Rock, Paper, Shotgun

End of Nations isn’t quite the only MMORTS out there on the hazy horizons of gaming, because there’s also Dreamlords, which went into beta a while back and then sort of fell silent. Anyway, it turns out that Paradox have picked the title up and will be publishing it under the title Dreamlords Resurrection. Good news, if just because this description of the game amuses me: “You will play a Dreamlord, a powerful collection of souls from ancient times, awakened by the turmoil and suffering of the living. Your personal goal is to raise a powerful civilization, lead an army, conquer land and grow in strength so that you might stand up against the mighty Nightmares that threatens to unleash the Nedom Wolven, Cynos of ultimate Destruction.” Blimey.

No release date yet, but Paradox’s support should bode well for continued development of the title. UPDATE: Improved quality gameplay video posted below.
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One Mr Bastock informs us that following the release of the German demo there’s a PC version of the September-releasing economics game demo available on Steam. You can totally download it now. Or later. Or earlier, if you knew about it before we told you. Go demo! Go demo!

EDIT: This is interesting. The demo was up there earlier and now appears to have been removed. We’ll update with further – er – updates.

I enjoy when a game experience creates moods or emotions, rather than coherent narrative sense. And Tale Of Tales have certainly done that for me in the past. But with Vanitas I hold up my hands and admit defeat. It’s a box with some stuff in. I haven’t been able to interpret any more than that, despite the explanations on the site. Previously an iPhone game, it’s now available for free to play with Unity on PC (look for tiny text saying “Try free web version”). So for once I’m going to be negative about the experience, and others can correct me where I’ve missed the point.

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I dropped by the End of Nations booth at GamesCom for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I’d heard they served the most wonderful amuse-bouches in the VIP area, which was true. You got a whole peach, and inside that was a smaller, marzipan peach, and inside that was lots of money! I ate four. I even ate the money, and spared a thought for Alec. I’d seen him earlier that day, looking like the thing behind the dumpster from Mulholland Drive. What was happening there? Maybe I should save some money for him.

Then I remembered the other reason I’d come to the End of Nations booth- this game was touting itself as the first MMO RTS, and had a serious budget behind it. How on Earth did an MMO RTS work? Handily Michael Legg, the President of End of Nations developers Petroglyph, was on hand to tell me everything over a couple of cigars. You should have seen these things we were smoking! They were like trumpets.
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Following yesterday’s energetic discussions of Elemental’s release state, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has issued a statement which can be read in full below. In it Wardell addresses comments made on the Quarter to Three game forum, saying that the remarks about people not buying Stardock games if they disagreed about their state of completion were simply a heated remark to a friend: “This comment was totally out of line and I apologize for it. It was made in the heat of a ~2000 comment long thread and is not how I honestly feel.”

On the issue of the Gamer’s Bill Of Rights, which we initially thought deleted from the Stardock site due to a broken URL, Wardell says: “We stand by it. It is, with some irony, our commitment to no DRM on our DVD release that ultimately caused the rough pre-release experience of Elemental. Several retailers broke the street date and we felt we needed to release our gold version to our customers who had pre-ordered from us as well as to our beta community that helped make the game the outstanding strategy game that it is.”

RPS remains uncomfortable with industry practices that involve shipping incomplete gold code, requiring – and assuming – day zero patches as a standard.

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The necromancer, as you might imagine, fiddles with dead things. He (or she, as necromancers are just as likely to be comely ladies) also doesn’t die when he’s dead, instead becoming the “death shroud” figure and continuing to battle his enemies even after his corpse has fallen. A bit like me with blogging. The keyboard continues to type even after I am slumped down in a coma beneath my desk. Spooky. The full necromancer page is here. I’ve posted the five clips of the necromancer in action below, for no good reason. If you want to scare yourself, try playing them all at the same time for nightmarish cacophony of sound effects that you are doubtless going to hear ten million times if you ever actually play as a necromancer.

Guild Wars 2 preview and interview coming up next week!
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Portal 2, Portal 2, Portal 2. Say it enough times and it sounds a bit like “portaloo”. But they say “Porta-Potty” in America, so perhaps that’s why Valve didn’t realise this. It’s the Left 4 Dead 2 V-sign all over again. But that massive controversy aside, there’s even more footage of the game available, and it’s not some dodgy cam recorded by a ne’er-do-well. Oh, and there’s also the video featuring Mr Stephen Merchant recording his lines for the game.

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Something else I curiously pointed my eyes at whilst dashing around GamesCom’s titanic floorspace was Dutch indie studio Ronimo’s side-on strategy title Swords & Soldiers. Which, if you ask me, is a name that rather undersells a game about giants, monkeys and clouds made of angry vikings…
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Lies, damned lies, and ballistics. That’s what’s in store for anybody who chooses to download the R.U.S.E. demo, which is available right now on Steam. Worth mentioning once again that R.U.S.E. isn’t going to feature Ubisoft’s DRM of legend, so it looks like this whole mess has worked itself out peacefully.

A video of R.U.S.E. isn’t to be found after the jump.
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Well, better late than never. I’m not sure which bit of the game it features, but this 3gb demo seems to have surfaced last week and can be grabbed over on Fileshack. Definitely worth taking a look if you have any interest in the Russian post-apocalypse, which we were fairly enthused about earlier in the year. Alec wrote up some conclusions about it here. I found it mixed, being impressive in places, frustrating in others, and incredibly atmospheric throughout. I look forward to the sequel.

When the Obsidian/Troika veterans Doublebear announced that they were making a Zombie-themed RPG, there was an immediate response in our comment thread. Namely, posting comments. It was then codenamed ZRPG. Now, it has a real name. It’s going to be called Dead State and we’ve got the first hard information, screenshots and an interview with head Doublebearer Brian Mitsoda.
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