This Persistent Life #10

The Agency

Status: not playable. Surprise factor: moderate. Here's a secret: even the best MMOs tend to suck more than a little bit in their pre-beta phases. There is just too much stuff that needs to be in place before everything clicks just right. If you read a lot of MMO previews, you'll notice that writers tend to gloss over the actual gameplay and focus instead on describing underlying systems. Long story short, The Agency is the sort of game that could theoretically carry itself on gameplay alone. It would have been really cool to be able to experience first-hand. Oh well. Maybe next time.

The Secret World

Perhaps less surprisingly, The Secret World wasn't present either. While it would probably have been a given at the sensory bonanza that was E3 previous incarnation, I'm assuming that the toned-down show motivated Funcom to focus on Age of Conan. Fair enough.

Age of Conan

We saw Age of Conan just a couple of weeks before the show, but Funcom did have a few new bits to show off during E3. I'm genuinely excited about this game, but as I've mentioned before, I'm still waiting for the melee combat system to feel finished. It certainly looks the part--it's vicious and gory as hell--but when you actually play the game, the impact just isn't there in the way that I'm expecting it to be. There already seems to be some sort of rudimentary collision detection implemented into the models; just take this a step further, and make it so that I feel like I'm cracking enemies' bones when I hit them. That's all I ask.

Pleasant Surprises

Fury was literally the last game I played while I was at the show, which isn't a good place for a game to be at E3, given how burned out attendees tend to get. But even with all that going against it, I had a blast playing the game. Gamecock recently picked it up, and I think that was a great move; I can see Fury filling a niche that has, of yet, remained uncatered to: the casual PvP MMO. I got to play it for around an hour, and it was relatively easy for a newb like me to get a enough of a handle on the mechanics to hold my own against the veterans I was playing with. Most of the abilities on my hotbar were instant cast, which really facilitated the game's quick pace, and the confrontations were short and sweet. Needless to say I'm hyped to play more. Hopefully, they won't botch it with an overly-restrictive payment model.

NCSoft and PS3, Sitting in a Tree

At the Sony keynote, SCE president Jack Tretton announced that NCSoft would be creating "exclusive online games" for the PlayStation Network. No one's quite sure what this means, but given NCSoft's history we can assume that this will result in some made-for-console MMOs. The big question on my mind is whether or not NCSoft's big properties will make it to the PS3. I could certainly see Tabula Rasa making it, as it seems pretty streamlined from a UI standpoint. But what about Guild Wars 2? Well, the original Guild Wars doesn't require the use of a whole lot of keys so if the sequel follows suit then it could very much live quite comfortably on a console.

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