RPS Feature That's Where International Waters Begin
Petroglyph and Trion Worlds are close to releasing End Of Nations, and they are hoping that it will change things for the MMORTS genre. Seeing the game at Gamescom has given us some clues as to whether they are going to realise that dream.
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RPS Feature Riot Games Interview
At GamesCom we had a talk with producer Travis George and designer Ryan Scott from League of Legends. Dan Griliopoulos was left feeling like the world’s biggest doofus, for not having played their game and for having fallen behind on the special language employed in competitive gaming.
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RPS Feature With Playable Dog
Roving reporter Dan Griliopoulos is driving home from GamesCom, but he turned the wrong way at the Baltic. Today he’s passing through Belgium.
Belgium! Where the only heroes are fictional! Hercule Poirot, Tintin and… The Smurfs? Anyway, it’s easy to sneer at Tintin; the plucky Belgian journalist went through an odd inception, passing quickly through the same facist, colonialist and racist phase as much literature of the 1930s. (Tintin in the Congo is essential reading if you want to understand why your great-grandparents in all probability shared these traits). But his adventures were always Jolly Good fun, in that way that inter-war kids stuff could be; all villainous millionaires and smugglers, where no-one who mattered was ever hurt except by fisticuffs, and the Cluedo-esque cast retired to Marlinspike Manor after an adventure to have their lugholes rent asunder by Bianca Castafiore’s rendition of the Jewel Song from Faust. When I was a kid, he was up there with Asterix and, um, Johnny Alpha. Apparently, Simon Pegg loved him as much as I did, because they’re making a film. And John Walker’s beloved Ubisoft have the rights to the tie-in!
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RPS Feature A Spot Of Skiing
Roving reporter Dan Griliopoulos has left Alec in Cologne and is heading deeper into Europe, writing up what the best of GamesCom as he goes. Next up is Hi-Rez Studios’ Tribes reboot, Ascend.
Switzerland may have been condemned memorably by Orson Welles as having “five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock”, but (aside from the cuckoo clock actually being a German invention – Pedant Ed) these days the most vertical of European countries is better know for its winter sports. As we rattle through its tunnels and stare up at its mountains, though, I’m thinking of a very different kind of skiing; I look at the 80 degree slopes of the Stelvio pass and think “you’d pick up so much speed on that and then you could jetpack off that glacier and…”
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We were pretty gosh-darned excited when we learned that excellent trade and building series Anno was going to continue its exploits in the near future, but the glimpses of futuristic island cities were only half of it: the full game of Anno 2070 will contain underwater colonies, too. This game is all about painting a portrait of a (frankly fairly likely) near-future of scarce resources and adaptable strategies towards surviving in a changed world. You’ll be asked to choose between “industrial power” and “renewable energy” routes, and deal with the trade-offs that each of them are forced to make.
No precise release date for this as yet, as Ubisoft are still quoting “Winter”. I’m hoping to find out a bit more soon, as it’s the Ubisoft game I’m most interested in right now.
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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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Salem – the forthcoming free-to-play crafting MMO from Paradox – has teased us with its first teaser, which you can see below. It’s apparently a taste that’s just getting the essence of the game across, and in that regard looks pretty interesting, especially when you consider the feature list: open PvP combat with perma-death, crafting and building as core mechanics, as well as being free. Now we can add “Being Cute” and “Being Spooky” to that list. I’ve also reposted the video of the developers talking about their idea for the game, so you can refresh your thoughts on it, because I think Salem could be genuinely interesting.
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