Rift: Planes of Telara

One of the newest entrants to the MMO market – RIFT: Places of Telara is opening its servers for the Head Start to players who have pre-ordered today – with the official launch taking place on March 1 (NA servers) and 4 March (EU servers) – full details of the Head Start is available here.

RIFT throws players into the world of Telara – which after a recent magic war is experiencing rifts which appear – seemingly at random – these rifts connect to other planes, allowing the denizens of those planes to invade Telara, putting the inhabitants and lands at risk of destruction.

Stepping into the breach to protect the world are two factions – the Defiant and the Guardians – who from the get go are at odds about how exactly to go about saving the world. Clever of them. So the players will be spending a fair bit of time fighting each other along with the invaders. No lack of targets then

RIFT features a dynamic world, two factions, and a host of different races and four base classes – each of these classes have a number of specialisations, granting the players a greatly varying experience. The races included in the game are, on the Guardian side: Dwarves, High Elves and Mathosians – and on the Defiant side the Bahmi, Eth and Kelari. Immediately you can see the light/dark contrast – and while 2 of the races are familiar to most people, the addition of 4 different races give the players something to explore.

The four base classes are: the Warrior, the Mage, the Cleric and the Rogue. As classes go, these are very familiar to most RPG players – but, each of these classes have 7 different specialisations, and it looks like Trion have left space to add more at a later date.

I’d love to go into the detail, but there is simply too much – so I suggest visiting the classes page itself to get an overview.

RIFT has all the ingredients to become an epic MMO title – while it may not be a WoW killer (it’s really too early to say), it may leech some players away, and if it lives up to its promise, it may very well put NCSoft’s Aion in some trouble – with Aion having had difficulty in retaining it’s players; while NCSoft has been getting progressively better at keeping their players happy – RIFT seems to contain features that may make it appealing to players of both the aforementioned games.

RIFT is a subscription-based game – with a monthly subscription of US$14.99 – although it becomes somewhat less if you opt for the 3-month or 6-month payment plans. However, you have until the 15th of March to subscribe on one of the Founder’s Subscription Plans – which will save you some additional dosh … you can end up paying as little as $9.99/month – and you keep that price for as long as you maintain an active subscription.

For those wanting to up their game and get ahead – Xerxes has released their Ultimate Rift Mastery Guide – featuring a Beginners’ Guide, a Comprehensive Leveling guide for both factions, Skills Builds Guides for both PvP and PvE – and it will be constantly updated with new tips and information. Ordering grants immediate access to the members’ area on the site – there are no monthly membership fees for this access; you get lifetime access to all the content.

For more details -Click Here!

Guildwars 2 Trailer premieres

The chaps over at NCSoft are quite the group of teasers.

As some of you may have gathered from my Aion write-up, I’m a huge fan of Guildwars. Not only of the gameplay, which is awesome, but it has an pretty decent soundtrack, the graphics and animation are quite pleasing to the eye – however, for me, this wasn’t what set it apart from the competition.

It was free. I got the box, which was pretty good looking; I also got all sorts of goodies inside, which, sadly, are missing from a lot of games nowadays – the purchase value hinges all on the gameplay rather than what’s in the box. Fair enough, I have four boxes (I bought each of the campaigns seperately), but that was the only money I had to spend on the game.

So, I’ve been playing Guildwars for about 2 years now. I’m far from the most experienced player out there, but that does come to a fair amount of game-time.

In any case, it wasn’t long after I started playing first that rumours of Guildwars 2 started making the rounds, and was confirmed by NCSoft. Back then, we were at least expecting a Beta to be available by September (2008), which, as you may know, never happened. And at this point, no one has been able to pin NCSoft down on a definite date of any kind.

Today however, NCSoft took some steps to provide the world with a new route to dehydration, by premiering the official Guildwars 2 Trailer. The video is a mixture of CG and gameplay footage, and if you get your joy from good visuals, it may just have been worth the wait.

In order to whet your appetite a bit, I’m including some screenshots of the video below, but I’d advice you to hop over to the Guildwars 2 site and have a look for yourself. You won’t regret it. While you’re there, sign up for the newsletter so you can stay up to date.

I don’t really have any definite information on what gameplay and character customisation options will be available, but if Aion was any indication – I don’t see NCSoft going without – so there will be a lot of unique looking folks running about … gleefully killing things.

We do know for certain that there will be five playable races (rather than only humans):

• The Charr
• Humans
• Asura
• Norn
• Silvari (new race)

For more info on the game itself, you might also want to visit the Guildwars 2 Wiki

NCSoft have repeatedly said that they’re holding back on release because they want to blow our socks off. Consider my socks blown. So, guys, give me my game now please.

.

Aion

The guys at NCSoft, who brought online RPG gamers Guildwars back in 2005, has scheduled their European and American releases of Aion for September this year. Having participated in two of the recent closed Beta sessions, I decided to do a quick write-up based on the few hours of gameplay experience I had.

Aion uses a modified version of the CryEngine, used originally for Far Cry, and for any of you who have seen Far Cry, I probably don’t have to spend a lot of time going on about the graphical excellence found in Aion. So I’m not going to – I’ll be dropping in a few screenshots later.

When creating your first character Aion gives you a range of character customisation options. First off, there are two playable races – the Elyos and the Asmodeans, and four initial classes. There were rumours of a possible third race, but I haven’t been able to confirm this. I spent a happy half hour playing around with my characters appearance, customising hair style and colour, the face, skin tone and various other bits and pieces. The customisation isn’t quite as extensive as that found in, for example, Oblivion, but anybody should be able to come pretty close to their ideal.

With that being done, I found myself injected into the game. Aion features a world server, which for me, a regular Guildwars player, takes a little adapting to, since I’m used to instance-based play. There are several plusses and minuses to this approach, the major plus being that the area you’re in always has a few players around – and if you’re lucky, some happy cleric will heal you while you’re fighting while on his way somewhere else. Having created a mage myself, I also happily tossed in a firebolt into a fight as I sauntered past.

The negative part though, is this. Everyone is in the same area, which means there is a bit of a competition for resources. Your first few missions usually revolve around kill 5 of these, harvest 10 of those – and when there are about 20 players running around trying to kill/harvest the same thing, finding a target can sometimes become a little problematic.

The first couple of hours seems calculated to get the player used to the interface and the environment. Until you reach level 9, you move around in a relatively confined area, doing a group of quests and side-quests which don’t do much more than reward you with experience and money. Side-quests and storyline quests are easily told apart, with NPC’s carrying the quests using different colours.

I started my character off as an Elyos (yes, I like being the good guy). Once reaching level 9, I was given the chance to do my ascencion mission, and yes, for those of you who were waiting, this is where you go to get your wings. Happily, it doesn’t take too long, and given the nature of the mission, it was surprisingly easy. During this ascension, you are given new options with regards to your class – depending on what your choice was when you created your character:

• A mage can choose to be a spiritmaster or a sorcerer.
• A priest can choose to become a chanter or a cleric.
• A scout can choose to become an assassin or a ranger.
• A warrior can choose to become a templar or a gladiator.

Sadly, I did not have a lot of time to explore around beyond my ascension – so I can’t comment much on armor customisation – something that was definitely lacking in the first 9 levels. Whether this gets addressed between now an the final release I hesitate to say. Differently to Guildwars, there is less focus on skill-builds – you get to drag your skill into the bar at the bottom of your screen, and the skills level up along with you.

If you’re an MMORPG fan, chances are you will like what Aion has to offer, although I venture this opinion on very little actual experience of the game as a whole. It’s entirely possible that it becomes a long grind as you make your way through the game, although I would hope NCSoft has learned enough by this time to avoid this particular pitfall.

The game is unfortunately not subscription free, and the monthly subscription will most likely be set at $14.99. For more detailed info than what I gave in my little runover here – you could do yourself a definite favour by visiting AionSource a fansite for and about the game. Myself, since I have an aversion to paying for a game after I’ve already bought it, I won’t be playing Aion myself, sticking to Guildwars until the arrival of it’s sequel, but if you don’t mind the fee, give Aion a try and see what you think for yourself.

The screenshots in this post are from the AionSource site.

EA strikes out with Spore DRM

Spore was quite possibly one of the most anticipated titles due for release this year, with gamers the world over descending on stockists like a pack of hungry hounds on the day of release. All was not fine in the world of Spore, however.Most, if not all, gamers know of DRM, or Digital Rights Management. DRM has been a touchy subject for quite a while now – and many people will remember the Sony BGM debacle from a few years back. Well, this year EA (Electronic Arts) – in an attempt not to learn from others’ mistakes – walked into the same wall.

The stated function of DRM has always been to curb piracy, but in this case it seems to be having the opposite effect, as EA’s heavy-handed tactics drove users away from purchasing legal copies of the game – despite receiving good reviews on Amazon, the game scored a ton of single-star scores, the reason almost always being the DRM. And at the moment, Spore is possibly the most pirated game around. Within 2 weeks, various Torrent sites reported a combined total of over 500,000 downloads of the game, with the game’s copy protection being cracked by the day after release.

The issue most users had was with the fact that Spore could only be installed on 3 computers, and required online authentification. This was the start; however, EA now face a lawsuit from users who claim that the installation of the game installs a second “undisclosed program” – SecuROM – without disclosure or warning – which cannot be uninstalled even when the game is unistalled.

EA has since relaxed its policy somewhat, increasing the number of computers that can run the game from 3 to 5, after drawing a lot of criticism from legitimate users who said that they are “being made to feel like thieves” or feeling that they “are effectively renting the software from EA” after paying full price for it. Pirate Bay, one of the biggest torrent sites in the world, had users urging everybody to download the game and give EA a wake-up call.

But it might just be a little too late.

A few new games …

Games don’t really last a long time these days, and every game that hits the shelves are more and more adept at pushing the boundaries of any particular system. With this being said, however, avid gamers are still keen to get their paws on a lot of the games coming out, and it is with this in mind that we’ve compiled a short list of games coming out over the next few months.

Mass Effect (PC)

Mass Effect has actually been out for a while now, but the good news for PC owners is the fact that they’ll be able to take a bash at playing it this year as well. The gameplay was awesome, the story was enticing – there was actually very little wrong with the game from both a technical and gaming aspect. It did cause something of a stir amongst the conservatives among us (anybody remember the alien sex-scene saga?), however, concerns were highly overated – Mass Effect was easily one of the best games of 2007.

Digital Planet is expecting the PC version to arrive on shelf by 11 May, and they are accepting pre-orders.

The PC version features a completely redesigned control system, as well as enhancements to inventory control (which was one of the few sticky points in the XBox 360 version)

Far Cry 2 (PC)

The original Far Cry far outstripped expectations when it was released, and a great big bundle of its fans are eagerly awaiting the release of the second installment.

I’ve done a earlier write-up here, and it’s expected to be on sale by the end of this month or early next month.

Alone in the Dark (XBOX360 & PC)

There are quite a few people out there who remember shivering in darkened rooms with the sound of undead creatures rustling at you through the speakers. Alone in the Dark can now be even better with the abilities of the Xbox 360 being used to full effect and we’re expecting this to arrive on shelves towards the end of May.

Splinter Cell: Conviction (PC)

The Splinter Cell franchise has been running for quite a few years now, combining awesome gameplay with stealth and high-tech gadgetry in order to achieve your mission goals.

You are Sam Fisher, a covert agent in service of the US government, or at least used to be. In Conviction, you are a fugitive, running from the government you used to serve. You need to build yourself a network of underground allies to aid you in your quest to prove your innocence.

We don’t have a release date for this game yet, but we are expecting it this year. Digital Planet are accepting pre-orders for this one as well.

The games listed above are just a few examples of games to pre-order from Digital Planet – not to mention that they have a huge collection of other gaming titles available across all the popular gaming platforms.

Visit Digital Planet now for your next gaming fix.