Friday - March 08, 2002
A rather short meridian 59 newsletter has been sent out today. Apart from listing bugs that have been killed, it is depicting the CD box of the limited edition for this retro-MMORPG (which was much fun to play then and could be as much now). This is what it says about it:
Expect these Limited Edition CDs to be on sale sometime tomorrow. Be sure to look for a mailing announcement and news on our website and fan websites. We're doing our best to get them on sale and everything is just about in place. Remember these are limited to only one thousand for sale in the United States and Canada. International customers may purchase Pre-Launch Gameplay Accounts for the same price with a limit of a total of one hundred international accounts being sold. This was done in response to player requests that international customers can play during the Pre-Launch period without paying absurd shipping costs. More details on the Limited Edition CDs and the Pre-Launch can be found in last week's newsletter. |
| Also at RPGVault today, you can see two screenshots fro Reakktor Media's upcoming futuristic MMORPG Neocron... |
RPGVault continues their series of Lost Continent interviews, talking to Lead Game Designer Keith Baker and friends about this upcoming MMORPG:
Jonric: Will there be very many friendly NPCs, and what kinds of roles or functions will they have?
Keith Baker: Non-player characters are closely tied to expeditions, and as a result will play a significant role in the game. We have designed a large cast of characters for players to interact with. These include the contacts with the six power groups, who players will interact with frequently, and a variety of characters with goals and stories of their own - lounge singers, reporters seeking stories, spies, politicians, scientists, and many more. Some of these characters will wait for you to come to them, but others will appear out in the field to interfere with your adventures or to lend a hand. We will also have long-term villains who will return to haunt you. After all, villains in the serials are almost as good at making miraculous escapes as the heroes are. You may THINK you've killed the nefarious Doctor Necropolis - but he may yet return with an even more fiendish scheme! |
The usual single question update to the Star Wars: Galaxies FAQ has been posted today at the official site:
10.18 Will we be able to build large scale, turbolaser sized guns?
Yes, there will be some large military installations available in the game, but they will require certain skill and faction pre-requisites to construct. There you have it. *g* |
| A bunch of Dungeon Siege screenshots cann be seen at Ferrago.co.uk. |
Thursday, March 14th at 6pm PST you can have your Neverwinter Nights module building questions answered by BioWare's developers over at the Neverwinter Nights Stratics House Of Commons chat. Here's the details:
Where: MAIN IRC SERVER: irc.stratics.com PORT NUMBER: 6667
STRATICS CHAT WEBSITE: http://chat.stratics.com - everything you need to know about Stratics' chats
JAVA CHAT CLIENT WEB PAGE: - http://chat.stratics.com/content/java/800_600chat.shtml HOC PUBLIC CHANNEL NAME: #nwhoc
When: Thursday, March 14th at 6pm - 7pm PST (7pm MST /8pm CST /9pm EST)
Why: Because this is where YOU will have YOUR Neverwinter Nights questions answered.
|
"The Mask of the mummy queen", the ongoing serial at the official site for Lost Continents, has been updated again. Here's a bit:
Mickey lost the rest of Howard’s sentence as he turned back to examine the room. He scanned the contents: walls, floor, ceiling, sarcophagus. Everything appeared to be in order. He took a tentative step into the room. Nothing. He crept closer to the sarcophagus to get a better look. Of course! If the sarcophagus was disturbed in any way, the central ceiling block would fall.
Meanwhile, the scene in the hallway was not pleasant. Rose had destroyed many skeletons with her shotgun, but they had closed in, and she was now swinging the butt end wildly to give Howard and Amira space. Streams of energy flowed back and forth between Amira and the mummy, a testament to their supernatural battle of wills. Glowing green sparks shot out from the hideous, ancient face. For his part, Howard had pulled out what seemed to be a huge flashlight, surrounded by many mirrors. It was projecting a powerful beam of yellow light that was both hurting and slowing the skeletons. The smoke rising from the contraption showed the strain the device was under, however. It seemed likely that it was soon to fail./UL> |
| Wanna know what the box of Warcraft 3 will look like? Just follow this link :-) - and I'd say it looks cool... |
| Gamespydaily has some new screenshots from Freedom Force, Irrational Games' soon to be released superhero RPG... |
| Bonusweb has posted a large amount of screenshots from Morrowind, and even being conservativem I would call them breathtaking and unbelieveable. Do yourself a favor and have a look... |
The latest Peek of the Week went online at the official Eve Online site. This week, it is entitled "Leech Capital" and talks about a company in the game. Here's something from that:
Founded by two brothers some five years ago DioCore remained for some time a company bereft of funds, staff or future. But the brothers didn’t sit idle during this time - they gained experience in operating space crafts, skills in dealing with people and established some important contacts. DioCore’s main activity was in the field of blueprint research. The founding brothers had many revolutionary ideas regarding drones and wished to incorporate these ideas into blueprints.
In the end they managed to attract the attention of the investment firm MindChill, a Gallente-based venture capitalists company that focused on budding space companies. With the aid of MindChill, DioCore finally managed to get their operation into gear and finance their first research facility in space, with two more following. With the money from MindChill the DioCore brothers thought they were made. A few early blueprints were promising, but these failed to materialize into anything more substantial. Soon, lack of funds threatened the continued existence of the company. Yet the brothers were unwilling to give up, as they knew their breakthrough project was on the horizon. This breakthrough project attracted the attention of potential customers - some very big - and the DioCore directors managed to sign a deal with some of them, but all with the condition that DioCore finished researching their blueprint first. |
A Dungeon Siege preview in (for now) two parts has been put online at Electric Playground. The first partgives you a nice introduction into the start of the game, without spoiling you with info you really want to find out yourself. The second part talks, amongst other things, about gaining a level:
Every time my character uses one of these attacks, he gains experience with that kind of attack. Notice how the bars are being filled. The bladed weapon is partially filled, the fireball (spell on the far right) is nearly totally filled. That represents my experience with that attack type. Soon, I’m going to gain a spell level, making me more powerful in that area.
So, my character will be shaped by whatever my preferred attack is. I could for a character that is completely about range attacking, and ignore the other areas. Or maybe I stick strictly to spells, like a wizard. Get it? This system doesn’t even require you to make a conscious choice about how you play. If you’re a blunt force trauma type of person, you’ll naturally stick to melee weapons. |
Jens Bremmekamp answered some questions in an Neocron Iinterview at Player2Player.net. Once again, we present a snippet here:
Sion Verdox: Have you followed any of the recent MMOG launches? If so do you feel you launch will be a WW2 online/Anarchy online launch, or more of a DAoC launch?
Jens Bremmekamp: Of course we have. As far as I have heard one reason for the DAoC launch went so well was the limited numbers in which the game was available in the beginning. While this definitely is a good method to avoid the troubles which WW2 and AO experienced, it had the downside of enraging some players who had preordered their copy months and months ago and didn't get it right away when the game launched. The exact launch method of Neocron is not decided upon yet though, so I cannot say which route we will choose. But be assured that we have put a lot of thought into this particular issue and we will try to come up with a solution that will be well received among the majority of Neocron fans. |
A-2.net has published a chat log from yesterday's Asheron'x Call chat. Nicely edited, it holds a lot of info on this upcoming MMORPG. Here's a bit:<
Q: Baron_Gonzo in AsheronsCall asks: Will there be multiple servers or will you there be only one world, And if there is more then one server how will the storry line work will it diverge with totally different directions being possible on the different servers?
A: Stucco_MS says: There will be multiple worlds, much like you see in other games of this kind. It just works well... The worlds will be parallel copies, except one may be all-PvP like Darktide is now, and maybe another variation or two...However the worlds can get to feel a lot different from each other, since different "forges" in different towns can get fired up by active players, per world...And on different worlds, different factions may end up controlling different small but interesting parts of the world. So overall you'll see quite a bit more divergence than AC1, and that's just at ship. We are finding other clever ways to diverge the world as monthly updates go along. |
| If you're running the Warcraft 3 beta on your PC, the auto-updater will install version 1.1 now. The list of fixes is veeeeeeeryyyyyy long andf can be found here. |
| The tenth installment of the picture preview for Warcraft III is now up at Invisible Dream... |
A preview of Another War can be found at GameSpy today. Here's a snippet:
From what we've seen so far, Another War will play rather like a standard isometric 2D RPG (think Baldur's Gate or Arcanum) with plenty of dialogue and adventure elements, but also lots of Diablo-style click-to-kill combat. You begin by creating a character rated for basic attributes like strength, agility, and intelligence. The base attribute levels will depend on the class you select: thief, strong man, or intellectual. No matter which you choose, you'll have a pool of extra ability points that you can distribute as you see fit to help customize your character. Your class choice should have a real bearing on how the game plays out. A strongman might get the opportunity to bash a door down, while an intellectual can start speaking in German to trick a nearby guard into opening the door. |
| A single new screenshots from MindArk's futuristic MMORPG Project Entropia was published at the official site. |
The fine folks from ToTheGame have once again gotten their hands on a few new screenshots of Might and Magic IX.
This is really confusing. Compared to the ones we've seen lately, these new ones definitely look good, especially the outdoor environments. Maybe not state of the art but still A LOT better than the blurry, pixellated -excuse me- crap we've seen elsewhere in the last couple of weeks. We know that some ToTheGame staff members recently visited NWC, so these shots might actually resemble a very final version of the engine. Let's all hope so :) |
 Trip Hawkins waives 3DO for Sale Rumors
Posted by Moriendor @ 06:38 - Top 
 |
German PC Games has done a little investigation on yesterday's rumors that 3DO is due to be sold to another company.
This is how Trip Hawkins, founder of 3DO replied to their E-Mail inquiry:
"No, the rumors are false -- 3DO has not put out a "for sale" sign. We remain independent, and recently released our first Top 10 bestselling PS2 game, our American baseball game High Heat Baseball. At the same time, it should be noted that the hardware platform transition has certainly been more difficult than expected and the financial markets are less supportive today of small companies. Hence it is appropriate in these times for the small companies to look at acquisitions and mergers and strategic deals that reduce risk, accelerate growth, and improve financial performance. At 3DO we are taking the steps we feel are necessary to survive, rebound, and grow as a small independent company in this challenging environment but at the same time we are going to examine all of our strategic options as we go forward, as should any company."
|
Here's the latest from the IWD2 forums.
Kevin Osburn:
About what has been implemented upto now
As to what parts of the game are finished, the items are pretty much finished besides a few balancing tweaks. We are still working on the other parts of the game, but I can say we have implemented some cool stuff that we haven't yet talked about which we will soon. Sorry for being vague, but that is all the information I can give at this time.
The level of the Death Armor spell as mentioned in the Doug Avery interview
A level 2 Wizard Spell.
About showing the new interface
We are still working on it guys and gals. As soon as it is ready to be unveiled, believe us, you will know.
Ballpark guess, a week or two.....This is of course subject to change :)
Briareus:
About OpenGL issues
I know that Bernie Weir (our Lead Programmer) has fixed several OpenGL bugs, I don't know if he's fixed "all" the problems. I did see quite a few OpenGL bug fixes early in IWD2's dev cycle. Just so you know, I test the game with OpenGL on all the time and haven't had any issues with it.
Two Q's about partymember influences
Q: Does the party splits and fight like in Bg2?
A: Nope. You control your party members. If you want a LG Paladin and a CE Dreadmaster of Bane in your party, go for it. It's all up to you.
Q: Does alignment matter for quests and dialogs?
It will and the amount it matters will vary from NPC to NPC.
Josh Sawyer:
If kits are replaced by true 3E multiclassing, will the new classes stay?
The monk and sorcerer are considered classes, but the barbarian is tricky; it's "half a class". For some weird reason, it's sometimes considered a kit in code, sometimes considered a class. It doesn't have it's own class ID, so at a basic level, it's a kit.
About bucklers
There are three unique bucklers in IWD2 at three different power levels.
|
| The official Zanzarah website has updated with a batch of new screenshots. Looks like Funatics' fairy RPG is shaping up quite nicely really. |
| The medics from Game Doctor have reviewed Mythic's Dark Age of Camelot. Rating: 4.25 out of 5. |
|
