World of Warcraft -- World PvP Blizzard unveils the first details of its upcoming player-versus-player enhancements
July 12, 2006 - It's no secret that an MMO must continue to evolve and add content to keep people coming back, and World of Warcraft is no different. Since its launch in November 2004, we've seen the introduction of several large dungeons, zones, and seasonal celebrations, not to mention new loot, crafting recipes, and Battlegrounds, the popular PvP arenas that Blizzard will be enhancing with cross-realm support in the upcoming 1.12 patch (which, interestingly, will be available on the Public Test Realm ahead of the patch's final release). If you're a player who regularly waits an hour or more for a PvP match that may only last ten minutes, cross-server Battleground should bring some much-needed relief from the waiting game, as well as making Alterac Valley a viable option for people who are playing on servers not in their time zone.
But the big news today is the scoop on world PvP objectives. Whereas before it usually boiled down to getting "wtfpwned" by roving bands of level 60 characters in Stranglethorn Vale, Hillsbrad Foothills and other areas where the victims couldn't possibly be a threat to their assailants, the new world PvP content will take place in Silithus and Eastern Plaguelands, although it may eventually branch out to other areas. Silithus and EPL are the highest-level zones in the game right now anyway (Deadwind Pass is too small to count, really), so it will generally be level 55-60 players bashing away at each other.
In Silithus, the objective revolves around collecting dust, called "silithyst," and players will activate the geysers to collect the silithysts. You get a nice "buff" (stat boost) when you turn in the resources, but you'll be flagged as a PvP player as soon as you pick the stuff up, making you attackable by anyone in the opposing faction while you attempt to make your way back the Field Duty camps associated with the Cenarion Hold faction quests. If you manage to turn in enough of the dust, all of your fellow faction members in the zone will gain a buff as well, including those in the "AQ20" Ahn'Qiraj dungeon. Also, Blizzard tells us that no new PvP rewards are on the horizon, although faction and PvP honor points will be involved.
In the Eastern Plaguelands, we'll have a PvP mode that's similar to the Arathi Basin play style, rather than the resource collection in Silithus. There are several towers in this zone, already standing, that will be converted to captureable bases. You'll need to control and defend each tower, and the faction who possesses all four will gain zone-wide benefits like in Silithus. In addition to increased damage against the many undead creatures there (and in Stratholme), there will also be PvP-specific flight paths connecting the towers to each other. Although this game type has been prone in the past to tactical exploitation by rogues and other stealthy classes, Blizzard plans to implement a feature where the time it takes to capture a tower is reduced according to how many friendly players are nearby. If you are a stun-kill-disappear commando, you may find your usual tactics less useful here. Also, unlike Silithus, there is no automatic PvP flagging.
Certain details, like what the buffs would be, how long they would last, and other questions will remain unanswered for now, for the simple reason that these elements haven't been finalized yet.
Source : IGN
EA's seminal racing franchise returns in its most dangerous form yet. Brand-new details, impressions and more.
EA's Need for Speed series is currently one of the longest running in all of gaming, and for good reason. Year after year and iteration after iteration, the series has brought the hottest and most recent trends in racing to gamers everywhere, and the newest title in the series, Need for Speed Carbon, is no different. From what EA tells us (and we'll trust them as our rusty Ford Pintos are not exactly ready for competition), street racing has essentially divided into two distinct factions. Being that it's highly illegal, some street racers have shifted to sanctioned races, competitions set up legally on safe tracks. Some racers, however, have taken their sport outside city walls, continuing to defy the law but pushing the boundaries of what any sane person would consider safe even further than before.
This leads us to the newest and biggest mode in Need for Speed Carbon, Canyon Duels. Based on points rather than finishing the race first, Canyon Duels pit two cars against each other in two rounds, with one car chasing the other in the first, and then reversing it for the second. You'll always begin as the follow car in NFS Carbon, whereby you'll earn points for keeping up with your opponent. The closer you are, the quicker you'll earn points. For the second leg, your opponent will follow you and attempt to chip away at the points you've just earned. Finish in the positive and you'll take home a medal, but finish in the negative and you'll go home empty handed (and maybe on foot).
The most interesting part about this is that it's possible to earn an instant victory (or loss, as the case may be). If the following car passes the lead car and manages to stay ahead for 10 seconds, the race is over. Likewise, if the lead car manages to pull way ahead of the following car, the latter of the two is going home. And last but certainly not least, if you happen to take a turn too late and break through the guardrail, the only thing you'll earn is a heaping pile of metal at the bottom of the canyon.
This stressed the main aspect of Canyon Duels to us: speed versus danger. Though the track we were able to try didn't have any very sharp turns, it was almost never straight, meaning that we were always toying with sliding into the mountain or off the edge of the cliff. In and of itself, the course isn't difficult to navigate, but when you're trying to stay either out in front or just behind the other racer, you'll wind up pushing your car farther than you should more often than not. This was the coolest part about this race - managing speed against safety.
Speaking of managing, this brings us to Carbon's crew aspects. While you'll be racing one-on-one in Canyon Duels, those only make for about 25% of the races in Carbon, with the majority of the game taking place in its open-world environment. This is where the bulk of the story will take place and it's here that you'll build up your own crew. Details are a little scarce on exactly how you'll gain members, how you'll manage them and so forth, but we do know that you'll be able to choose who joins your racing team and each member will be able to increase their skills as the game progresses.
Each member has two of six skills, one off the track and one on. For racing, a crew member will be classified as a Blocker, Scout or Drafter. During a race you'll be able to tell your teammate to perform their ability a few times per race (as to not overdo it) and help you get ahead. They're able to win races for you, but you're the main focus so they're present more for support and will drop back to help you out even if it means losing a few positions.
Blockers will drive directly in front of another car and attempt to prevent it from passing. A Scout will boost ahead and look for shortcuts and such for you, pointing them out both aurally over the radio as well as visually via some sort of clues. A Drafter will drive right in front of you and allow you to draft for a bit before slingshotting ahead of him. Off of the track, each member will either give you bonuses for modifying your car, tuning it or helping calm down the police, which have returned but have less of a focus than in Most Wanted.
Though EA seemed quite proud of introducing drift racing to a majority of American gamers in the first Need for Speed Underground, the series shifted away from it. However, drift racing makes a return to the Need for Speed series in Carbon, but this time it's seen a major facelift. For one thing, the scoring system has been completely reworked. One problem that was evident in NFS Underground was that gamers learned to "snake" their way into a never-ending drift and essentially break the scoring system. That's no longer possible for multiple reasons, one of which is the scoring zones that are set up in corners, meaning that you won't be able to score on straight-aways.
The other huge change that we immediately noticed with the drift races in NFS Carbon is that it has been highly simplified compared with what we've previously seen. Rather than relying on having drivers perform faints, over steering, using power brakes or anything of this sort, you'll simply need to hit the gas as you enter a turn and watch your car fishtail - skill here is focused on keeping your car under control rather than performing different moves and mixing it up.
While it takes a couple seconds to get used to handling the cars in a drift competition, it certainly doesn't seem overly difficult. Being as you're really only managing the direction you're steering as you'll almost always have the gas punched down, it's a rather simplistic mechanic overall. That doesn't mean that it isn't fun, but it does mean that it's pretty far removed from being any sort of simulation.
While EA has shifted some of its driving focus back to drifting, it's also quite keen on widening the handling and feel variance between each of its car classes. One of the complaints that it has seemingly taken to heart from Most Wanted was that regardless of which car you ran with, they seemed to feel about the same (sans differences in speed and acceleration).
There are three car classes this time out, tuner, muscle and exotic. Tuner cars are things like pimped-out Civics and the like, middle of the road cars that have been given a ton of extra juice and flair specifically for racing. Muscle cars are your classic 1960s and '70s sports cars obviously, while exotics are those quarter-million dollar-plus beasts with hundreds upon hundreds of horsepower. The quickly-defined differences between the three types is that tuners handle the best and have decent speed, muscle cars are really powerful but handle poorly (which means they're great for powerslides), and exotics are extremely quick and handle well, but maybe not quite as well as tuners.
In practice, there's a huge difference between the muscles cars and everything else, but right now it still seems like tuners and exotics could be separated a bit more. The muscle cars do feel really great - they're heavy, skittish and rumble with more power than you'll likely be able to handle. It's exactly what you'd expect them to drive like, so EA has seemed to nail that. The tuners and exotics feel much closer in style, very similar to how Most Wanted felt as a whole. They're quick and fairly agile and right now make for a marked difference from the muscle cars, if not each other so much. Granted, we were only able to use one car from each class so that could have something to do with our overall impressions here, but either way EA still has a handful of months to improve what already works pretty well.
One thing that we absolutely loved, especially when behind the wheel of a muscle car, was the feeling of applying the brakes. While most games, especially arcade-esque racers like this, simply use a brake's analog input to determine how quickly your vehicle should slow down, in NFS Carbon it really feels as if you're using a real brake pedal. By that we mean that if you slam down on the brakes, you'll feel like you've put too much pressure on the pads and will possibly lock up the wheels. More often than not, especially when on one of the canyon courses, it's better to use the brake in varying degrees just as you would in a real car. Very cool stuff here, and though it's subtle, it's one of the things we were most impressed with.
The absolute coolest thing about Need for Speed Carbon however is its Autosculpt system. The best way to think of it is as Game Face or Fight Night's boxer creator for a car. You're essentially given analog control over the shape of the major pieces of your car, allowing you to raise, lower, angle, shrink, expand and even twist parts however you want (within reason, of course). Each car class will feature somewhere between seven to 10 Autosculpt regions, and in each one of those regions you'll be able to edit numerous pieces.
So for example, when editing tires you're able to change the depth, width and twist of the rims, the width and depth of the tires and more. On the hood, you might be able to change the angle of air intakes, whether or not and how far a supercharger sticks out, the angle and size of retractable lights and more. The same goes for the spoiler and basically anything else you can think of. It's almost impossible to say how much customization you can do here simply because we've already seen a ton of variety and we've only been shown a handful of the options.
What we've seen so far in Need for Speed Carbon fits right along with our expectations. The series hasn't strayed too far from its proven formula, though with the introduction of a few cool new modes and a couple killer new features (like the ultra-sweet Autosculpt), NFS Carbon looks like it'll take many, if not all, of the best features from the last few games, expand on them and pile on a slew of cool new goodies. The game is set for release this November on basically every platform known to man, plants and aliens.
Source : Deep Throat
Half-Life 2: Episode Two Update Valve gives us a quick but awesome new glimpse at its upcoming Half-Life 2 extension.
At an EA press event held today, Valve's Gabe Newell presented us with a couple new tidbits and a short new teaser for Half-Life 2: Episode Two. The teaser itself is essentially a shortened version of the trailer you see after finishing Episode One, though three scenes stuck out as being new.
At the start, a large steel bridge slowly buckled under its own weight, breaking away from its supports and its edge at the side of a cliff. Snapping off a bit, the bridge tilts down a little more towards the drop below as a few girders fly off into the distance. Panning down, Alex is seen hanging from part of the wreckage, just as we'd already seen in the original trailer.
This looked a fair bit more complex than what you'd normally find in a scripted cutscene, primarily because it employs Valve's new "cinematic physics" technology. Blending keyed animation with Source's Havok physics model, the new technology will allow Valve the ability to create cutscenes that are much more complex than previously possible simply because of the use of physics objects. This was the only example shown for cinematic physics during the event, so we'll have to see just what else is possible at some point in the future.
The second new scene in the demo showed a Strider attack a tiny village (or just a shack, really) with a slew of freedom fighters returning the attack via assault rifles. One blast from the Strider destroys the shack, just before a tripod shows up to help with the attack.
The final new scene we noticed showed a Vortigaunt fighting a series of the new tripods in a cave. Surrounded by nearly a dozen of the tri-pedal creatures, the Vortigaunt uses some sort of area attack to knock them all away.
On top of Source's new cinematic physics feature, the engine has also been updated with soft particles and a few other minor tweaks. Gabe Newell did mention that Episode Two will feature not only new environments (one of which being giant outdoor spaces) and creatures (ala the tripods), but new weapons as well.
Half-Life 2: Portal Valve's innovative surprise game could just be the shizzle we've been waiting for.
What better way to open up your company gamers' day then to have acclaimed designer Gabe Newell casually walk on stage and in ho-hum fashion demonstrate the coolest thing since the invention of the word "shizzle?" Can't really think of one myself.
But that's what happened. Representing Valve, the creators of Half-Life, Team Fortress and Counter Strike and the most radically independent software developer in the business, Newell walked up on stage at Electronic Arts -- the biggest and most ominous game publishing company in the world -- and explained Valve's dedication to episodic content, to be published by EA. Then he showed us a killer list of games and innovative ideas. The preposterousness couldn't have been more shocking. The irony couldn't have been thicker. The shiz-nittiness of it couldn't have been more shizznitty.
But seriously, shizzle aside, the Portal demo blew our minds. In the demonstration, Newell walked us through the concept. I'll back up a step. If you've played or heard of Humanhead's Prey, then you know the game offers organic portals throughout a giant sentient alien ship. The portals are dimensional doors into different areas in the ship, and they're graphically and conceptually well implemented and work seamlessly. They're also stationery. In Portal, a seemingly independent game that ships with the PC version of Half-Life Episode 2, and the bundle of Half-Life 2, Episode 1, 2, and Team Fortress 2 on Xbox 360 and PS3, players use a tool that creates portals on the fly. Yes -- a gun that creates instant openings through walls that transport you in the bat of an eye to another place.
Seems simple enough, but how is Valve applying the design into actual gameplay? I'll use Valve's examples. Say you're in a room and you can't jump over the giant 10 foot chasm in front of you, but you need to get to the other side. Easy! Whip out the portal gun, aim it at a spot on the floor on the other side of the chasm, and then create a portal on your side of the chasm. Then walk through it. It's like an Easy Bake Oven recipe. For-snizzle.
Now that you have the idea, apply the concept to multiple floor puzzles. How do you get from floor one to floor four? Let me introduce you to my little friend, the portal tool! Now introduce objects, such a boxes or keys, that can be ported to open more complicated doors, and you've got something else to talk about. Lastly, and just for the fun of it, create endless loops of portals for mind-bending fun. The examples we witnessed were of a soldier falling infinitely through a continuous loop of portals in floors and ceilings. And people chasing each other in circles through portals in walls. It's all really wild shizzle, we must say.
Again, and this is the last time I'll use the faux word "shizzle" in this article, what we saw was a mere demonstration. The demo used in-game footage mixed with slide show images to cleverly make Valve's point. What remained unclear was whether Portal was a standalone game or not, or whether Portal was strictly for single-player gaming or whether there were multiplayer opportunities. When we spoke with EA, the reps were unable to answer if the gameplay was part of Episode 2's single-player game or if Portal was a fully independent entity. Newell's presentation indicated it was a standalone single-player game on its own. When phoned, no Valve representative was able to return our calls prior to deadline.
Source : IGN
Team Fortress 2 Teaser Impressions Valve's class-based shooter arises from the dead with a wholly unique look and style.
Nearly 10 years ago, a trio of fellows named Robin Walker, John Cook and Ian Caughley released what would go down as one of the most important mod releases to date, Team Fortress. The free modification for the original Quake brought about class-based team play into the world of 3D shooters, allowing players the ability to take on the roles of a sniper, spy, medic and more and make use of their specialized skills in a slew of multiplayer modes, including Capture the Flag and Attack and Defend.
The game was successful enough that the team formed TeamFortress Software to begin work on Team Fortress 2, what was then intended to be a commercial mod for Quake II. Valve Software quickly snatched up the young development house and released their sequel work as Team Fortress Classic, a free mod for Valve's own Half-Life. After its release, Valve announced that work on Team Fortress 2: Brotherhood of Arms was underway and a short while later released a handful of screenshots and a gameplay trailer.
For its time, the game looked to feature some extremely impressive technology, like proximity-based lip syncing on characters that matched actual players' voice chatting in-game. It also looked to have changed style quite a bit, shifting from the original Team Fortress' hectic play to a much more realistic combat simulation. Unfortunately, the screenshots released in 2001 were the last time that any concrete information had been heard about the game, until now.
Valve has now revealed that Team Fortress 2 will make up the multiplayer component for its forthcoming Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Along with Valve's experimental first-person puzzler, Portal, Team Fortress 2 will be a standalone game but essentially free as part of the Episode Two package. No price has been given as of yet, but it's assumed that it'll run for $19.95 like Episode One.Team Fortress 2 will feature nearly all of the classes from the original game, including the Heavy, Spy, Scout, Demolitions, Engineer, Medic, Sniper, Soldier and Pyro, making for nine classes in all. Valve hasn't released any sort of information on what loadouts each class will carry.
While the classes have largely stayed the same, one thing that's extremely unique about Team Fortress 2 is its look. While the video that we saw was an edited-together montage, it featured in-game footage of the characters posing smugly for the camera, giving us a great look at the game's art and rendering style. Characters have been designed in a highly exaggerated fashion, drawing attention to what we'd assume would be their main attributes. From the sickly-thin frame for the sniper (the better to hide with) to the massive hulking arms for the heavy, it looks like you'll easily be able to spot character classes in the middle of a battlefield.
The most unique thing about the characters' looks however is the way they're rendered. Using a brand-new lighting system implemented into Source, the characters look like a cross between an action figure and a cartoon. They're clearly 3D, but feature very little texture detail. The lighting is extremely smooth however, giving them the appearance of being sculpted models or something similar - Toy Story-esque is the description that probably comes closest.
The teaser that we saw showed little more than the characters posing for a quick bit, so as of yet we know nothing about game types, map designs or anything else of that sort. Team Fortress 2 (along with HL2: Episode Two and Portal) do not have a firm release date as of yet, but being as Valve plans to ship Half-Life 2 (along with Episode One and Two, Portal and TF2) to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 at the same time as the PC release of Episode Two, we can expect mid-November to be the earliest we'll get our hands on it. On the other hand, Valve had planned to ship Episode Two roughly six months after Episode One, which released on June 1st, so plan on seeing the game sometime this winter season.
