Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 10:49 PM

Category: First Person

Based around the latest renditions of the Unreal Engine and Havoc Physics Set, WarPath is a team-based multiplayer gankfest that is played fast, loose and ruthlessly. The game allows you to choose among three races: the Ohm, Kovos and Coalition. Seven weapons give you options for killing foes, but two are specific to each race, while the other five are unlocked throughout the game. The gameplay is reminiscent of Quake 3, and its levels are designed arena-style, but there are strategic elements to the overall game.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 10:04 PM

Category: Role Playing

Michael: Well, first off, there is no encumbrance. It's a great stat for simulation purposes, but we were really focused on making a great, action-packed game and not a simulation. Inventory management will look very familiar to anyone who has played RPG's before. There's a limited amount of space that defines how much your character can carry, and items of varying sizes take up different amounts of that space. Rather than going for a static "stash" that you would have to go back to town to access, we've put in additional "bags" of storage space that are tabbed on the character inventory.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 6:28 PM

Category: Role Playing

Brian Sullivan: The main gameplay element I am most proud of is the visceral combat. When we started making the game, we decided that it had to be fun to kill monsters, as this is core to gameplay. It actually takes a lot of work to get the pacing, animation, sound effects, special effects, skills, physics and equipment to come together for a really satisfying experience when fighting monsters.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 11:05 PM

Category: Role Playing

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 1:53 PM

Category: Massively Multiplayer

April 26, 2006 (BELLEVUE, WA) — ArenaNet®, developer of the award-winning online roleplaying game Guild Wars®, and NCsoft® Corporation, the world's leading developer and publisher of online computer games, announce today that one of the year's most-anticipated PC titles, Guild Wars FactionsTM, has officially shipped. For fans of the game that revolutionized online roleplaying, the wait is nearly over as Guild Wars Factions goes out today to retail stores worldwide.

Guild Wars Factions is the stand-alone follow-up to Guild Wars, the game that set new standards in online gaming with fresh design, innovative technology and no-subscription-fee pricing. With an expected retail price of $49.99, Guild Wars Factions will be available worldwide and servers supporting the new release will "go live" at 12:01 AM PDT /7:01 GMT on April 28, 2006.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 6:45 PM

Category: Role Playing

Basically, we're working on it and trying to get it done. We've found a few additional things we wanted to include and are trying to finish up testing as soon as we can. We'll let folks know as soon as the beta patch is ready.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 12:05 PM

Category: Role Playing

The environment is packed full of things to interact with, like pillars you can topple to crush things beneath them. This can include you, too, as the AI is smart enough to notice and utilise environmental objects. The physics carries across into the magic system, with spells adding an icy sheen to the floor and sending the opposition flying - usually off a cliff.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 9:00 PM

Category: Role Playing

Finally, our goal is to set a benchmark in PC RPG combat with interesting tactical options and hundreds of animations to bring the real-time combat to life. All those factors led us back to a single-player experience. Oblivion’s recent success shows the strength of the single-player-oriented RPG genre and verifies for us even further that we are headed in the right direction. We think there will always be a small group of developers that will dedicate themselves to this genre in one way or another, and our goal is to be one of them.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 11:02 PM

Category: Strategy

As your main character gains experience and levels, you can choose whether to specialise in either the Combat or Magic skill tree, or choose whether to devote yourself to both equally. You can also choose to determine how your party members spend their skill points, too, though the automatic levelling works well enough. Depending upon your style of play, you may choose to strike a balance in your party between spellcasters and warriors, or chose a predominance of one over the other, with one or two characters heavily specialised in the magical arts or the mastery of martial arms to provide either heavy firepower or a melee shield for your magicians.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 3:00 PM

Category: Mods

Now that Oblivion has been out for over a month, it's time to make a list of which mods on Planet Elder Scrolls have been most influential and eye-catching.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 7:23 PM

Category: Role Playing

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 10:08 PM

Category: Role Playing

Egypt, the second act of Titan Quest, features a vast number of monsters that thrive in the hot desert sun, lurk in the ruined temples and crypts, and hunt for their prey in the marshes along the papyrus filled Nile. The most common creature you'll find in Egypt is the Jackalman. The Pharoahs of Egypt had long prayed to the jackal-god Anubis. The Egyptian god of the dead is represented as a black jackal with the body of man. For our version of the jackal, we decided to show more of the animalistic side of this creature. Like the Satyrs in Greece, we have soldier jackals and jackal mages.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 12:00 PM

Category: First Person

UberSoldier is everything I didn’t want to appear in my beloved genre, the first-person shooter. How can someone take Nazis and make them even worse? By giving them voices that make me think twice about shoving needles in my ears, that’s how!

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 1:48 PM

Category: First Person

Essentially, for us, SiN Episodes works on two levels. The first level is on an episode specific arena. We want every episode to be a rewarding and satisfactory experience for the player. So, we endeavor to make each episode not a "part" of a game, but a complete game in and of itself. It's an idea of scope, not division.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 10:36 PM

Category: Role Playing

The open-ended nature of Oblivion makes the game one of the more enjoyable games to come along in a long time.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 5:53 PM

Category: Action

One of the most intriguing aspects of gunfights is that the environment also plays a role in them. You can choose to shoot the bad guys directly, or you may decide to shoot at some loose rocks on a mountain-side to cause an avalanche that will take care of your enemies for you. There are also lots of barrels everywhere that can explode and sometimes you can drop your enemies from a cliff to be quickly rid of then.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 11:10 PM

Category: Massively Multiplayer

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 5:09 PM

Category: First Person

This is no half-assed attempt to show off the multiplayer here. The Activision booth will house a 24 player LAN that anybody at the show can walk up and test out assuming they can break through the ridiculous crowds that will undoubtedly gather around the area.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 2:47 PM

Category: Role Playing

Every now and then some adventurer takes a stroll around in the almost-finished world of Gothic 3 and shoots a few pictures.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 8:36 AM

Category: Role Playing

arczi: Will Geralt, depending on monster or weapon type that he wields, have different stances while fighting or holding a sword in other way? Or maybe he'll stand just like in the MoCap movie?

Michał Madej, (Chief Designer): Yes, every combat style will have a different stance (dynamic one, he won't be just standing). Same thing will be with movement, defense and attack animations.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 11:46 AM

Category: Role Playing

In North America, Oblivion has become the fastest selling game released on the Xbox 360. The NPD Group Inc reports Oblivion PC as the best selling PC game, while the Oblivion Collectors Edition is ranked number 2. NPD reports that Oblivion represented approximately 13% of all PC game sales in the first week of its release, more than four times the sales volume of the next best selling title. (The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind®, the highly-regarded predecessor to Oblivion, remains one of the top 25 best selling PC games nearly four years after its release, according to NPD). European results have been similarly strong with Oblivion quickly becoming ranked the number one selling title in the UK, Germany and France.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 8:47 AM

Category: Role Playing

Dave Brevik: I think that all along we've tried to make games that -- well, that appeal to myself; there's definitely that -- but also appeal to other people besides just myself. [I try to put] equality in all of the characters. In all the games -- we've only made pretty much role-playing games -- when you're choosing your avatar, we like to try to make it as equal as possible, so it'll open up and make for a broader audience so people can relate to it better.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 9:18 AM

Category: First Person

A few weeks ago I mentioned that Michael Greyeyes was here recording new lines for Tommy. This week most of those lines have been processed and are being added to the game. Probably half of the new lines are now in the game with the rest planned to be implemented next week.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 6:02 PM

Category: Role Playing

We are working on a patch/update for both the PC and Xbox 360. It will address a number of issues that we have found and ones that have been reported to us and confirmed. It is our plan to first release it as a beta patch for the PC when it has cleared our initial testing cycles internally. Since it’s a beta patch you should be aware that issues may come up that we haven’t found yet and we strongly recommend you backup save games and understand it may be necessary to reinstall the game when the final patch comes out.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 2:04 PM

Category: Action

By pressing and holding a button while grabbing a cliffside, Lara can transform a normal jump into a silky smooth back-bend to a perfect landing. If you time it right, she executes a series of back flips and summersaults into a mid-air summersault finish. She feels nimble and athletic, easy and actually fun to manipulate. Not such a hard concept for most people to grasp, but for this series, control has been a bane. The swimming mechanics are smooth and likeable too. Mind you, Tomb Raider: Legend isn't as artistically stylistic or as mechanically high-end as Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, but overall, Lara's fluidity and dexterous nature are of high caliber.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 3:27 PM

Category: Role Playing

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 9:15 AM

Category: Role Playing

Dungeon Siege II: Broken World is the expansion to last year's Dungeon Siege II, and while it will continue the epic story begun in that game, much has changed behind the scenes. Basically, the Dungeon Siege franchise has switched from Microsoft to publisher 2K Games. Not to worry, though, because Gas Powered Games remains the developer of the series. We got a first look recently at what 2K Games and Gas Powered have in mind with the expansion.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 9:53 AM

Category: Role Playing

Chances are, it won't be long until you find yourself stumbling across an abandoned fort or cavern, and thus the fun really begins. Again, for anyone used to nothing but highly linear game titles, there's something of a feeling of pride and achievement when you stumble across some uncharted, unknown cavern full of monsters and treasures, and hacking your way through said location picking up whatever bounty you can find along the way leaves you with a feeling of accomplishment. You'll find yourself coming across many, many such areas during your time playing with Oblivion, meaning that there's never a dull moment even during those long treks between towns and cities, and of course every encounter serves to improve your skills and help your character to reach his or her next level. Somehow, despite the general similarity of exploring these various dungeons and caverns, hacking your way through them never seems to become too repetitive - There is always the thought of a rare or valuable item or tougher enemy around the next corner to spur you onwards.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 9:49 AM

Category: Role Playing

Combat has received a major overhaul, yanking out the functional-but-inconsistent waving fest that caused undue frustration and some disjointment in installments past. The first thing you'll notice: when you swing, you hit, and if you hit, you do damage. Low skill no longer keeps you from hitting, but it does determine exactly how much damage you'll do, along with a small litany of side effects, ranging from knocking your target flat on their keister to pulling the weapon right out of their hands. Most of all, the player's actual timing, both in blocking and attacking, has much more bearing on how fights work out than it ever has before.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 11:20 AM

Category: Action