But let's get back to the RPG's. As we know by now a lot of games are profiling themselves as being a hy-brid game in which one of the classifications is RPG. Paradise Cracked is a tactical RPG which emphasises more on tactics then on RPG, Etherlords is a strategy/RPG which has some resemblance to Magic: The Gathering. Nomads also has RPG in it's name, but that one is a bit far fetched. Although the game looks really good and features you flying around on an island in the sky. The things you can do with it are really cool. Unfortunately we still have to wait a whole year for that one.

This is a screenshot (or a shot of a screen) from Shadows of Luclin

We don't have to wait so long for the Everquest Expansion, Shadows of Luclin and Pool of Radiance, both on display at the Ubi Soft booth. I looked at Pool of Radiance and was given a presentation. The animated characters on the screen look really good. The background graphics are a bit static however as in most 2D games, and do not seem to have the quality that Baldurs Gate 2 has. They basically only showed combat in the game, but I hope there is more to it then just that. The combat went a bit strange however, it was turn-based but the time for the turns were kept rather high, so you could do a lot in that time, which looked unre-alistic to me. It did however come in handy is you are a wizard as selecting a spell is not an easy task. You have to know the level and the name of the spell in order to find it in a hierarchical selection menu, where you first select the level and then can select from a list of spells. Some iconised version of it would be much easier I think. But all in all the game will probably do very well when it's released in November (in Europe).

CDV had a huge sign of Divinity up and for me this was one of the best RPG's on display at ECTS (but then again maybe I'm biased). You can check out the preview I did last week if you want to know more about it.

Two of the other things I noticed is that consoles and RPG's are not very common and the second is that there are a lot of RPG games is Korea. Most of them are online or networked, but there are some single player games as well. I have to be careful in generalising things too much, but it would be save to say that the Korean games have a lot of emphasis on fighting. And killing other players online (PK'ing) seems to be a natural thing. There were both 2D and 3D games on display and I still have to delve into what I have about them a bit more, but my first conclusion is that each of the 2D games look alike and give a feeling like Line-age. The 3D games are mostly done in a manga style and look similar to each other as well. I'm not going to name any names yet as there were so many demos and so little time that I'm afraid I would mix them up.

Some of these games are actually coming to Europe and the USA, but several of them are still looking for a distributor. So we might never see any of them over here.

Then there were stands who hired people to try to put some emphasis on their products. Noteworthy are the strange silvery guy from Steinberg, promoting their audio tools and the lady from the game Anno 1503, who is apparently dressed up like someone from 1503 ;-).

First there were two...	...then there were three	And here all 6 of 'em... er ... all 3 of 'em

To conclude I can say that ECTS, even though it was fun, is no match for E3. There seems to be no show in Europe that comes close to E3 when it comes to games. And from the looks of it next year will be even worse as ECTS seems to become smaller and smaller. Maybe it's time for a new show that is able to promote games in Europe in the way E3 does it in the USA, but at the moment there is none. Yet I did manage to get the material for some noteworthy articles, so I'll be haunting you with them in the next couple of days :-).

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