Monthly Feature:
Serving It up: What's on the MMORPG Menu for 2005
January, 2005
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Now that the honeymoon phase for EverQuest® II and World of Warcraft™ is coming to an end, many gamers are beginning to take stock of what works, what is a disappointment, and what may have been done better in this latest generation of MMORPGs. With the hype that was surrounding these two behemoth games and the cancellations of Ultima® X and Wish™, the MMORPG horizon may seem a bit bleak.
A quick glance at GamerGod.com's list of upcoming MMORPGs, however, will uncover over 170 proposed games. Though most will not meet the high expectations of seasoned gamers or reach retail launch, with so many on the menu, there is likely to be one or two games to satisfy the tastes of nearly every player. In this month of the Monthly Feature, we present a menu of several promising entrees to watch closely in 2005. |
| Planeshift™ |
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| "The objective of the PlaneShift Team is to create a virtual fantasy world in which a player can start as a peasant in search of fame and become a hero. [The Planeshift Team] will focus our efforts in the reproduction of a real world with politics, economy, many non-player-characters controlled by the server that will bring to life our world even without players connected!
"[The Planeshift Team] want[s] to give FREE access to everyone, without the need to either purchase the game or pay a monthly fee. Servers and bandwidth will be donated by sponsors. "[The] virtual world is persistent, and this means you can connect to it at every hour of day or night and you will always find players and npcs wandering our realms. You will be able to disconnect and reconnect again, the server saves the actual status of your character including his possessions. "You will use a client program to interact with our world, that enables you to have a 3D view of the surroundings.
"PlaneShift is a free and non-profit project, and so [the] release dates are difficult to define. [The Planeshift Team is] now working for next minor release, but [they] cannot yet give you release date for the final product." Be sure to take a look at the Planeshift Manual to fully appreciate the amount of volunteer work and talent that is contributing to this project. |
| Official Site Articles and Press Releases |
| Copyright © 2001-2003 PlaneShift Team |
| Tabula Rasa™ |
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| "Tabula Rasa™ is the latest massively multiplayer entertainment experience to come from the legendary creative mind of Richard Garriott and the all-star team of industry professionals at Destination Games. Developed from the ground up to be stable, fast and fun, Tabula Rasa™ represents a refreshing new approach to the design of multiplayer online games.
"The character development process provides the novice player with an ability to explore and discover the game universe at their own pace without committing to a specific play style. Seasoned gamers will appreciate the challenging strategy and complex depth found in similar games." No launch date has been scheduled yet for Tabula Rasa. |
| Official Site Articles and Press Releases |
| © 2005 Destination Games and NCsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Tabula Rasa® is a trademark of DestinationGames and NCsoft Corporation. NCsoft® is a trademark of NCsoft Corporation. |
| Pirates of the Burning Sea™ |
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| "Pirates of the Burning Sea will have a variety of professions available. You can be a naval captain, battling enemy navies and pirates. Or be a privateer, with official sanction from your sovereign to loot and pillage the merchant ships of the enemy. For that matter you can be a free trader, moving valuable cargo from port to port, or work your way up through one of the massive trading companies. And because our RPG system is not class-based, you can change your profession again and again over the life of your character.
"PBS is a game about a tumultuous and violent period of history. Players will be fighting all over the game world in major battles and random encounters alike." The world of PBS encompasses the "entire Caribbean, including portions of the continental coastlines of North America, Central America, and South America." There is neither permadeath nor experience penalties for death. Players will have their own ships to command at all times. PBS is currently in alpha testing. |
| Official Site Articles and Press Releases |
| All Contents © Flying Lab Software |
| Dungeons & Dragons® Online |
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| "Dungeons & Dragons Online is going to be a fun, action-packed, massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that allows thousands of players to participate in a story-driven D&D campaign featuring swashbuckling adventures, betrayal and intrigue, and lots and lots of deep, dark, dangerous, trap-riddled dungeons.
"The game is being developed and funded by Turbine Entertainment Software, in conjunction with Atari, Hasbro, and Wizards of the Coast. "No announcement regarding a ship date has been made, though [Turbine Entertainment Software is] currently on schedule for release in the second half of 2005. Beta plans have not yet been announced. Keep watching [the] site for more details." |
| Official Site Articles and Press Releases |
| Dungeons & Dragons Online: Secrets Of Eberron Software © 2004 Atari, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
| Guild Wars™ |
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| "Guild Wars takes the best elements of today's massively multiplayer online games and combines them with a new mission-based design that eliminates the tedium of those games. You can meet new friends in towns or outposts, form a party, and then go tackle a quest together. Your party always has its own unique copy of the quest map, so camping, kill-stealing, and long lines to complete quests are all things of the past. Within a quest you have unprecedented freedom and power to manipulate the world around you: your magic can build bridges and open up new pathways, or it can burn down forests and tear the ground asunder.
"You don't have to spend countless hours on a leveling treadmill to get to the interesting parts of the game, because combat is designed to be strategically interesting and challenging right from the beginning. You don't have to spend hours running around the world to prepare for a quest, because Guild Wars allows you to instantly travel to the beginning of any quest that you've previously unlocked. You'll never spend days playing only to discover that choices you made early on have left you with a permanently uncompetitive character, because the unique skill system in Guild Wars allows infinite experimentation but doesn't allow bad decisions to ruin a character. And you'll never meet new players only to discover that you can't play with them or compete against them because their characters are on a different server than yours; in Guild Wars, all characters live in one seamless world. "...After learning the game and building up your first character, you may choose to test your skills in head-to-head competition or guild warfare. The game is designed to reward player skill and teamwork, not time spent playing, so you won't need to spend hundreds of hours leveling up your character to compete. "The game includes integrated support for guilds, with guild banners and halls, chat rooms and forums. Guilds can challenge other guilds to battle, compete for control of key parts of the world, and be ranked on a worldwide ladder. "...ArenaNet's unique streaming technology forever eliminates the concept of patching a game. You don't have to wait a month for the next big patch to experience new content. Instead, the game constantly and intelligently streams new content to your computer in the background while you play. The world can change continually. This allows us to build a much more dynamic game world than any that has existed before." Guild Wars is slated for a Spring 2005 release. |
| Official Site Articles and Press Releases |
| Guild Wars is a trademark of NCsoft Corporation. Copyright © NCsoft Corporation. All right reserved. |
| Imperator™ |
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| "Imperator™ is an Alternate Earth™ Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game, one set in a future world where Ancient Rome never fell. Small changes at crucial moments in Roman history create an entirely new timeline for Earth, leading to a star-spanning Roman Respublica and thousands of years of interstellar Pax Romana. The Republic is home to many planets, each containing wildly different flora, fauna, creatures, culture, and climate. As the game begins, new threats to the Republic have sprung up internally and from beyond its borders, making the galaxy more dangerous and the Republic itself less stable - an exhilarating setting for an online gamer. Over the last few decades, many themes of classical Roman history have found their way into modern science fiction and fantasy. In Imperator the architecture, beauty, nobility, and even the savagery of Rome are the heart of the game.
"Mythic Entertainment is one of the most successful developers and publishers of massively multiplayer online role-playing games in the world. Credited with 15 online games, including the award winning "Dark Age of Camelot®," Mythic's success is based in proprietary technology, superior game design and exemplary customer service delivered by a talented staff of more than 150 people. "Dark Age of Camelot®" is played by more than 250,000 subscribers in almost every country in the world, and has been translated into four languages. "[Mythic Entertainment is] hoping to begin beta testing of this game sometime next year and [is] looking at a Winter 2005 release of the game." |
| Official Site Articles and Press Releases |
| Copyright © 2001-2004 Mythic Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |
| The Matrix™ Online |
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| "In 2005, the Matrix will become a reality as gamers everywhere log into The Matrix Online to continue the saga of the Matrix movie trilogy.
"Players of The Matrix Online (Mx0) will inhabit an enormous urban sprawl, which spreads for miles in all directions. There are subways, nightclubs, skyscrapers, and dark alleys that all seem normal on the surface, but beneath this pedestrian exterior, a secret war is being waged for the survival of humanity and machine alike. Here, you and many operatives like yourself, will determine who shall inherit the earth. "The Wachowski brothers and the award-winning independent developer Monolith Productions are creating The Matrix Online. "The Matrix Online will debut in 2005." |
| Official Site Articles and Press Releases |
| TM & © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. (s) 2004. THE MATRIX ONLINE, characters, names and all related indicia are trademarks of and © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. 2004. |
| The Lord of the Rings: Middle-Earth™ Online |
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| "The Lord of the Rings: Middle-Earth™ Online will be the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) set in the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings™. Thousands of players will join together to fight evil or serve it as the War of the Ring sweeps over Middle-earth. Others will simply adventure across the Hobbit homelands of the Shire, the Elven city of Rivendell, and many other familiar regions.
"MEO is still in the early stages of development, so Beta testing is still a long way off. [Vivendi] will announce the start of beta on this site and through the official newsletter. "The release date for MEO has not yet been announced. [Vivendi is] anticipating a 2005 release." |
| Official Site Articles and Press Releases |
| "Middle-Earth Online" interactive game © 2004 Vivendi Universal Games, Inc. All rights reserved. |
| Mourning™ |
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| "Mourning is a new persistent online world set in turbulent medieval times. Mourning plunges players into a beautifully detailed world to explore, which includes underground caverns and dungeons, woodlands, mountain ranges, deep forests, ice lands, deserts, cities and towns.
"Mourning's core game play is based on political and economical systems that allow for alliances, expansions, territorial conquest, player vs player battles or server events generated by Game Masters. "A unique bloodline system also exists to create many role playing possibilities, and allows for truly epic game play experiences. Players no longer are forced to stay with one character through out the game. In Mourning they can have an entire bloodline or lineage, where the founding character of a line is born into the world bearing the name that all characters born thereafter will bear. With this feature comes the ability to marry, have children, and in the case of death, the player continues living in the game world through his or her child as a playable character and receives the benefits that come with that characters existing bloodline. "'Mourning has been our largest project to date and has taken up the last 3 years of our lives,' said Andrei Gireada, CEO of Newrosoft R&D and Project Manager for the highly anticipated MMO title. 'When we started building a massively multi player online world, our goal was to create a universe where all the players felt as though they could truly make a difference in the world based on their actions. We're extremely excited about the game and technology we developed along side it and hope that players will enjoy the experience we created for them.' "Limitless Horizons Entertainment LLC today announced that its eagerly awaited massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) Mourning® will be launching in the United States on February 25, 2005 with subsequent launches occurring in Europe and Canada at a later date." |
| Official Site Articles and Press Releases |
| Copyright Limitless Horizons Entertainmeny LLC , All rights reserved |
| Dark and Light™ |
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| "Dark and Light is a new type of massively multiplayer game, enhanced by the experience from previous generations. Immersion in a virtual universe is now a reality: with Dark and Light, you will experience a huge world along with tens of hundreds of players.
"Dark and Light offers a gameplay that adapts to each player. "Thus, you may fight frightful enemies by becoming a ferocious fighter or a powerful sorcerer, but also become a prominent politician, a fearless explorer or a renowned crafter. These game axes will offer many possibilities; for instance, players who take a fortress can manage a whole city as they please, thanks to options and interfaces only them can use. Crafters can improve their skills and use them to give some properties to their items, or enhance their statistics. If you prefer wandering in little-known places, Dark and Light offers complete gameplay options for explorers. And in order to make sure that they always have something to discover, the developers created a land of 40.000 Km². The game has no loading zones, in order to keep the feeling of immersion and to allow you to see the horizon, 50 kilometres away. "Of course, transportation is a fundamental aspect in such a huge universe; either by riding a dragon or a dodo, or using a teleportation portal, you may easily join your friends in wonderful epic tales. "Moreover, server technology allows us to offer a unique world where all players of Dark and Light can meet. This makes a more populated and lively game, in a constantly changing universe. "In order to give players an easier access to Dark and Light, the website and the game will be translated in five languages: English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Likewise, event and support teams will be available in all these languages make sure that Dark and Light offers an enjoyable and dynamic gaming experience. Online scripted events give players the opportunity to have an impact on the world and to witness the consequences of their actions and choices. "A game with a rich and varied game design, a vast and open world, a constant interaction between the universe and players, and a really massive community are all the features that the development team wanted to integrate to Dark and Light, in order to offer a strong immersion and an entertaining experience in a fantastic and attractive world." |
| Official Site Articles and Press Releases |
| © 2003 by DnL Dark and Light™ is a trademark of Farlan Entertainment and is Developed by NP Cube |
 Flippandra and her infamous, EverQuest® II-hating PC |
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Flippandra is a Senior Web Content Developer/Designer with a small pharmaceutical company in the Northeast. |