The brief discussion of D&L depresses me. I downloaded their E3 trailer and thought the combat crude in a late-90's way. One or two jerky animations fire off every few seconds, and eventually someone snaps into a death pose.

I really want to like this game. The world is big and beautiful, and its visible horizons inspire the Explorer in me in a way no MMG has since AC1. But I haven't seen any game yet. A little uninspiring combat, and nothing but written discssions about crafting, PVP, and city building.

ASS GLIDERS!!!!

Honh honh, saississez votres chevals!

MONSIEUR, QU'EST-CE QUE C'EST PASSE AVEC LA LUNE?

I'm so psyched for AA. I kinda wrote off DDO, but perhaps I'll give it a second look now. I never really gave it much of a fair shakedown, so I'll have to read up on it now. I actually bought Guild Wars, but only played it for like 5 minutes. I'm debating whether or not I still want to play it (or if it's worth playing). I figure I'll keep it around for a while, it's something else to play when I get bored with WoW.

Pleasing to acquire a stack of "for the k-rad community" beta accounts for DDO, thanks.

Or just me. I'm fine either way.

Glad to hear Imperator looked as bad as it sounds. Being the angsty negative-nelly without just cause is ungood.

I want to hear more about DDO! ;p

I read the article thinking this was the bigger DDO bit

I'm doing whatever the mental analogue of salivating is here now.

I thought AOE 3 was pretty meh. The designer guy demoing it on Gamespot showed the "infantry charge the cannon" and frankly adding ragdolls to each character doesn't make it significately different than the previous games. The guys still had to stand there and beat on the cannon like it was a tank. I've played this game already.


Empire at War however made me wet my pants. Hopefully it won't turn out to be a piece of shit like most Star Wars games.

Did you brave Kentia Hall?

http://www.g4tv.com/mediaplayer/index.aspx?video_key=9179

We saw Heaven vs Hell down in that pit. It's a ways off but it looks to be something hot in 2006 when they release it. They are putting a lot of time and effort into it and so far their ideas and hard work is looking very very good to me.

Could you say a little more about this one? What did you like about it? I'm just curious, seeing as I am but a lowly college student with no access to these sort of video game events/cluster fucks.


*edit for clarity*

One of our brave editors is actually owed a favor by one of the thong-clad Heaven and Hell girls, but, alas, we missed seeing that one.

Div actually is suppossed to be airing the whole spiel on Radio Gamerifts. I'm not sure when.

I'll try to nutshell it a bit.

They made it clear they had only been working on the graphics themselves for 6 weeks. The engine itself has been a work in progress for awhile.

There are three factions: Human, Heaven, Hell

Humans are fighting for their souls.. Heaven wants their souls as does Hell. There is a fourth group that are humans but sub humans called primians.. primians are a resource for all three factions.

That's not the fun part however.

The units themselves are high detail. You can zoom right down on them and see the detail vs being God on high looking at a pixel stick. I forget the poly count but they planned on upping it even more. Their goal was to immerse you into the world much more than other RTS' do.

Units are slightly modifiable. So if you want your unit to be a bit stronger or a bit quicker you can alter the stats a bit to get it.

The terrain changes much in the way of the zerg did in Starcraft but the land is a living thing. If hell takes over the land opens up cracks and shows lava.. plants that were living there slowly die etc. And if Heaven takes over that area, the plants come to life and the land heals.

They plan to support 16 players at once with multiplayer. They MAY bump that to 32 and limit how many units you can have at once or something to keep it from lagging up. The game showed smooth on a 3 gig.

Mods can be done basically on the fly. Meaning.. you can open up the map.. edit it.. save.. pop it RIGHT back in and go. There is no compiling or waiting. Could you imagine that at a lan? The file size for mods are expected to be small. In fact it was said smaller than a normal jpg.

It was pretty to look at already with only 6 weeks of dev in. The technology being stacked into it is more advanced than the usual rts.

There will be special powers as well so that you could literally open up a chasm of lava between you and an enemy thus changing the whole feel of the battle and forcing your enemy to create air units instead of ground units etc.

I haven't cared about many rts' in awhile because they all have the same kind of feel. This one seems fun and interesting again.

I enjoyed meeting the Corp guys at E3. Next time, we'll have to go out for drinks.