It's called Throne of Oblivion, and looks to be a major upgrade to the sieging system in Shadowbane, lending more purpose to the pillaging of one's neighbours.
Shadowbane is still suffering from lag, lack of quests, lack of dungeons, a dated graphics engine, and an abysmal physics engine. It's a real shame, because the concept and the lore are far and away the best in the MMORPG crowd.
Turbine has its fingers in a lot of pies right now.
They're doing the Middle Earth MMORPG for Vivendi. They're doing the Dungeons and Dragons MMORPG (formerly for Atari - now they're self publishing, and using Atari as a distribution partner only), and of course, the AC series.
They're able to do this because they're using the same engine for all their games (AC1 being the exception, and we can hope they'll migrate it to their new engine too). Once you've got the engine done, assuming it's robust enough to handle the different rulesets for the different games (and Turbine's is - AC provided a complicated rules-base, and they learned some good lessons there), it becomes merely a matter of generating content for the games. And content is a lot easier to produce than graphics engines and back-end networking support.
I agree with earlier posters - this is a ballsy move by Turbine, and one that I think will pay off for them in the long run.
Give AC1 the new engine, and it'll be a game with tremendous staying power. AC2 was "MMORPGs for dummies" but I'm told they're learninng from their mistakes on that one, and it's getting marginally better (the game mechanics are going to remain too simplistic to interest most hardcore gamers, though).
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It's called Throne of Oblivion, and looks to be a major upgrade to the sieging system in Shadowbane, lending more purpose to the pillaging of one's neighbours. Shadowbane is still suffering from lag, lack of quests, lack of dungeons, a dated graphics engine, and an abysmal physics engine. It's a real shame, because the concept and the lore are far and away the best in the MMORPG crowd.
They're doing the Middle Earth MMORPG for Vivendi. They're doing the Dungeons and Dragons MMORPG (formerly for Atari - now they're self publishing, and using Atari as a distribution partner only), and of course, the AC series.
They're able to do this because they're using the same engine for all their games (AC1 being the exception, and we can hope they'll migrate it to their new engine too). Once you've got the engine done, assuming it's robust enough to handle the different rulesets for the different games (and Turbine's is - AC provided a complicated rules-base, and they learned some good lessons there), it becomes merely a matter of generating content for the games. And content is a lot easier to produce than graphics engines and back-end networking support.
I agree with earlier posters - this is a ballsy move by Turbine, and one that I think will pay off for them in the long run.
Give AC1 the new engine, and it'll be a game with tremendous staying power. AC2 was "MMORPGs for dummies" but I'm told they're learninng from their mistakes on that one, and it's getting marginally better (the game mechanics are going to remain too simplistic to interest most hardcore gamers, though).
Cheers, Turbine - all the Best!