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The Matrix Online Announced
Thanks to Blue's News for pointing to the new official website for The Matrix Online. This massively multiplayer PC title, where you get to live, explore and fight within the machine construct of The Matrix, is courtesy Warner Brothers and Ubi Soft, and is being developed by Monolith (of No-One Lives Forever and Tron 2.0 fame) for a 2004 release. IGN.com has more details, and a healthy, if sensible, skepticism until they see the game playable. Finally, this project is completely separate from Shiny/Atari's Enter The Matrix game that we covered a little while back, and which is shipping into stores about now.
Now we'll have humans spending hours in front of the computer trying to immerse themselves into the digital world of the Matrix, a place where humans trapped inside of a digital world are trying to get unimmersed. it's not too hard to believe that the robots probably released an early version of The Matrix as an MMORPG...
Why Monolith? Did Warner Brothers simply draw up a contract for the game design and award it to the lowest bidder? I hate to sound like a troll, but honestly, Monolith isn't exactly the paradigm of innovation in the industry. Almost everything they've done since the original Blood (nolf, avp 2, shogo) has been largely derivative of popular trends, and there isn't a whole lot of precedent for a game like this. Maybe I'm just being paranoid and the game will kick ass, but when I think of an ambitious project like this, one of the last development teams I would want is Monolith. The Blood series was first-rate, though the rest of their catalogue is a little weak. They're a pretty good team as far as the industry goes, but I wouldn't be surprised if this game ends up as "Everquest with Uzi's."
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
Do you really think such a powerful entity as the Matrix could be dissembled in three movies? Right now humans are fighting off extinction. I think this just means there won't be a cheesy 'yay, good guys always win.' ending.
Personally I am actually interested in this, and I generally can't stand MMOGs.
"I only speak the truth"
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I'm curious as to how they'll implement bullet time in a MMORPG setting. If I recall correctly, the bullet time feature was left out of Max Payne multiplayer.
If someone hits the "bullet time" button, will everyone slow down? Will all NPC's within a certain radius slow down?
Good luck devs. Lets just hope this title doesn't turn into a grief fest.