PC Games First Look

[USO36]

Another MMORPG, but this one's different, honest



Developer's NCSoft have described their upcoming MMORPG as the 'most visually beautiful MMORPG ever made'.

Aion: The Tower of Eternity is a fantasy MMORPG, chronicling an epic conflict between the Chun, the Ma and a server-controlled NPC faction, the warlike Yong.

In Aion: The Tower of Eternity, players must choose a side between two warring factions: the Chun or the Ma. Once their world was whole; a perfect union joined at the centre by The Tower of Eternity. When a great catastrophe shattered The Tower of Eternity, it split the world into two halves - and awoke the Yong, a warring race exiled within the extra-dimensional Abyss. The Yong now seek revenge on both of these new worlds, sparking an epic conflict. The part you play, the side you choose and the decisions you make will help determine the ultimate fate of Aion.



Key Features
Interactive gameplay systems
The actions of each faction on each individual server will eventually trigger consequences, which will then change each server's live environment. No two servers should ever be the same.



PvPvE (Player vs Player vs Environment)
Aion: The Tower of Eternity features an evolving conflict system, which manages the complex relationships and alliances between realms, races and guilds. The system also controls a third NPC faction, the Yong, who may act as the enemy - or the ally - of players.

Free flying and flying combat
Take to the skies and soar over the landscape, with wings that allow your character to access remote areas, travel to different parts of the world - and to engage enemies in aerial combat! Created using a modified version of the Crytek engine (as used in Far Cry), Aion: The Tower of Eternity is the most graphically beautiful MMORPG yet released. Astounding levels of detail on characters and in environments immerse you in the world of Aion.

[inuyashaa]

how much does this cost it sound like a gwd game

[USO36]

http://www.mmorpg.com/index.cfm?bhcp=1
http://www.gameogre.com/

[inuyashaa]

http://www.mmorpg.com/index.cfm?bhcp=1
http://www.gameogre.com/


its gwd and all giving links to see wat its about and wat it looks like but all
i wanted to know i how much it cost

[USO36]

You know what Im still looking for that in the mean time I ll be do other post.

[USO36]

It's Their Life, But It's Your Story.
The Sims Life Stories is the first release in an all-new product line called The Sims Stories. Play through all the great moments of your Sim's life in this easy-to-play, laptop-friendly version of The Sims. In the new and engaging directed Story mode, you take your Sims through a unique and entertaining storyline full of romance and dramatic twists. You even unlock cool rewards along the way as you achieve set goals. In open-ended Classic mode, you create Sims and then choose how they'll fulfill their dreams through life's biggest moments. Stay connected by using your own IM and email while playing.

Exclusive Screenshots
See never seen images from the game

Click for more images Features
Direct Their Lives in Two Complete Stories
In all-new Story Mode play through the life story of Riley as she returns home to start a new life with new friends, new experiences, and unexpected surprises. A bonus second story lets you sort out the love life of Vince, a love-struck high-tech whiz who's been unlucky in love so far.

Create Your Sims' Own Stories
In Open-Ended Classic Mode you create your Sims, design their dream homes, fulfill their desires (or dash their hopes), and tell their stories as they experience life's biggest moments.

Life's Most Memorable Milestones
From first date to first job, from finding Mr. or Mrs. Right to building a long-lasting family legacy, take your Sims through a lifetime of unforgettable experiences.

It's Never Been Easier to Play on Your Laptop
Specially designed to play easily and quickly at home or on the go, this laptop-friendly game features simple shortcuts and an all-new auto-pause that lets you start and stop easily when opening/closing your laptop.

Be Creative While Staying Connected
You can easily stay in touch with your friends by using your own IM and email while playing the game in its own window.

The Start of an All-New Product Line
Also Coming Soon to The Sims Stories Line: The Sims Pet Stories invites your Sims to care for and train loveable but unpredictable pets, and in The Sims Castaway Stories you help your Sims make a new life in an unexplored island paradise. All releases in The Sims Stories line offer two fun ways to play, directed Story mode and open-ended Classic mode, and are designed with laptop-friendly controls that let you play even when you're on the go!

[USO36]

I'm Jared 'jRAD' Hefty, one of the programmers at Splash Damage working on id Software's Enemy Territory: Quake Wars (ETQW); specifically, the tools used to process, crunch, optimize, assemble or otherwise 'mess with' all of the pieces of data that make up the game. I want to give you an insight into how we go about assembling a massive game like ETQW, what we use to do it, and why we go about it the way we do.

The Job for the Tools for the Job

What is a tools programmer? I think of myself as Splash Damage's Enabler (TM). I'm here to save artists, game designers and level designers (the guys who pull everything together into a playable game) from pulling their hair out doing mundane, repetitive tasks. I'm here to notice patterns in tasks and figure out ways to streamline them before they become a roadblock or a time sink.

I watch my co-workers use the programs that I've produced in ways I'd never expected. "Huh, cool," I say under my breath as I watch a level designer zip around one of the game worlds, tweaking, nudging, adjusting with practiced ease. The level designers at Splash Damage spend massive chunks of their time in tools that I've been working on for years.

I want to pause here for a brief moment. You may or may not have heard of a term I'll be throwing around a fair bit: MegaTexture. What is it? It's a way for us to fill a large landscape with a massive image that not only looks incredibly pretty, but provides practical information like traction for vehicles and appropriate sound effects and bullet impacts depending on what it looks like you're moving over or firing at. Now, moving on...

Toolmakers: Made, Not Born

Before I came to Splash Damage as their tools programmer I was the Lead Level Designer on the Quake3 modification Q3F2, and then a professional level designer at Dallas-based Ritual Entertainment.

During my time in Dallas I spent more and more time using my programming skills to enhance the level editing tool Q3Radiant (don't worry, I finished my levels too). I would often stay late into the evening improving the user interface, fixing niggling bugs that had annoyed me during the day, or adding features that my fellow level designers mentioned. "Hey, you know what'd be cool?" became a phrase that I enjoyed (and still enjoy) hearing from people as they wandered over to my desk to share their ideas.

Over three years ago, I dutifully began poking and prodding the Doom 3 level editor (known as "Radiant") to add in some features that would help us edit the massive terrains that we were planning. After a few cycles of pounding, shoehorning and sometimes bludgeoning code around, it became apparent that it was time to give the editor some more attention than we had originally planned. I needed a framework that I could work with quickly and efficiently as each department figured out how we were going to make this whole MegaTexture thing work.



Around editWorld in Eighty Ways

I set to work with one major goal in mind: no matter what new features were added, no matter what changes happened under the hood (and by golly there are a lot of 'em), it still had to feel like Radiant; it had to stay a friendly home for our Radiant-bred level designers. Four years' experience with Radiant came into play as I set about gutting and rebuilding the beast from inside out. It always looked the same, which made an apparent lack of progress disheartening sometimes, but the improvements started piling up as I gained momentum. The rework ended up being quite a bit more work than planned (isn't it always?), but after several months the newly-christened "editWorld" rolled out to the level designers.

The biggest gain from the massive rewrite was the ability to tie several smaller worlds together into a larger one. Previously, if someone built, say, a quaint little shed, and wanted to place it in several places around the world they would have to copy and paste it to each location. When the time came to revise the hut (and those times come many, many times throughout a project) they would have to visit each location and update each hut separately (blech). Aren't computers supposed to automate repetitive tasks?

[USO36]

With a mind-boggling eight million subscribers contributing to first-day sales of 2.4 million copies worldwide, attracting new customers wasn't a problem Blizzard Entertainment faced with The Burning Crusade, the first retail expansion for World of Warcraft. So it's probably little surprise to see that the basic formula hasn't changed: you're still taking on quests, beating up monsters and endlessly pursuing better loot alongside thousands of other players.

But the fact that it doesn't break much new ground doesn't change the fact that Burning Crusade is an overwhelming success: there's enough new content to keep most players busy for months, and many of the new areas and quests easily outclass those of the original. Without tampering with its addictive formula, the expansion still manages to change the landscape so dramatically that it's now virtually pointless to continue your adventures in Azeroth without it. And we're loving it.

Space Shammys and Evil Pallys

The first main draw of the expansion is its two new races: the Draenei (Alliance) and Blood Elves (Horde). While the Draenei are far from ugly, the Blood Elves are easily the ***ier of the two (if you were to poll players, they'll likely tell you this is Blizzard's way of getting more people to join the Horde). The character creation options are still somewhat limited compared to other MMOs, but the two new races do have a little extra variety in terms of hairstyles and such.

Also new are the options for Blood Elves to roll as paladins (formerly exclusive to Alliance characters), and for Draenei to create shaman (previously Horde-only). There was some initial griping in the WoW community when the news first broke, but 10 days after Burning Crusade's release, it's still too early to tell how it will pan out: it'll be months before we can properly evaluate the full impact of these classes standing side-by-side in raids.

Both new races boast new starting areas and home cities, and it's hard to decide which is more beautiful. The Blood Elf starting area, north of the Eastern Plaguelands, is a masterpiece of color, a forest filled with oranges and reds. The Draenei main city of Exodar, off the northwestern coast of Kalimdor, which is actually a crashed spaceship (just the first of many sci-fi-ish nods Blizzard has injected into this fantasy world), is equally striking. We've never had a shortage of good things to say about Blizzard's art department over the years, and it'll be hard not to spend a great deal of time just staring at the scenery in these new locations.

These starting areas are overflowing with quests, which often feel a notch above the lower-level quests from the original races. As you go through the early levels, there's a lot of attention paid to how these two races ended up in Azeroth, and while there are plenty of kill-the-thingie or collect-the-whosiwhatsis quests, there are also more interesting tasks as well.

The only real downside to the new races is that the fun basically stops at level 20. From there, you have to go back to the "old world" and continue with the previously existing level 20-60 content. The result is that it's possible to churn through the lowbie areas in just a few nights, which can leave you feeling a little empty when it's over. At the least, it would have been nice to have some new lowbie dungeons, like the Deadmines or Wailing Caverns.

Dont have it yet play with friend and got to say I love it.

[USO36]

It takes a game like Titan Quest to make you not care very much that Blizzard still hasn't gotten around to making a new Diablo. C'est la vie. Take your time, Blizzard. We're having a great time with Titan Quest. And now we've got the Immortal Throne expansion, which doesn't just add new content after what used to be the final boss. It also gives us an incentive to start over from the beginning.

One of the first things you'll want to try after you install Immortal Throne is the new Dream mastery. This new "class", if you will, is a powerful jack-of-all-trades, with skills for all occasions. There's crowd control, a healing aura, melee attacks, and even mage-style long-range nuking powers. Most of them are accompanied with some nifty visuals that make use of transparency effects. Nothing says sleep and reality-bending powers like clear rippling shockwaves and bright blue sparks.

You can even make use of a rather unassuming little pet. The Nightmare may look like nothing more than a winged eyeball with a tail, but he's got considerable kick once you put a few skill points into him. There's a whole set of improvements for the Nightmare and even a buff for your other pets if you're a dual class with a wolf, lich, or earth elemental. Thematically, the dream mastery doesn't make much sense. But it's got enough power and flexibility to make anyone want to roll up a new character.

The problem with rolling up a new character is that you're going to have to play through all three acts of Titan Quest before you get to any of Immortal Throne's new areas. The new areas pick up right where Titan Quest left off. Once you've reached the end of Olympus, you step through a portal and you're back in...Greece. You're still only in Greece.

You'll begin in Rhodes. Say 'hi' if you see Kratos, who also starts God of War 2 in Rhodes. But this is the Rhodes to hell, at least eventually. It takes a while to get to the underworld, and there's a fair bit of mundane Greek filler before you get to the cool new stuff. Apparently, the road to Hades is paved with a lot of artwork that doesn't look that different from what you played in the original game. But about a third of the way in, you'll come to a shade-infested ruined town with a stairway behind it that leads conveniently to the underworld. Here, you'll find some of the expected trappings: the ferryman, Cerberus, and Orpheus, for instance.

But down here there are also some new demons, some impressive effects, and lots of harmless dead people aimlessly wandering around. You'll eventually get to some really funky locations and special effects. Immortal Throne starts out pretty mundane, but it eventually turns out to be quite a trip.

The core game has a few important changes. There are new money sinks, so you won't have that an extra million gold pieces weighing down your pockets any more. New artifacts are made from recipes, but for a steep cost in gold. These recipes also require some pretty esoteric ingredients, such as completed relics or charms. Some artifacts are even made from lesser artifacts. The result is an even more robust collecting game, partly maddening for how hard it is to complete anything worthwhile, but partly addicting for how easy it is to just keep playing in the hopes that you'll come across what you need. There are also expensive one-shot scrolls that are particularly useful during some of Titan Quest's boss battles at the harder levels. As far as money sinks go, these feel a bit tacked on, but they do the job. Overall, it's nice that money is useful again.

To help you with the collecting you'll inevitably be doing, there's a new caravan shopkeeper. He gives you considerably more storage space, which makes it feasible to play packrat in hopes of collecting the ingredients for artifact recipes. It also means you can keep collecting charms and relics without eating up precious backpack space, and therefore making trips back to town more frequent. The caravan shopkeeper also has the ability to store items and transfer them to your other characters. You no longer have to jump through hoops to get that sweet staff from your character who can't use it to your character who can.

Inventory management is also made easier with a new sort button that instantly repacks your inventory a few different ways. You won't have to tax your Tetris skills while you're playing Titan Quest. Remember trying to squeeze that 1x4 bow next to that 2x2 helmet and the 2x4 chest piece with a smattering of tiny potions and relics crammed into the gap? No more. The new loot sorting options lock out any inadvertent pick-ups when you're gathering treasure, so you won't accidentally trawl junk that you don't want. These two relatively minor features go a long way to making Titan Quest less tedious.

A new multiplayer lobby makes it easier to know what you're getting into when you join a multiplayer game. Unfortunately, there's still no provision for secure character storage, so Titan Quest is rife with cheating and maxed out characters. THQ has given us a great game, but it's too bad they haven't taken steps to protect it for those of us who want to play fair.

But at least they've given us enough new stuff to warrant another playthrough, plus the ten or so hours it'll take to go through hell. Not to mention the extra time you'll spend collecting ingredients for your artifacts. And then there's the time it'll take to level up a new character with Dream mastery. Plus the new characters you'll want to make to use the great loot you found that you can't use. Diablo 3? Never heard of it. We're too busy playing Titan Quest.