacksmith - your character initially takes residence in one of five starter towns, or later on, maybe in a village created and built by players. The primary purpose of the game is to raise your social, professional, and political status; to become a master in your craft or trade, a significant and influential personality in the world, or perhaps the chief of a village or a union of villages. As your character gains more knowledge and learns more skills, he or she matures, grows wiser and older - in a world where age, wisdom, and maturity are the true measure of a person. With the ability to change profession, allegiance, or domicile at any point in the game, there's literally an infinite amount of possibilities available, ensuring the game will never grow stale. Midgard is based on the factual history and mythology of the period (Scandinavia, one thousand years ago), and thus players will have to contend with gods - praying and sacrificing to one god may grant you his or her favour, but it might also anger gods from warring factions - as well as mythological beasts and giants and invading barbarians. And while the game will reward those who choose a peaceful path, there is always a need for great warriors and fierce Vikings. Over at http://www.appeal.be/default2.htm you'll find info on the sequel to Outcast, The Lost Paradise, I truly loved the first game so lets hope this one will also come to the PC as for now it looks like PS2 again. Over at Solon.com we have the return of Lord British, http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/12/04/garriott/ Garriott's P.R. blitz comes after the end of a one-year noncompete clause in his contract with Electronic Arts, the company to whom he sold Origin the Austin game studio he founded to develop his Ultima games, in 1992. Now he works out of the Austin offices of NCSoft just 300 yards or so from his old headquarters. Now if you read my first link about online games you will know who NCSoft are..... Garriott's return to the gaming industry after parting ways with EA in late 2000 was supposed to be at a start-up called Destination Games a company he planned to run with his brother Robert. But soon after registering the domain, he was offered the opportunity to merge with the Korean-based NCSoft, developers of Lineage: The Blood Pledge, the most popular subscriber-based online game in the world. (As of this writing, Lineage boasts a staggering 3 million-plus players, mostly in Korea, Taiwan and other Asian economic hubs. By contrast, Everquest the most popular American subscription-based online game, has a mere 400,000 or so subscribers worldwide.) Talking about Ultima, over at http://www.twistsoft.co.uk/ they are remaking Ultima Underworld and have a simple tech demo up, nothing to exiting but hey if they finish the game then :-)) But over at http://www.peroxide.dk/ultima/tech2.htm we have the 2nd teck demo for the remake of Ultima 1, it's 18mb but you will love it, walk around, talk to people, see monsters (no combat yet) see the sun set and rise... I have seen commercial games looking a lot worse then this.... lets hope they can get the content of U1 unto their engine and I think we will all be playing this game. And over at http://icdweb.cc.purdue.edu/%7Efrazieri/home.html we have a full remake of U5...... this seems to be the thing these days. remakes of old games.... Talking about old games..... Meridian 59 might or might not ring a bell, kind of an old MMORPG taken over by 3DO (the people behind M&M), well some of the original creators of the game have gotten together and bought the game back from 3DO, you can read all about it at http://meridian59.neardeathstudios.com/M59- FAQ.shtml, I subscribed to the newsletter which comes every week, it's a nice read about how things are shaping up.... recommend you subscribe. Now the next thing I found very very cool: http://www.voodooextreme.com/articles/devilwhiskeydiary.html it's about the Bards Tale: Bards Legacy, this is - as far as I could tell - the follow up to the old Bards tale, and it looks just like it from the screenshots .... too cool!!!! Not sure if all of you know it, but many will, Gundam, the popular Japanese series, well it's going online in a MMORPG kinda of way, check out the screenshots at http://www.voodooextreme.com/articles/gundamonlinescreens.h tml and head over to http://61.206.44.102/index_en.html to reach the official web page Soul Reaver 2 is the game I just finished and over at Gamespot they have a PS2 review of that game, but it's identical to the PC so head over to http://gamespot.com/gamespot/stories/reviews/0,10867,282129 5,00.html, this is one very, very, very nice game!!! The story behind the Soul Reaver series was convoluted before it even began. Set several thousand years after the PlayStation role-playing game Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, the original Soul Reaver put you in the role of Raziel, a vampiric lieutenant in a medieval fantasy world ruled by the vampire protagonist and namesake of the previous game. With us so far? Good. There's more. After being cast into an abyss and mutilated beyond repair by Kain, Raziel awoke many years later to find himself transformed into a being that now survived on soul energy instead of blood, and he was quickly set after his former master and cohorts by a creature called The Elder God who claimed to have rescued and restored him. Still with us? We're almost done. At Soul Reaver's climax (or anticlimax, as many would call it), Kain eluded your grasp by escaping into the time stream and travelling into the past. In Soul Reaver 2, you travel back in time, as Raziel, to find Kain and discover the answers to all the unanswered questions from the first game. If matters weren't complicated enough already, you now find yourself interacting with characters and plotlines from the original Blood Omen, itself already awash in mysteries, manipulations, and time paradoxes. Luckily, you don't need to fully understand the complete back story of the series at the outset of Soul Reaver 2 to enjoy it. Throughout the game, the narrative alludes to past events, strings you along with partial answers to its long-standing questions, or provides you with new mysteries to try to uncover. If its lush CG cinemas and in-game story sequences don't fully set the stage for the current events, its text-based timeline fills in the necessary gaps. Obviously, the story is a very important element of Soul Reaver 2. In fact, it's your main motivation to progress in the game. With every new environment that you gain access to and with every puzzle that you solve, you're rewarded with a sequence that either moves the story along or gives you a clear understanding of where you need to go next. As complicated as the storyline might sound, it's very compelling and inspires you to push on through much more than the storylines of games such as Eidos' Tomb Raider series. Over at CG online we have a long article with the title "Here There be Dragons, into the past and future of the king of role- playing games - the something troubled history of Dungeons & Dragons (phew) http://www.cgonline.com/features/011218-f1-f1.html Over at http://www.miss-match.com/interview.php?id=45 we find an interview with Jens Bremmekamp about Neocron, yet another MMORPG :-) Genty Do you see all MMORPG fans buying Neocron and if so what do you think the reason for this will be? Jens Bremmekamp *g* That would be nice. I dream about that, but I can't say if I see it. That's the bane and at the same time the great thing about this genre - you can't really predict much here. What I know for a fact is, that Neocron will bring a new perspective to the MMORPG market, a new flavour. I think it will appeal to all players who haven't gotten into MMORPGs so far because they disliked the existing settings, I think it will appeal to many players who were not satisfied with the combat systems of existing MMORPGs and of course I also hope that every MMORPG player will have a closer look at it and get into it. It's definitely worth it. IntelGamers have an interview with Wizardy 8 - http://www.intelgamer.com/news/articles/2281.htm Wizardry 8 is finally out on store shelves and many fans are raving that this is one of the best RPGs of all time. After playing the game for the past several weeks, I have to agree that this is truly a great product. Linda Currie, who has been with the Wizardry 8 project from day one, was kind enough to sit down and answer some of our questions. Intelgamer: Wizardry 7 came out about 7-8 years ago if memory serves me right. What took so long to make number 8? Linda Currie: Well, actually Sirtech Canada only started working on Wizardry 8 in late 1996 with a very small team, ramping it up through 1997. Having said that, it still took longer than we had hoped. We ran into issues with our licensed technology - after we'd been working on Wiz 8 for a while (a year?) the technology we had licensed changed from C to C++. We had to port the work that had been previously done and with complications along the way, this added 8-12 months to the project. But this wasn't the only delay. We had underestimated just how much work it would be to recreate Wizardry from the ground up... There was an incredible amount of redesign... more than you might think from first playing Wiz 8. Our goal was to ensure that Wiz 8 still felt like Wizardry, yet so much about it had changed by entering the 3D realm. And finally, it took a long time after we had finished all work on it before it actually appeared on the shelves. I am still looking to see if I can get it here in Europe, but no luck so far :-( Talking about 3DO and M&M, over at http://www.cgonline.com/features/011227-f1-f1.html we have a preview of M&M IX, now will it become like Ultima IX...... Naturally, the centerpiece of the game is its new engine. "That's our biggest step, finally bringing 3D to Might and Magic," says Dickinson. The vehicle of choice is the LithTech Development System, which New World is giving a real workout, largely because of the need to integrate a lot of database operations as well as the difficulties in making a real- time 3D engine do turn-based combat. "I'm pretty sure that even Monolith would say we've pushed it [LTDS] farther than even they thought possible," says Dickinson. Combat will reprise the same tried and true formulas used in Might and Magic games for years, but the immersion factor should be a lot higher. Gone are the days of running into 50 lizardmen at a time. "The problem with the previous engine was, that's what we had to do to make it a challenge," says Dickinson. With the vastly enhanced and more frequent scripting in Might and Magic IX, though, encounters can be much more elaborate. The screenshots looks nice.... but am not sure... the last few M&M were a disappointment after the M&M Xeen series.... but who knows... http://www.sgalaxy.com/_gameinfo.html will tell you everything you wanted to know about Shattered Galaxy, a MMORTSG At http://www.unknownplayer.com/archive/01/12/21/199.php we find an interview with one of the people making ShadowBane, another MMORPG And finally a non-online thingie (well if you want it to be) http://www.cgonline.com/previews/neverwinte-01-p3.html about Neverwinter Nights...... looks pretty nice too. And as my almost last link... http://www.ve3d.com/games/interviews/christaylor/ about Dungeon Siege which is described as a Action/RPG but does sound nice anyway. As a final note head over to http://www.oldmanmurray.com/realnews.shtml, he can be pretty rude at time, but also extremely funny!!! so be warned (about the rude part) - o -