Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Salem fascinates me. Few MMOs dare go the route of full-on player-driven systems and player co-operation, but this village-builder is doing it. And it’s doing it in the lovely setting of the colonial era Americas, complete with spooky woodland folklore monsters. Salem is going to be one of those games where the basic process of doing things – collecting resources, building and so on – is relatively unexciting, but the wider prospects for co-operation and sanctioned griefing are where the true game lies. It’s a sandbox MMO with permadeath, so you risk losing everything if someone happens to be quicker than you with a knife. Becoming a criminal, as this video explains, is not something anyone can take on lightly, however, because it allows people to track you. And if the mob catches up with you…
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We’ve been a-rambling about War Of The Roses before now, but this is the first chance for the world at large to see the game in action. The Medieval melee combat game is reportedly the most expensive project ever undertaken by Swedish publisher Paradox, and it’s also a big deal for its developer Fatshark, who have built the thing from the ground up. It’s looking fairly solid, too.
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I had a look at Naval War: Arctic Circle when I was over at the recent Paradox Convention, and I have to say I was impressed. It’s an austere sort of affair – a real-time strategy that takes place mostly at the level of a tactical map encompassing most of the Arctic, with visuals of ships and other naval participants on various screens (depending on which views you’re working with). You can see some of that in action in the developer diary below, where the team talk about some of the design choices they made, and also admit their love for a particularly large boat from the Russian fleet. So sleek. So buoyant.
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Paradox have announced their line-up for next month’s GDC and it contains three new games. They’re waiting until the convention to say what they are, but they’ve dropped some hints and codenames, including a new game from the Magicka team, an action multiplayer.

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Fancy watching the developers of Paradox’s Naval War: Arctic Circle play their game? I know Super Bowl vs Wrestlemania is on tonight, while they’re also projecting the World Cup final onto the full moon and fixing the Earth’s rotation so the moon stays overhead for the duration of the game. But if you can’t make it to the Battle of the Megashows AND if it’s cloudy, Paradox are streaming a live demonstration of their strategic ship simulator. You won’t even need 4D specs to see it.
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Neocore’s multi-facted King Arthur II has a demo out, and the people from Paradox claim it’s about an hour long. An hour isn’t all that long, really, but should be enough for you to taste this all-encompassing fantasy strategy sequel. I’ve been rather to keen on playing this myself, actually, because the original game was one of Paradox’s strongest games of 2009. Gosh, was it really that long ago? 2009: when the druids still walked Albion…

Jim had a look at 64-player RTS Gettysburg: Armored Warfare last week and now, thanks to a couple of videos of the game that I’ve managed to hunt down, you can pretend to be his eyes by watching bits of the game yourself. The first video dates back to March 2011, at which point the game hadn’t been loudly announced at a convention and therefore didn’t exist in any form, so let’s assume time has been impossibly sundered to put that there. The second is from last week’s Paradox convention and shows the impressive map editor along with some gameplay.

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