News to Come: Everquest II: Kingdom of Sky, Neverwinter Nights 2, Dragon Age, Star Wars: Empire at War
Electronic Gaming News...
Release for Middle-Earth II Approaches
March 2 date set by publisher
Los Angeles, Calif. (Feb. 24, 2006) J.R.R. Tolkien and real-time strategy (RTS) fans have a new game to look forward to and its release is quickly approaching: The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth II.
Electronic Arts recently announced the title is ready for manufacture and will hit store shelves in North America on March 2. The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth II is the sequel to its critically-acclaimed RTS predecessor and was developed at EA's Los Angeles studio for the PC.
Battle for Middle-Earth II offers all-new content based on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings books and allows the player to delve deeper and engage in new battles that go beyond Peter Jackson's award-winning movie trilogy. The game was developed in agreement with the Saul Zaentz Co., doing business as Tolkien Enterprises, which granted EA the rights to develop games based on the books, in addition to EA's separate agreement for games based on the New Line Cinema movies.
In the new game, players wage war in the northern regions of Middle-Earth, where they can choose to assume command of elven and dwarven armies or fight on the side of evil. Hugo Weaving reprises his role as Lord Elrond.
The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth II will be available as a collector's edition, with a suggested retail price of $59.99, or as a regular edition priced at $49.99.
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MechAssault to appear on Nintendo DS
Online (Feb. 24, 2006) The newest mech game to enter the electronic gaming market, MechAssault: Phantom War will ship later this year for the Nintendo DS, announced Majesco Entertainment Co.
The first hand-held installment of the hit franchise features popular mech elements while making use of the hand-held's touchscreen to deliver new control and maneuverability, the company reported.
Developed by Backbone Entertainment, a division of Foundation 9 Entertainment, MechAssault: Phantom War brings interstellar combat to hand-held gamers in a third-person futuristic shooter. While taking on the role of a MechWarrior (elite fighter trained to control BattleMechs, ultimate war machines of the 32nd century), players experience fast-action, 3-D mech combat on the top screen while viewing cockpit controls on the lower touchscreen.
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D&D Online: Stormreach prepares
for launch
Eberron campaign setting becomes the location for an MMORPG
By Editor T. Rob Brown
Online (Feb. 18, 2006) They're most likely the first name to come to mind when
one thinks of role-playing yet it has taken Dungeons & Dragons a long time
to leap onto the MMORPG caravan.
For those who believed Everquest, Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, and countless other fantasy MMORPGs (Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) that have come before and paled in comparison to the epic pen-and-paper games they played in yesteryear -- this is their chance to see if the D&D name can live up to those expectations.
Developed by Turbine, the company that currently controls the Asheron's Call franchise started by Microsoft, this game is perhaps what some die-hard D&D fans have been waiting for since the mid-'90s when MMORPGs first came to life in the form of Meridian 59, Ultima Online, and the early MUDs. Previously, the closest ways to play D&D games online was via the original SSI Neverwinter Nights on AOL in the '90s, multiplayer networked games of Baldur's Gate series by BioWare, and the most popular online D&D game to date: Neverwinter Nights, also by BioWare -- yet none of these were true MMORPGs.
Fans will, of course, have to fork over about $15 a month or less (depending on the payment play they select) to play D&D Online when it is released in late February 2006.
As with any modern PC/Mac game, it has undergone rigorous alpha and beta testing by true fans and newcomers alike. Thus far, one of the major drawbacks reported is that in order to gain enough experience points to get to the next level, some quests might have to be repeated by your character up to three times (on easy, medium and hard difficulty settings). Some beta testers have reported this repeating of quests can break the feel of the game while others didn't seem to mind the repetition.
Other fans have reported their dislike of the experience point (XP) reward system used in the game. In most modern MMORPGs, experience points are awarded to the character per kill -- in otherwords, everytime you kill something you get XP. This system can lead to several issues including repetitive "milking," "camping," or basically a hack-n-slash mentality to get every single bit of XP off monster kills. For some, this type of activity becomes so redundant, they get bored and quit playing the game while others enjoy the constant onslaught of death. For true role-play (RP) fans, gaining XP for every monster kill can become distracting and unbalancing to the game. Imagine a rogue, who does not possess the vast number of hit points (HP) as a fighter or barbarian, who must wade through 20 orcs to get to the destination to retrieve an artifact and bring it back to the non-player character (NPC) who issued the quest. First, it is highly unlikely a rogue would run through the quest, killing every orc just to get XP -- that's not good RP. Second, if the rogue avoided the orcs (as a rogue would do RP-wise), he/she would get less XP than the fighter who ran through slaughtering orcs at will.
In many home pen-and-paper games of D&D, dungeon masters (DMs) issue XP per completed quest (the quest XP total includes the average XP one would have earned for the monster kills). If the rogue is able to sneak past the orcs, it is the same as if they were defeated -- think of the orcs as an obstacle, they don't have to be killed to be defeated. Some custom Neverwinter Nights worlds such as the Broodslayers Official PW have used similar methods -- reducing monster kill XP down to 2 percent of the D&D standard, while making quest XP (or bonus XP from DMs -- also known as adhoc XP) the focused way to level.
Ever since its release in 2004, the Eberron campaign setting created by Keith Baker has become a big hit with D&D fans. It was the first campaign setting completely built using the 3.5 edition rules, it was Wizards of the Coast's (WOTC) elite choice from thousands of campaign settings submitted in a major campaign search, and is being fully supported by WOTC with frequent book releases, novels, and now two computer games (the other was the real-time strategy (RTS) game Dragonshard).
For some fans, the Eberron campaign setting is new and fresh -- for others, it is too disimilar to Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms campaign setting, which older fans have come to love and cherish through the years. For those new to Eberron, it is a world that follows all the rules and traditions of D&D staples like Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms but offers many new twists -- the chief, of which, are the warforged. Yes, you can play a warforged race character in D&D Online. Warforged are living constructs forged during a great war that spread across Eberron. Although they share some of the same traits with the monsters known as constructs, they are sentient and constructed differently so they do have critical locations and do not possess all the amazing abilities of a true construct. As a player race, a warforged can be great at most anything -- but they are excellent fighters and barbarians.
At this time, the shifter (lycanthrope descendant), changeling (doppleganger descendant), and kalashtar (human-alien hybrid race) have not been introduced as player races for the online version of Eberron. In addition, the artificer class is not available at this time.
The world of Eberron combines the feel of traditional D&D with a sprinkling of steampunk, some action-adventure of the Indiana Jones variety, and a dab of the old gumshoe-style private investigator stories. You put all that together, stir in some gnomish contraptions, high magic, introduce technology -- but not as technology -- as magical enchantments, and an in-depth history of a war that completely reshaped the world, and you have a very unique place indeed.
If you would like to learn more about D&D Online and pre-ordering, check out Turbine's website HERE.
Turbine is also developing the forthcoming Lord of the Rings MMORPG.
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NVIDIA announces first Quad SLI
Next level in PC graphics releases soon
CES 2006 (Feb. 15, 2006) Though the battle between NVIDIA and ATI as the gamer's choice graphics cards continues, NVIDIA takes another step forward in an attempt to win the war.
Taking its acclaimed NVIDIA SLI technology to the next level, NVIDIA unveiled support for the first-ever Quad SLI-certified PC at CES 2006. Delivering what NVIDIA calls "the most extreme high definition gaming experience available on the PC," Quad SLI combines the power of four NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX GPUs with an NVIDIA nForce4 SLI X16 motherboard.
The forthcoming Dell XPS 600 Renegade will feature this revolutionary technology, allowing gamers to run today's hottest games at an unbelievable 2560X1600 resolution with silky-smooth frame rates.
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[Edits for grammar, punctuation, artifacts, and syntax made by GamingNews Editor T. Rob Brown, http://t-rob.com
