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E3 Impressions - Huxley and Mass Effect
The 360 is playing host to some non-traditional titles in the near future. Huxley is an MMO, one of the first on the console, and combines MMORPG elements with FPS shooting. From Gamespot's Huxley hands-on: "We saw a residential area that has room for 5,000 players, and told that you'll be able to purchase your own housing in the game." Meanwhile, Mass Effect is Bioware's next great opus, an RPG with energy weapons. From 1up's Mass Effect hands-on: "Everything for the E3 demo was in-engine, and the graphics are impressive. The dialogue scenes revealed characters with lifelike eye movements that conveyed real emotion. Excellent voice acting, distinctive music, and a beautifully formed world with rich, detailed environments show real promise."
what about Dragonage? I've been pumped for a while now and it won awards at E3 '04. Anything from them on that or is it still hush-hush?
So little time. Stupid work takes up too much time.
I've been reading all the hype about Huxley, and frankly I'm not impressed.
Now, don't get me wrong. The graphics are very impressive. The Unreal Engine pretty much assures this. It's the whole concept that doesn't impress me.
This is a game that's not sure what it wants to be.
It wants to be an RPG, so it has NPC vendors, and "living quarters" for your character, and Classes.
It wants to be an FPS, so it has First Person style battles that require FPS Twitch skills to win with.
But it doesn't seem to want to be fully either one. For example, it still fails at one of the major stumbling blocks with all RPG games. Level Grinding. In order to keep high level players from stomping the newbies, they aren't going to let the newbies and high-levels fight one-another. How are they going to manage that? Instanced combat. Basically fighting in a box. If I wanted fighting in a box, I could go play UT or CS, or any other arena-based FPS game.
An MMOFPS is supposed to be LARGE SCALE. Fighting that takes place over an entire Continent or Planet. Not fighting in some goofy instanced arena that others can't enter. An MMOFPS should allow a complete newbie to kit up with his weapons of choice, go out on the field, and if he's skilled enough, take out the highest level player in the game. An MMOFPS should NEVER restrict the players ability to fight anyone, anywhere, with anything he chooses.
RPG's on the other hand, are all about Levels, Classes, grinding up the scale until you have your "Uber-sword of l33tness +15" that lets you go out and defeat anything you come up against. Huxley, from everything I read, is all about this. You can level grind up to level 50, gain your Uber armor with a gagillion expansion slots in it, get the noobpwner cannon of d00m, and go out and then fight in an instanced box against a predetermined number of opponents. (SNORE!)
So all Huxley gives you is a goofy taped together "mostly-RPG-with-FPS-elements" combo game, that looks pretty, but doesn't do RPG and especially not FPS really well.
No thanks, I'll stick with the first and only MMOFPS in existence, Planetside.
www.planetside.com
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The big question is, how do you avoid the problem of a level 50 player absolutely destroying a level 1 newcomer? Kang had an answer. Basically, the idea is that the levels are divided by class. The first 10 levels are the basic class, while the highest 10 levels (41-50) are the elite class. Level 50 characters will have more socket skills at their disposal, as well as more weapons and armor, and they'll usually battle other players that fall into their class. Meanwhile, lower-ranked players will battle in their class, so the disparity isn't so great.
So the answer, Kang, is...nothing. Perhaps it's something we were not told, but that's beside the problem. What a shitty journalist AND editor. Simply write the lies and misdirection that the mindless journalist is presented, then present them to us as facts. Well done.
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Huxley reminds me of Gunz (a Korean-made Third-person shooter), what with its "tier" based system of levels x to y fighting in their tier. Of course, the acrobatics aren't there, and neither are the sword and dagger. Still, you don't see much in the way of FPS (or TPS, either) with character levels (Planetside, really).
This completely skirts the important issue regarding Mass Effect. Specifically, will there be lesbians? While Jade Empire had a pretty good storyline, a far more compelling reason to replay it was to have your female NPC seduce and ultimately shack up with the lesbian daughter of the Empress. If this had been mentioned on the back of the box and in the advertising, the game would have shifted six times as many copies.