Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’m not convinced many, if any, of our regular readers are still playing superheroic MMO Champions Online – general interest seemed to dry up pretty soon after release. Would love to hear some earnest talk about what it’s like these days, though – are the servers busy, is there plenty to do at the high-end, has it managed to diversify its quests yet? CO was probably the biggest disappointment of last year’s games for me – not a critical failure, but meatless enough that it killed my plans to spend a couple of merry months in an online world stone dead. At least Cryptic aren’t throwing in the supertowel yet – they’re continuing to tinker under the hood (although earlier attempts at that pissed fans off royally), plus they’ve just revealed the first expansion’s in the works… If they had any sense, they’d call it CHAMPIONS ONLINE VS SIR BIFF BIFFINGTON III OF THE MEGA-BIFFINGTONS. They haven’t announced the name yet, so it’s not too late – CAMPAIGN! CAMPAIGN! CAMPAIGN!
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Update: And STOP! All 1000 have just gone. You’ll know if you were successful very soon.

We like to think we take care of you. For instance, if you were ever in trouble, we’d maybe look up from what we were doing. We also like to give you magical presents. So today we’ve got 1000 keys for the Star Trek Online open beta to give away. (All gone.)

We’re going to give them to the first 1000 people to email us at compo@rockpapershotgun.com (making sure to use the subject line “I would like to be a Star Trek Online Beta-zoid” or you definitely won’t get a key), nothing more complicated than that. So be quick, or be sad. Then so soon as the fine folk at Cryptic send them out, you’ll find out if you have free access to the open beta for the game until the 26th January. RPS subscribers have already had their chance to reserve a key, by the way. If you’d like to be a part of that exclusive crowd, you can click here.

Star Trek Online is out on the 29th of Jan, and you can find out more about it here.

Global Agenda is out on the 1st of February! How did that happen so fast? The online spy game (although still no one has figured out what it has to do with spying) is a fascinating mix of traditional MMO and multiplayer shooter. This is a claim that’s been made before, but when I played it at E3 I was confused to discover it actually seems to deliver this. I’m intrigued to see how it all plays out once it reaches its meta-game, which appears to introduce the third prong, strategic battles. Anyhow, there’s a new trailer out to remind us all it’s only a couple of weeks away, and you can see it below.

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Set cliches to cliche, something about beaming, where no sentence has gone before. Cornish pasties for heads. Red jumpers. There – that meets the government required minimum quantity of Star Trek references, and a fine is once more avoided.

The big news is: Star Trek Open Beta opens today (12th Jan) at 10am PST (2am proper time), letting all sorts of riff-raff into the universe.

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The Star Trek Online beta has for some reason allowed us in. So of course this means spending my entire afternoon playing with the character creator. It’s made by Cryptic. Can you guess whether it’s brilliant or not? It’s brilliant.

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Lord of the Rings Online expansion The Siege of Mirkwood is now online. Are you already there? Or planning to return? I must confess to having had no real experience of LOTRO, beyond a disastrous pre-release event where I was abandoned in some weird place with nothing to do for 45 minutes before quitting in confusion. I’m assured this isn’t how the game works, but instead it’s a deep, involved and rather musical MMO. And now it’s even bigger with this new chunk of game. There’s a launch trailer below to get you in the mood.

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Another peek at Cryptic’s upcoming Star Trek Online, this time focusing on the Klingons and their motives for wanting to smack the Federation’s ships up. They sound angry. Was it because they were left out of the new movie? I’d be sad about that, if I was a Klingon. Doesn’t seem fair, really.

Not quite sure why the guy in this trailer sounds like a disgruntled Yoda, however. And I’m presuming it’s CGI rather than in-game, but I can’t tell anymore. I’ve been tricked so many times before! I can’t trust anyone!
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After the phenomenal runaway success of Hellgate: London it was only a matter of time before there’d be an expansion… Justhangonaminute. Astonishingly this is not a mad lie. There really is to be a Hellgate: Tokyo. There’s even a debut teaser to prove it, below. However, it’s looking likely that the Korean owners, HanbitSoft, will be keeping the game and this new expansion inside Asia. Still, with the announcement of a new version of Mythos last week, it’s interesting to see what happened next to the disastrous MMO.

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You can now tick off the final two boxes in your I Spy Book Of The Old Republic Playable Characters. The seventh and eighth options were revealed by the German press this morning, and swiftly scanned for the rest of the world to enjoy by terrible word-stealing scandemons. I can barely bring myself to link to StarWarsMMO.net who have posted the pages, which are understandably in German. The internet’s best codebreakers were put to work, deciphering this tongue, and revealed that the last two are one more Jedi and one more Sith, a Consular and Inquisitor respectively. (I pretty much got into journalism so I could use the term “respectively”.) As Eurogamer points out, this has been confirmed by BioWare as definite-o-truth, which means there’s now four Force-based options (the Jedi Knight and Sith Warrior previously declared), alongside the baddie Bounty Hunter and Imperial Agent, and the goodie Smuggler and Trooper. Is anyone planning to pick a non-Force character?

Almost forgot there was another Bioware game in the offing (two, in fact – Mass Effect 2 also looms) amidst all this cheery chatter about Dragon Age. The Old Republic remains The New Hope of both Star Wars games and mainstream MMOs, and while we’re all lacking a clear picture of quite how it’s going to play, Bioware are at least providing a steady drip-feed of new info. This time, some of their thinking behind the Jedi class, and the revelation of what another class will be – boo-hiss-baddies, these ones…

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