Monday - February 11, 2002
| Dungeon Siege Center has posted 41 new screenshots from the game, bringing the total numer of Dungeon Siege Screenshots on the net to 753.254 :-) |
Packmule.org has posted their Dungeon Siege Beta Impressions. Four pages with screens from the character generation and the game. Here's something about fighting:
How much you micromanage battles is largely dependent on your game speed settings and how often you use the pause button. You can simply set your characters to "attack freely, move freely" and click somewhere near an enemy and let them handle it with the weapons you've selected (while you enjoy some zoomed in carnage), or you can slow the game down a bit and tell them each which enemy to attack, use specific spells and weapons on each enemy, etc. My personal favorite method is to select only my main character, put the rest on follow and then charge in with one character letting the rest fend for themselves. Hitting the "Health" potion key during a battle causes all party members below 50% health (except packmules who don't have hands to be able to drink from bottles) to stop and drink a health potion. Similarly, hitting the "Mana" potion key will tell your needy party members to gulp a mana potion. Of course, while they're drinking they won't be able to do anything else - but they replenish as they begin drinking, so you don't have to worry that they'll die by the time they finish drinking. Additionally, you don't have to worry about wasting potions because they'll drink only as much as they need. At the beginning of the game, health potions are almost ridiculously abundant. However, as you progress you'll find yourself running out more quickly and being forced to be more careful. |
| Akella has released yet another six new screenshots from their upcoming naval RPG Sea Dogs 2... |
Gamespot has written a preview of Warcraft 3, six pages long, with several screenshots. Here's how it starts:
Blizzard's games always run the risk of being overexposed. It almost seems as if the company is too excited about its own work to be able to hold anything back, and fans are usually so eager to learn every detail about the company's upcoming games that, once they're finally released, it's almost as if they've been here all along. This is certainly true of Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, which was announced in 1999 and is finally nearing completion. During these years in production, the game has transformed from what Blizzard originally dubbed a "role-playing strategy" game into a decidedly more-conventional take on the real-time strategy genre. All throughout the game's development, we've had opportunities to sit down and try the game, such as the E3 trade show in May 2001 or the European Computer Trade Show later that year. But the launch of last week's Battle.net beta program has given us ample time to really get a sense of what Warcraft III is all about.
Overexposed? Nah. *g* |
Stratics presents to you an official House of Commons with the developers of the Massive Multiplayer Online Space Strategy game Darkspace
This house of commons will be held at February 22nd at 5:00pm CST in the #darkspace channel on theirr IRC Servers, you connect to them by using mIRC and entering one of the following servers:
irc.stratics.dhp.com
stratics.frws.com
coldfront.gamers-irc.org
stratics.truefear.net
They also have a full contest going, where you can win a free month of DarkSpace, to learn more about the game, and to find out how to enter the contest, make sure to visit their DarkSpace contest page
For more information E-mail them at darkspace@stratics.com |
Our hosted site The Locus Inn has uploaded two new screenshots from Divine Divinity, with a wizard showing some great looking spells. You can find them in their gallery.
Also you can check out another cool wallpaper from the intro movie, with Arhu the white cat. The wallpaper is available in 4 different sizes. |
Two new screenshots of the wizard showing some spells can be found at the gallery.
Also a new wallpaper has been uploaded. This time it features the small white cat Arhu who plays an important role in Divinity. The wallpaper is derived from the intro movie and you can find that in four different sizes right here. Or you can check out how it looks first via the image below. |
| Just a last news roundup before I will have to get some sleep (haven't slept more than 4 hours a day for the last 10 days or so): Ther will be an audio interview with Josh Sawyer, lead designer of Icewind Dale II. It is scheduled for broadcasting at at 9:30 PM EDT at XGR... |
| Another german article that was brought to our attention today is a preview of HoMM 4 (also at Spieleflut.de). Once again, Babelfish will come in handy, and once again there are some screenshots with the article which can be understood without it :-). |
| Spieleflut.de has posted a preview of Eve Online, in german, so you might want to use a babelfish for translation. And even if this translation gets screwed, there are some nice screenshots to look at at the page... | | Source: Voodooextreme |
| Orc Command has posted the music from the Warcraft 3 beta. Haven't heard it yet, so I can't tell you what it is like. Ah, just do a little bit of discovery yourself, will you? *g* |
MGON cornered Chris Talyor for an interview about Dungeon Siege. Here's a bit:
MGON: In the past Dungeon Siege has been talked about as a possible Diablo killer, however the game seems to have gone off in a direction which also borrows from games like Baldur’s Gate, with the multiple character party stuff and more outdoors exploration. Would you stay the emphasis is still on Diablo style action or does the multiparty strategy play a bigger part now?
Chris: The action part of the game is more important to me. The game is about instant in your face action. You are running the game and hacking into the bad guys very quickly, without interruption from the scene, because of the continuous loading and the fact that all of the story development takes place ‘in engine’. For me this is the single most important feature in the game, although the usability is also important.
We have been sending builds of the code to the usability labs, and making that sure anyone could play quickly and easily has been our goal. My wife, who is 31 and not a gamer even came by the office the other day. She dropped by to do some testing and get a feel for the game for what she thought would be a few hours, until she was bored. However she ended up playing for a lot longer, around eight hours and found the game just kept her attention. So accessibility and action are still really major factors. |
 Wasteland Wolf dead
(PC: Single-Player RPG) | Posted by Rendelius @ 11:58 - Top 
| Game Info | Homepage |
Not even a month after it was announced, Wasteland Wolf, a Fallout style RPG, is dead. According to a post at Vault113.net, it died of unprofessionality:
1) The programmers they had in the beginning were not committed enough, and one even made the wrong engine (heh). And freeware engines were deemed unsatisfactory.
2) Lack of solid work plan and design documents. No design doc was made, changes were made when someone on forums said "wouldn't it be cool if you...", or something like that.
3) Nobody listened to the lead designer.
Kudos to Big G. for pointing us to that newsbit. |
Luke from Ferrago informed us that they have a preview of Star Wars: Galaxies online at their site. Very detailed and a informative, as this snippet about character generation shows:
When you actually get around to creating you character, you will discover that it’s a little different from the likes of Everquest. In Galaxies, there is no level system, instead LucasArts have optioned for a ‘Skill System’. The Skills system will utilise skill trees, as you start learning a skill, it will develop and branch out, giving your character a great many skills to master. The skills trees will not be linear either, LucasArts promise, as you can change to another skill at any point (you may feel that blaster repair is a lot more vital than crop-tending skills, for example). This ‘system’ should mean that your character will develop a great variety of skills and no two should be alike, meaning, hopefully, greater player diversity. It’s also interesting to note that aside from the obvious allegiances (Rebel or Imperial); LucasArts seem to reward the player who prefers to go it alone. There are very few ‘clans’ within the original package. Obviously a great many will appear when the game finally goes online, but it’s nice to see that the developers have gone for this approach for a change as it could lead to hundreds of warring factions… Which would be something to behold, certainly. |
Thanks to Maximus at Vaultnetwork for letting us know that NWVault has published an 15 questioninterview with BioWare, graciously contributed by world site, A Land Far Away. Some highlights of the interview include specific memory requirements of the modules, and a detailed scripting example. Here's a bit:
Question 6 Factions:
What is the default monster AI aggressiveness? Do monsters attack only PCs, do they attack other monsters, is it set via a drop down menu? Is it a faction (MonsterFaction) set to be hostile to any member not in the faction?
In Neverwinter Nights, the faction system is very powerful and customizable. When a faction is created, a two-way relationship (how faction A feels about faction B, and vice-versa) needs to be defined between that faction and any other faction by declaring a value between one and 100. To explain these values, let us use the example of a player faction and how the player faction relates to the other factions established within the module. A value of 90 through 100 in an entry indicates an ally who will protect the player faction against the attacks of hostile creatures. 11 through 89 is a neutral range, and members of factions set to this range will not attack unless attacked, nor come to the aid of the player if the player is attacked. If a faction is set to zero through ten, members of that faction will be hostile and attack the players' faction on sight. By default, players come in with the player faction and have their values set by the module. After that, the player can change any of the values through his/her in-game actions.
You can have as many factions as you wish in a module, but we have found it is best to keep the number of factions to a minimum, as it quickly becomes confusing. |
There is a new review of Gothic at Ascully.com. Ther review rates gothic 3 1/2 out of 5 stars, and the summary reads like this:
Gothic is a good RPG. It's not great, but it is good and definitely worth picking up if your a fan of this genre. The game comes on two cd's and takes just over a gig of hard drive space which isn't much really for the level of detail and sound quality you can expect from it. The system requirements are minimum a 400mhz processor and 128mb of RAM. The recommended requirements are a p3 600mhz with 256 RAM. My machine was way above these specifications and I didn't see any slowdown or problems at all. Also a point to note the game runs perfectly out of the box on Microsoft's new Windows XP operating system and the game doesn't even need a patch.
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The second part of the Freedom Force interview with Ken Levine is online now at Gamespy. Here's a bit:
GameSpy: Tell us more about the things you can destroy. What kind of objects can you rip out of the ground/pick up and use as weapons? Would it be plausible to pick up a civilian and use him or her as a weapon?
Ken Levine: We divide objects into throwable and wieldable. Throwable objects, like cars and dumpsters tend to be the heavier blunter instruments. Wieldable objects are things like street lights and traffic lights. These are great for clearing out large numbers of goons who are stupid enough to cluster together. And no, you can't pick up and wield a civilian! It's not that type of game! |
TTLG's www.StygianAbyss.com has posted its second Arx Fatalis Beta Tester's
Report. This report is a follow up to the previous one, and describes the
progress the game has seen since the last writing. It also features four
NPC images, and four totally new screenshots. (Not just new snapshots of
old areas, new, never seen before areas.). You can check out the article here... |
Check out our latest developer profile from the developers of Divine Divinity. This time it features Kirill Pokrovsky who is repsonsible for the music in the game.1) Tell us about yourself. Who are you and what do you do at Larian Studios.
I am a retired rock-star. Yes, you can call me like this. Back in the USSR I played in this legendary rock band ARIA. This was the first really heavy band in the Sovjet Russia, just before and also during the Perestroïka. Every teenager in the country knew about our band. I don't know how much recordings we exactly sold - because it was still a state company (Melodia) - , but I've heard it was some millions. We were the biggest band fore some time and we were playing in the biggest sport-arenas all over the country. We were young and we did stupid things, so we split up just on the peak of the wave. Some of my friends now live in Amerika. The drummer on the other hand lives somewhere in the Wallonian (Liège) part of Belgium. And others carried on the band ARIA (http://www.aria.ru/eng/ie/index.php) and others continued with a new band Master (http://www.rusmetal.ru/master/). You can visit their sites and read the story and see that they are still very popular over there in Russia.
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Also at XGR, you will find an interview with Freeform Interactive on Purge, a FPS/RPG hybrid currently under development. They also scored three exclusive screenshots from the game. Here's a part of the interview:
For those not familiar with the game, tell us how you described it to your publisher to get the deal
We have two Lithtech games in development.
Purge is still looking for a publisher. It is far too "different but similiar". We are self-financing the development of Purge until completion. Plus it is not a Counter-Strike clone, based on WWII, or play like Halo -- so it is a hard sell right now.
Our other Lithtech game is being published. I can't talk much about that game's contents, but I can tell you how we got the deal. Basically, we spent months negoiating back and forth with the publisher. It was originally being development by them in-house, but they closed the in-house team and asked if we were interested in completing the game. So the moral of that story is having 1) patience, 2) contacts, 3) and most important, lots of luck! |
 Video report on the state of MMORPGs
Posted by Rendelius @ 03:23 - Top
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| XGR did an interesting video report on the state of MMORPGs. It deals with games like Anarchy Online, Dark Ages of Camelot, Jumpgate, and DarkSpace, their merits and their problems. |
Adrebaline Vault brings us a review of Disciples 2 - Dark Prophecy, the recently released turn based strategy game with strong RPG elements by Strategy First. Once again, it is a very positive review, rating the game 4 out of 5 stars and offering this conclusion:
Disciples II doesn’t raise the bar for turn-based strategy games by introducing new concepts, breaking AI logic barriers, and offering a unique design. It contains concepts introduced in many previous titles, and indeed, most avid gamers will be able to open the box and jump into the fray without reading the rules. But it grabs hold of the intangible elements of interactive entertainment -- atmosphere, compelling gameplay, and emotion -- and runs with them.
The fantasy setting, with flamboyant and exaggerated warriors, devils with festering hides, and dwarves with over-sized axes and hammers, has a fantastic look and feel all its own. You aren’t in the neat-and-clean world of sparkling elves and prancing unicorns anymore; rather, Disciples II’s dark and foreboding nature gives the game its own distinctive air. By creating a world of great texture, the designers prevent Disciples II from being relegated to copycat status, and instead make it a worthy addition to any player’s collection.
Strategy First has built a rock-solid product with no major bugs. It’s easy to get into, the campaigns can be approached in a variety of ways, and the quests contain more twists and turns than any turn-based game I’ve played. I can’t say for certain if it’ll be a classic, but it’s definitely a contender. |
aming Voice has written a review of Asheron's Call - Dark Majesty the addon for one of the big MMORPG's out there. The review is pretty negative with a rating of 2/5, and the reviewer makes some grim remarks about the lack of atmosphere and roleplaying in the game in his final thoughts:
It is hard to recommend Asheron's Call: Dark Majesty because it has so many things going against it: there is almost no atmosphere, there is no role-playing, and having to use .Net Passport are just a few of my complaints. In fact, the only things Asheron's Call really offers are the game's mechanics. Through flexible combat options, a decent skill system, and some innovative features like allegiances, AC shows that it does have some potential. I just don't think it is enough to overcome its crippling flaws. Still, there are players that will enjoy this style of game -- I'm just not one of them. Rules vs. Role-Playing vs. Ambiance -- which do you prefer? |
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