Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Brriiiiiing! Briiiiiiing! Briii-
“Hello, Alec Meer speaking.”
“Hello, is that Alec Meer?”
“Yes, that’s why I said ‘Alec Meer speaking’. God, why do people always do that?”
“Sorry, yes, it annoys me too. Alec Meer here too – you said I should give you a call.”
“What?”
“You said you have so many half-forgotten interviews to transcribe that you needed to find some sort of fool-proof reminder system. This is it. When you sell RPS for $4 billion in 2027, you spent your share on a machine that could send phone calls back through time.”
“What?”
“So this is your reminder to transcribe the Wildstar interview you did back in August.”
“What? Wait, that’s actually really useful. Thanks.”
“Oh, and if you post that beta sign-ups for the new NCsoft MMO are now open, that’ll further help you to remember. Bye!”
“Oh, that’s a very sensible idea.”
“Oh, and don’t play Duke Nukem Forever, it’s rubbish.”
“Hang on, I thought you said you were from the future?”
“Er… Gotta go!”
[Click]

Good, in fact excellent, tidings for those who find themselves able to enjoy Fallouts both old and new, and for anyone who lived through the 90s heyday of PC RPGs. Tim Cain, the main brain behind the original Fallout and later co-founder of the much-missed Troika, has fetched up at Obsidian. Until this July, he was at Carbine, working since 2005 on what turned out to be Wildstar, but today we discover that he’s now Senior Programmer at the Fallout: New Vegas/ KOTOR 2 devs. AVENGERS ASSEMBLE.
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Earlier in the week we revealed that NCSoft will be publishing Carbine’s space MMO, Wildstar, and Alec delivered his impressions on that. Now eight minutes of footage has appeared (below), and holy crap there is a lot in that eight minutes: the player-character starting out getting revived by an NPC, exploring a valley and dodging avalanches, setting up and using bits of equipment, fighting some kind of space yeti, and appearance and destruction of some awesome spacecraft thing. The visual references are clear, and it’s certainly an MMO in the classic sense, but with some surprises. It does look like it might be entertaining.
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UPDATE: New embed.
There’s the preview of NCsoft/Carbine’s ambitious new sci-fantasy MMO Wildstar, and here’s the first scene-setting video. Pre-rendered intro vid kinda stuff rather than in-game footage, but sets the scene, the tone and introduces the three playable races and some of the classes… Take a look. Now, I must run off to a giant German convention centre to go see many, many games.
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