Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Any Tad Williams fans in the audience? Ah, just that guy at the back. Oh well, this is for you, anyway: Otherland, the Tad Williams-directed MMO based on his sci-fi scribblings, is going to enter beta this weekend. It’s closed for now, but you can sign up for a chance to get in on the main site. (Top left!)

Otherland is quite ambitious, with different “worlds” encompassing varied genre conventions in a single game: a fantasy Medieval England, a cyberpunk city, a tranquil Eastern mythology, and so on. You can see Tad and his friends talk about all this in their latest Making Of piece, conveniently embedded below. There’s a gameplay trailer, too.
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Or, to give the new game its full title, Black Prophecy Tactics: Nexus Conflict. This was its own project until fairly recently – simply Nexus Conflict – but now this game of online capital ships has become a multiplayer RTS spin-off from F2P space MMO, Black Prophecy. Hence, Black Prophecy Tactics: Nexus Conflict. Got all that? Right, good, because the beta for this RTS is taking sign ups. In it you’ll pilot a gigantic battleship and duke it out with other players in heavyweight star-sluggery. There’s also a conquest meta-game, with player teams fighting over 22 conquerable regions of the galactic map.

Possibly unrepresentative trailer with long sequences of capital ships pounding each other, below.
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If a game doesn’t have a connection to my favourite dark matter infused vacuum, I’ll usually take the time to write a letter to the publishers, developers, neighbours, suggesting a rethink. Sometimes it works, sometimes I get my door kicked in by a SWAT team and taken to a ‘facility’ for a rest and a cup of tea. Take Gamigo’s Nexus Conflict: It was originally a fighting game about two phones, a classic in the making you might think? But upon hearing about the burgeoning international movement known as SPACE!, they reworked the game according to my themes: it’s now a strategic MMO in the Black Prophecy universe. You know, in SPACE! Beta details and trailer are below.
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The alliance that is jagged, but also online (rather than the one that will soon be back in action) has an open beta! You can completely sign up for that right here. I’ve no idea whatsoever about whether this is any good, or not, but I do rather hope it is, because this is the same company (and therefore the same design and tech) as the forthcoming Shadowrun Online. And that is something I have a fair bit of interest in. Oh yes, the residual fandom of the cyberpunk RPGs of youth remains strong.

Thanks to everyone who troubled my inbox to point this beta out.

Gosh, has it really been over two years since I dabbled in Pirate Galaxy? The browser-based space ‘em up has been growing apace since that time and has just announced a major update. They explain: “All changes will result in the exploration of the Sirius Singularity being significantly easier, and even small clans will be able to get the most out of the game. The difficulty level has been adapted to smaller groups of players, and there are now over 750 technologies to collect. More updates are already in the planning stages.” Hmm, that probably means something to people who played Pirate Galaxy more recently than I did. Anyway, the MMO continues to offer a light snack of space combat and exploration, and is probably worth a look if you want multiplayer intergalactic adventures but can’t stomach the full Eve Online space diet.

Here’s a new, visually splendid, science fiction action MMORPG from Singaporean dev RealU and free-to-play types Gamigo. Based on the “cyberpunk Lord Of The Rings” book series by Tad Williams, Otherland seems to mash up abstract sci-fi visuals with more traditional fantasy MMO guff, as well as some entirely abstract things. Crazy whirling fly-through announcement trailer details all this, below: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s GamesCom next week in Cologne, and that means we’re about to be engulfed in a torrent of news. A few early trailers and so on have started turning up, and he first of these to attach to our GamesCom 2011 tag will be this: Jagged Alliance Online (not to be confused with Jagged Alliance: Back In Action). Gamigo’s MMOG take on the tactical squad-combat game is going to be properly revealed at the show – having been announced at the show last year – but today we get a bit of a glimpse of it in action. Developer’s Cliffhanger are producing an isometric combat game that is reminiscent of the original series, even if not quite the same sort of turn-based affair. Go take a look, and we’ll round up some more details next week.
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Free to play – and frankly fairly okay – space shooter MMO Black Prophecy has expanded today. The expansion is called EPISODE 1: INFERNO IN TULIMA, and I think it is called that to make it sound exciting. The trailer, which you can see below, is also clearly designed to make it seem exciting. I don’t know what is going on here, but it seems like the company who make this game want you, and all of the rest of us, to think their game is exciting. Anyway, the expansion adds a new sector to explore, but perhaps more importantly it does a lot of general tweaking to the game, including new missions, new weapons, new skills, and overhauled communications system, and a customisable UI.

The game is now also available in North America, apparently. Isn’t that right, North Americans? If it is not right, then I am sorry.
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Free-to-play space MMO Black Prophecy is actually fairly interesting. I played through the prologue, but had to move on to other things before I really got stuck into the main world. It’s impressively pretty, and the mouse-keyboard space combat controls are surprisingly action-oriented. I did get splatted attempting to higher level missions with RPS chums, however, so I suspect that linear level ladder might be too much for me. Anyway! The devs have written a letter to the community, addressing concern over lag and bugs, as well as talking about features planned for the future of the game. You can read it in full here. (And my initial impressions of the game here.)

One of the features they propose for the future is “Station walking”. Sounds oddly familiar…

The free-to-play space MMO Black Prophecy is out in the EU, and there’s a beta underway for North America. I decided to take a look over the past couple of days and have written up a little about my experience. Read on for sparkling wit and space-insight.
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