Perfect KO is a Korean MMO that looks to incorporate a large scale fight sequence a la Matrix. Not sure how the leveling dynamic will work or how large the battles will be, but the game looks like a corss between Tekken and Street Fighter set in an MMO. The video shows a couple of 3 on 3 fights with different style fighters just causing mayhem, I wouldn’t mind setting up a Loot Ninja character. What do you guys think?
Today The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar announces that players will get Book 11: Defenders of Eriador, another free expansion to the already deep LOTR MMO. THis update brings 100 new quests, a new 12 player raid, more areas to squish hobbits and a new house system, so now you can stuff your orc in a hobbit house. Book 11: Defenders of Eriador will be available to subscribers of The Lord of the Rings Online on October 24, 2007 in North America and October 25, 2007 in Europe.
For full details hit the jump!
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Tired of eating Cheetos and Hot Pockets while sitting so close to your monitor to get your raiding in? Then head over to Xfire and get out your Switchblade (program that is) so you can use your handy dandy Xbox 360 controller to control your henchmen in World of Warcraft, Azeroth will never be the same again. Best part is that it is free and will support other games in the future as well, perhaps a bit of Crysis later this year? I wonder if the TID will also work so you can map all of your control bars to it?
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At Digital Life this weekend, we got a chance to sit down with Adam Mersky of the development team at Turbine who works on Lord of the Rings Online. We talked about the general aspects of the game as well as new features in the upcoming Book 11 update.
If you’re not familiar with the game, Lord of the Rings Online allows you to immerse yourself in the Tolkien universe as a member of one of the main races in the game. You interact through a storyline that takes place during the Lord of the Rings books. You’ll get to meet up with Frodo, Sam, Aragorn, and even Gandolf. The game is much more about exploration than player vs player combat, unlike many other MMO’s out there.
Adam walked up through the updates in Book 11 and what we can expect from the game in the coming months. The update will bring housing to the game for yourself and your kinship. You’ll be able to settle down in a town with your kinship and create your own house and yard and decorate it to your pleasure. Each player can own one house, but anyone in the world can visit your home. You can give other players permissions to make changes in your house, so don’t be surprised if you come home and find your walls a different color. The options for changing the interior of your house are very simple, and each element can be changed on a room by room basis. You can add many different types of furniture and artwork to each room. If you want to add a stone troll head on your wall as a trophy, it’s there for you to put up. Pricing for housing and different items will be determined in the next few weeks as development wraps up on the update.
Army of Two keeps looking more and more interesting the more I hear about what is packed in to the game. The idea of aggro is nothing new and if you are someone who plays any basic MMO, you know aggro or aggression is typically used to pull creatures to one character, typically a tank, so the rest of the team can kill the mobs that have been “pulled” in.
Army of Two uses a similar system in which, one of the Mercs can shoot and pull aggro/attention of the enemies, while the other Merc flanks them around. Very cool idea, which provides another level of strategy into the game, I can quickly imagine situations where one guy can equip a bogger gun and pull enemies towards him while the other goes aorund the other side and picks them off with a sniper rifle.
Loot Ninja is all over this one once it releases, stay tuned!
Way back in the day at E3 2007 (yeah, I know it wasn’t that long ago), Sony announced a partnership with NCSoft to bring their MMO expertise to the PS3 and PSP. Today, NCSoft games some of the details on how they expect to accomplish that in a discussion with CVG.
“We haven’t announced any of the titles we might be bringing out, but whatever we bring out, the one thing I can tell you is that, even if they’re some intellectual property we already have, they’ll be things that’ll be very carefully created for the console experience, not merely a straight port”, NCSoft exec producer Richard Garriott told us when we caught up with him at this week’s Develop conference in Brighton.
“We found even back in my Origin days that direct, unadulterated ports weren’t very successful compared to games that you make sure are really crafted correctly for the console experience”, he added.
I’m glad they aren’t going to just throw ports of City of Heroes and such. Richard Garriott is right on the money: gamers would rather have a customized version to make proper use of the PS3 instead of a straight port of the PC versions of their games. Either way, I think NCSoft will do a great job in bolstering the MMO community on game consoles.
Why?! Why must people that play online shooters or online in general be jerks? Why can’t people just play the %ucking game and not try to give everyone a headache? My frustration stems from GRAW 2 on the Xbox 360 and trying to play over Xbox Live, but it got me thinking about this particular item.
I was playing through GRAW 2 single player and decided to hop online and try some of the multiplayer gametypes, bad idea! I proceeded to try and just get a quick game online using the quick match funtion. I quickly got booted. OK, so I think this is nothing and try another one after running a custom search. 15 games later of trying to get into a game and not get booted, I finally go back to one of the original rooms and try to ask why i keep getting booted for no reason? Answer: Becasue my rank was 1, wtf?? So I ask the kids on the other side (that were level 9) if they born level 9 perchance? How the %uck are people supposed to level up or learn how to play if higher players won’t play with them for fear of losing levels?
Correct me if I am wrong, but if you are so good and are such a high level, what would be your fear of playing with some low level players anyway? Also I wasn’t aware that your GRAW level was correlated with some life or death statistic?! I proceeded to go off and yell at the kids in the room and vent my frustrations, but it just brought me to a bad place, why must online games give me heart burn?
I recently read an article by Julian Dibbell entitled “The Life of the Chinese Gold Farmer” and I was thoroughly intrigued. It brought perspectives to light I hadn’t thought about, Many gamers out there are quite familiar with MMO games such as World of Warcraft, Phantasy Star Online, Ultima, Guild Wars, Second Life, Final Fantasy, the list goes on, but some may not be aware of the subculture that exists as a result of these games.
There are many players who play the game straight up and are content with leveling and questing, perhaps joining some buddies every once in a while and making a new one at other times. Then there are the hardcore gamers that play with no other purpose than being the best and having the most elite gear or the largest bankroll. Then there are the players that want to be “elite”, but want it the easy way and purchase their items from farmers or online services.
The latter classes of players are the ones that intrigue me and made me think about what is right and wrong with MMO games. In all MMO games there is a sub culture of gamers for the most part of Asian decent that play, no better stated “work”, in these games to gather gold or currency in order to sell it back to real life players typically in Europe and America. If you have played an MMO like WoW they are typically known as “Chinese Gold Farmers” and typically are frowned upon by other players and in extreme cases hated and even hunted.
There’s a new website up for Sony Online Entertainment’s new MMO, The Agency.
You can click in a couple places to get more info on the game, specifically the US and Africa, which are the headquarters of the two factions in the game, being U.N.I.T.E. and ParaGON, respectively. I’ll let you guess which one is the good guys (hint: they’re in the Western Hemisphere).
Along with that cool info, if you click on the bullet next to the game logo, you can sign up to be considered for membership in one of the Agencies. Now, this very well could be just for email newsletters. But more importantly, most are speculating that you’re registering for a beta of the game. Here’s hoping for a beta invitation on this one…
It looks like the rumors have been confirmed that today’s major Sony announcement is for The Agency.
This trailer shows some real-time gameplay footage, with some brief interviews with the developer. The game looks absolutely amazing, and may pull me into an MMO for endless hours.
