Rock, Paper, Shotgun

No, you don’t get to get away from the zombie culture-plague by playing a sci-fi game, because it only pops up there too. A Halloween zombie event for Star Wars Galaxies, inspired by the recent Star Wars zombie novel Death Troopers, is now live (undead?). Assuming anyone is still playing the over-hauled Star Wars game, it seems they’ll be able to get involved in a quest arc to fight zombie wookiees (probably, I mean they’re in the artwork), among other craziness.

Sony have sent out a survey to Planetside players, asking for feedback. Here’s what it says:

We plan to expand the PlanetSide® universe with another game and we need your help with the design. After all, who knows the game better than you, our customers, the people who actually play it! Don’t worry about the original PlanetSide, it isn’t going anywhere.

We want to hear your opinion and to do so we have put together a short survey. The information you provide will play a critical role into helping guide the development and direction of the next hit Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter.

More thoughts below.
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The chaps at SOE must be rather pleased with themselves. Their free-to-play-except-with-micropay-stuff MMO Free Realms has had three million registrations in just seven weeks. Not bad going, even by free-to-play standards. “We are pleased to be able to provide such a vast, in-depth and, most importantly, fun world to an average of 500,000 new gamers per week,” said John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment. I bet you are, John. Those are the big numbers.

The game seems to have attracted folks with neat cartoon presentation and its kid-friendly demeanor, but it’ll be interesting to see how many of those millions stick around over time. I’m assuming some of you guys are included in that colossal figure? Anyone care to share their impressions? Any thoughts on long term appeal?

We’ve not been paying much attention to Sony Online Entertainment’s new MMO, spy-shooter The Agency, but since 2009 is clearly Year Of The Spy, we thought we’d best post up some of the E3 09 insight. In this case it’s a GameTrailer’s-acquired developer walkthrough, posted below. The game definitely has a whiff of City Of Heroes to it, in that the public areas are “City Of Spies”, but there’s nevertheless something quite refreshing about seeing someone playing real-time FPS (or TPS) combat in an MMO instance. It’s going to take some successful hands-on time with this to really convince me, however, as it does just seem a little lightweight. Being an MMO, I do wonder where the grind will come from, and how cookie-cutter those missions are really going to be. Anyway, go take a look.
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Everquest II’s fifth major expansion goes live today. It’s a retail box at $40, and includes all previous EQ2 expansions and add-ons, as well as a load of new regions and new quest strings. To be honest I have little idea what kind of significance this expansion holds for the Everquest II community, which I understand remains fairly large, despite the fierce competition it faces from so many other MMOs. This interview delves into some of the details, and unearths some of the ways that the EQ designers are still polishing and reinventing their game.

Trailer and full press release after the jump.
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SOE’s new MMO, Free Realms, opens its public beta this weekend. The concept is that this is the free MMO for children, so expect to run a gamut of cute if you’re heading in its direction. It seems relatively simplistic with a Wow-but-more-cartoony-by-half game world, and absurdly sugary character creation. There’s also the MMO standard of quest-based monster-monstering, and a whole bunch of mini-games that can be played solo, or with chums. There’s a bunch of video-based FAQs here and you (or your offspring) can sign up to the beta here.

Sony have released some more details about their forthcoming persistent-world multiplayer spy thriller, The Agency, and I’ve posted those same details after the jump. The concept does sound intriguing, particularly “from sneaky assassinations to all out assaults, from vehicle challenges to casinos loaded with mini-games”. It does sound as if they’re going all out for the unofficial Bond MMO with this – a kind of City Of Heroes, where the logic of the game world derives from spy thrillers rather than superhero comics. The other possibilities, such as the politics between player-run agencies, and having NPCs work for you, make this one of the most interesting multiplayer titles lined up for 2009.
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[Thanks to extreme tiredness, I didn’t manage to write up all of my impressions from E3. Over the next couple of days I’ll clean house and post up my leftover thoughts.]

So if the Sony Online Entertainment game that you are looking forward to is DC Universe Online, well, E3 wasn’t for you. Because cleverly, SOE are going to reveal all of the details of the game at the San Diego Comic Con (which, in retrospect, I should have stayed for) in front of the slavering hordes of nerds that they want to impress the most, instead of wasting the details on the slavering (but smaller) hordes of nerds at E3. What did I learn from my brief chat with the developers? Well, that it’s going to be a heavily physics based MMO where characters be able to “use the environment as a weapon” – and they made a pretty big deal about how hard it is to put proper physics into an MMO.
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From the Sony conference:

My, how very earnest. And is that Peter ‘Optimus Prime’ Cullen doing the irony-free voiceover, or just my stupid imagination? Suitably comic-booky anyway, and apparently a very straight-laced take on the DC Universe, as opposed to the incomprehensible muddle it seems to be in over in the comics at the moment.
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2009 is Superhero MMO year, it seems. Which, after the unending plague of fantasy MMOs over the last couple of years, is something to look forward to. We’ll hopefully be talking more about Champions Online, the sequel of sorts to City of Heroes (and, if rumour is to be believed, is new life spawned from Marvel Universe Online’s corpse) pretty soon, but also rearing its cowled head is DC Universe Online.

I have only the foggiest knowledge of who’s who’s in the DCU outside of the Justice League folks, and my attempts to decipher the Wikipedia page about the current big crossover storyline, Final Crisis, almost hospitalised me, but presumably DCUO is a terribly exciting idea.
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