Rock, Paper, Shotgun

“It’s a PWNS”: CrimeCraft In Action

By Jim Rossignol on April 1st, 2009 at 8:46 am.


A new, horrible acronym: “CrimeCraft is not an MMO, it’s a PWNS, a persistent world next-gen shooter.” Yeah, he was practicing saying that in the mirror. CrimeCraft is revealed in the most recent of the GDC videos that we expect to keep on rolling in all week. In it the developer explains how the game is a twitch shooter, rather than a standard MMO, only with all the trappings of a persistent world: guilds, shops, character customisation, kill-25-dudes missions, and so on. The shooter aspect of the game means that they’re some classic shooter combat, such as 8v8 domination matches, hitscan weapons, and skill-based play. Interesting stuff, and I’m certain this isn’t the only “PWNS” we’ll see revealed in the coming months.

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57 Comments »

  1. 01/04/2009 at 08:49 weegosan says:

    Don’t do that, just make the game good (and sack your marketing idiots).

  2. 01/04/2009 at 08:50 Senethro says:

    Welp, its nearly an MMOFPS I guess. If only they didn’t feel compelled to make it “urban”.

  3. 01/04/2009 at 09:12 VPeric says:

    So what was wrong with the MMOFPS monicker?

  4. 01/04/2009 at 09:16 Heliocentric says:

    Ha. I was going to make a joke about it being covered in next gen unreal vaseline and then i realised it was unreal engine.

    My favourite mmofps (pwns) is cod4 i have 2 characters one is scorpion rusher with silent movement. The other is an lmg gunner with high penetration.

  5. 01/04/2009 at 09:26 Ian says:

    It’s not looking especially exciting right now (a shame) but the 3rd person view makes it look even more uninspiring.

  6. 01/04/2009 at 09:30 Neuromante says:

    I can’t understand how somebody can say “PWNS”, explain what the acronym means, and not fell of the chair due the laughs. Seriously.

  7. 01/04/2009 at 09:32 pignoli says:

    @Heliocentric: Silent movement and high penetration? You sure you aren’t playing one those games Leigh Alexander was on about?

  8. 01/04/2009 at 09:34 DMJ says:

    Thank god it’s not a First-person Universe for Crafting and Killing…

  9. 01/04/2009 at 09:38 Black Mamba says:

    Realtime worlds have been awfully quiet about their MMO or PWNS A.P.B any news on its status ?

  10. 01/04/2009 at 09:40 MeestaNob! says:

    If he said the game was epic lolz then I would have been interested, but this just sounds a little bit like they’re trying to hard.

  11. 01/04/2009 at 09:52 DeliriumWartner says:

    I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.

  12. 01/04/2009 at 09:53 NuZZ says:

    Why oh why is it thrid-person. Tisk tisk tisk…
    Where is my goddamn COD4 MMO ?

  13. 01/04/2009 at 09:56 Schmung says:

    Ditto what Nuzz said. Can’t make a proper shootery game 3rd person, it just doesn’t work properly in a multiplayer context IMO

  14. 01/04/2009 at 10:06 Richard Beer says:

    I honestly can’t work out whether calling a genre PWNS is the most puerile thing I’ve ever heard or the most ironic. It might go down a storm with the gaming community if it’s genuinely good, otherwise it’s just going to be PWNT (Persistent World Next-Generation Turd).

  15. 01/04/2009 at 10:31 mandrill says:

    Oh god! Some berk in cargo pants and a humourous t-shirt with a gaming reference he doesn’t understand thought this would be a good acronym for a game because he heard his 14 yr old nephew saying it (this berk is far to ‘book’ and ‘wack’ to have kids of his own). Do these people have no clue? I couldn’t watch the trailer as hearing that ridiculous word intoned by a grown man, completely out of context and divorced from its usual meaning almost made me physically sick. Leave our language alone, the reason we made it up is because it is something that is ours and now you’ve gone and sullied it. Its a bloody MMOFPS and it will stay that way, the next time I hear this word will be when I’m pwning your ass in CrimeCraft and then sharing you with the rest of the cell block. AAAARGH! /rant over

    As a game though it looks interesting, though I’d like to be able to compare it with APB (if thats still on the go that is)

  16. 01/04/2009 at 10:35 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:

    @DMJ: Hey, wouldn’t that spe–oh.

  17. 01/04/2009 at 10:44 Gap Gen says:

    CrimeCraft, I dub thee “World-wide Around-the-clock Network-based Karnage”

  18. 01/04/2009 at 10:49 Richard Beer says:

    How about Crafting Universal Network Tools In Next Generation Shooter. Or am I just being silly now.

  19. 01/04/2009 at 10:51 DMJ says:

    Shooter with Highly Innovative Technology?

  20. 01/04/2009 at 10:54 Aubrey says:

    PWNGS, surely?

    Also: It’s not next generation. It’s this generation. Fffffffffffffffff.

  21. 01/04/2009 at 10:55 Rei Onryou says:

    The hub stuff looks alright. 3rd person makes sense to admire your “fashion style”, but 3rd person shootery? This games for PC, not the 360, what’s with the Gears of War camera-ness? FOOLS!

    I hope he just forgot to show the first-person view, or that it’s still being worked on, otherwise I just lost interest. But no multiplayer shooter should allow both 1st and 3rd person in a match. Bad practice.

    As for the combat, it looked a little…dull. An 8v8 CoD4 match is exciting and that looked drab. Make some more epic campaign battles. Fight for territory that give your gang bonuses etc… All this game makes me want to do is play Wolf: Enemy Territory.

  22. 01/04/2009 at 10:58 Morph says:

    @Aubrey

    Because Persistant World This-gen Shooter would give them PWTS. And that would be ridiculous! Unlike PWNS. Not ridiculous. No, definitely not.

  23. 01/04/2009 at 10:58 DMJ says:

    Broadband Optimised Lag-Limited Online Crime and Killing Simulator?

  24. 01/04/2009 at 11:15 Tei says:

    Thats the most stupid idea of this year, by far… I think It will still be the most stupid idea in october.

    I will just ignore it, and call this game MMOFPS, ..I may even try the game, if there are a demo or something. Hell.. .I have played Gunz.. You can go lower than that.

  25. 01/04/2009 at 11:17 MD says:

    April Fools!

    ..right?

    But nah it looks like it could be reasonably enjoyable, and certainly appeals to me far more than a WoW-style MMO. Pity it’s not first-person though! That would be far more suitable in my opinion, though I guess that’s just down to personal preference and a preference for the shooter bit rather than the mmo bit.

    Still, I’m almost certainly never going to play it, and I do wonder whether even a really well-executed MMOFPS (sorry, a “Powns”) would be a big financial success. It seems to me that the two audiences that are being aimed at are just too different to please together. Make it heavily skill-based (and in this case I mean physical skill, i.e. aim and movement) and you’ve turned away a massive chunk of the modern MMO audience, whereas leaning too far towards the stat-based, grind-heavy model will turn off the shooter fans, who presumably are the reason you didn’t just make a WoW or Everquest clone.

    That said, there seems to be a pretty big group of people who love the random/grind-based elements of TF2 and would probably be happy to see that taken a step further (not to mention the RPG mods that have sprung up for various Source games, including TF2 I think), so who knows. Maybe persistent player avatars are more important than a persistent world, though.

    Anyway, despite my efforts not to be one of those “man, everyone who enjoys games in a different way/for different reasons than me sure is stupid!” people, my disdain for certain rpg elements infiltrating what was traditionally a genre based almost solely on player skill has probably shone through, so needless to say I am more an interested (and slightly pissed off ) observer than a part of the target market for ths sort of thing. Still, I’ll be watching to see where all of this goes.

  26. 01/04/2009 at 11:27 Heliocentric says:

    Why cant people just call them murder simulators?

    @pignoli Fist Person shooter?

    Only just watched the videos, the play looks bad, but it was being played by a bad player, strafing about in the open, but the maps seemed pretty funneled. I love customising my little mans in R6vegas, i give them short shorts!

    Who likes short shorts?

  27. 01/04/2009 at 11:41 Lobotomist says:

    8 vs 8 shooter. With virtual chat room.

    WOW! The the games are getting better and better everyday!

  28. 01/04/2009 at 11:42 Tei says:

    @Helio: Short shorts are very Farcry-ish. Hence.. awesome.

  29. 01/04/2009 at 11:48 Johan says:

    Aprils fools :-)

  30. 01/04/2009 at 11:59 yhancik says:

    @Lobotomist:

    But they’re taking it to the next level.

    The back story in pretty interesting too.

  31. 01/04/2009 at 12:32 Hypocee says:

    PC doesn’t have generations. What was wrong with ‘Network’? He cried pedantically.

    He mentions player-created guns. What’s that upcoming game that has umpty-million procedurally generated guns? Video has a dev clearing out a bandit camp in a cave I think?

  32. 01/04/2009 at 13:25 Surgeon says:

    “What’s that upcoming game that has umpty-million procedurally generated guns?”

    Hypocee, that’ll be Borderlands.

    Bah to 3rd person too.

  33. 01/04/2009 at 13:32 Hypocee says:

    It will indeed, ta. I suddenly wanted to take another spin through the info on that.

  34. 01/04/2009 at 14:26 Gutter says:

    “PWNS” will never catch up, because of the “next-gen” part. It doesn’t make sense, unless they only plan to release “PWNS” on systems that don’t exists yet.
    I understand that it need to be “PWNS” for mnemonics, but it’s a really stupid acronym.

  35. 01/04/2009 at 14:37 Chaz says:

    The first thing I thought was that it reminded me a lot of Matrix Online, which isn’t a good thing. And secondly why bother having a persistant world when you’re just going to throw people into the same old standard 8v8 TDM style arenas that we’ve all seen a billion times before.

    How about a persistant “open world” where your gang can carve out a bit of turf for themselves and take over a tower block or two, and maybe rake in money as slum lords and drug dealers. Rival gangs will then fight each other for a bigger slice of the pie, or maybe your player could be part of a police force or a bounty hunter trying to restore law and order.

    But for gods sake don’t make just another shooter with variations on the old team death match gameplay etc. You can get that experience from the multiplayer component of pretty much 95% of the current shooters already out there.

  36. 01/04/2009 at 14:55 roBurky says:

    That was interesting until I realised they were lying about it being a persistent world shooter, and all of the combat is actually pocketed away into team deathmatch games.

  37. 01/04/2009 at 15:02 Torgen says:

    DMJ says:

    Broadband Optimised Lag-Limited Online Crime and Killing Simulator?

    win.

  38. 01/04/2009 at 15:39 ReturnToNull says:

    This isn’t Planetside 2… where’s my Planetside 2. I want my Planetside 2. >:C

    I’ve already got a billion arena style FPSes, I want my gigantic 1000 man global war game.

  39. 01/04/2009 at 15:46 Larington says:

    Publishing is scared of trying another Planetside right now and possibly development as well. I hope to change that, but even then its going to take a number of years before I’m even in a position to do so. :-(
    IE I’ve got to finish being a student first, yet alone having a respected opinion on what game could/should be made within a development company.

  40. 01/04/2009 at 16:03 Jeremy says:

    I wonder when a game company will figure out how to program a character to not run like a tard. Has that technology not been created yet?

  41. 01/04/2009 at 16:12 Heliocentric says:

    Its possible but only in first person due to the tard co-efficent being directly proportional to the perception of the user. Alternatively you can overload the tard co-efficent by zooming out thousands of miles, but thats likely not the effect you wanted.

  42. 01/04/2009 at 16:33 Post Maker says:

    Lost Planet has a fairly good set of running/walking animations; there’s an entire set that plays out depending on how your turn your character, where your legs are facing, and what direction you’re moving. They’ve avoided the usual “torso disconnect” that comes with a lot of third person games, too.

  43. 01/04/2009 at 17:26 clovus says:

    I’m surprised the actual name of the game isn’t getting as much flak as PWNS. The idea of creating a MMO-anything and putting “craft” at the end is kinda’ retarded. I wouldn’t be suprised if Blizzard actually trademarked *craft for MMOs. On hearing “CrimeCraft” a reasonable person might think Blizzard decided to make mafio MMO.

    I should have gotten into Planetside, but I never did. I really, really would like to play a MMOFPS. I enjoy the concept of MMOs and I like shooters. Someone please combine them into something awesome.

  44. 01/04/2009 at 17:59 Fumarole says:

    PWNS is a lame acronym, and it’ll only be moreso once this game is no longer next-gen (god, if ever a phrase needed to die horribly, this is it). Please developers, stop the acronym madness. This isn’t the military you know.

    Also, people who pronounce it powns are tools. The P is an O people.

  45. 01/04/2009 at 18:44 DigitalSignalX says:

    Looks basically like Guild Wars with guns. Eh. pass.

  46. 01/04/2009 at 19:10 Moonracer says:

    Are there any victim simulators out there? Where you run around unarmed trying not to be killed by much stronger and armed NPCs?

  47. 01/04/2009 at 19:19 Jim Rossignol says:

    The Clocktower games have you play the victim. Some would argue The Path, although that’s fuzzy/wrong.

  49. 01/04/2009 at 20:51 Alex says:

    Please tell me this acronym is an April Fool’s.

  50. 01/04/2009 at 21:35 malkav11 says:

    To be fair, to me an MMOFPS is something like Planetside, where you’re actually moving around in a wide open world shooting at one another. If it’s some sort of shell around standard shooter matches, then it’s clearly not an MMOFPS.

  51. 01/04/2009 at 22:37 Inanimotion says:

    The interface looks super cheesy.
    That’s the first thing I’ll be changin if I play this game…

    Whoever above said they are trying too hard, I agree.

  52. 02/04/2009 at 05:46 Wedge says:

    Doesn’t this apply to EVERY MMOFPS being made right now? Certainly none of them are trying to hit on the scale of Planetside, unfortunately =/.

  53. 02/04/2009 at 06:44 CasinoOmaha says:

    Looks cool, I hope it delivers.

  54. 02/04/2009 at 07:07 Mel Gibson says:

    This game looks like the club

  55. 02/04/2009 at 16:56 Adrian says:

    This looks so much like Gunz: The Duel.

    Gunz was actially fun for a while… surürisingly the third person didn’t bother me at all when i played gunz so i wouldn’t be too pessimistic because of it

  56. 03/04/2009 at 16:09 Joseph says:

    The way he said “Twitch based [i]so you got to have skill to play[/i]” made me think [i]what a wanker[/i]. Maybe I’m over sensitive. But he [i]is[/i] the guy who just called his game a PWNS. Wanker.

    And of course, if they don’t have some seriously hot way (magic, preferrably) of reducing the effects of lag, this game will be useless to anyone without a server in their country. E.g. Australia. U.S. MMO companies, plant some servers in aus whenever you make an mmo pls. It’ll be worth your time and money. I’ll pay you $5/mo to help out, and $10/mo for a subscription. Thx. Joe.

  57. 03/04/2009 at 16:12 Joseph says:

    PWNT by html. /blind

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