I’d like to welcome everyone to 2011. A year I’d officially call “The Year of Hope” for the MMOG industry. We can all attest to what a disappointment 2010 has been for the most part. We’ve seen new releases with a severe lack of content, major intellectual properties turn in to games that don’t do them justice, and were even ‘lucky’ to witness the shortest lived MMOG in history. As such, most gamers will remember 2010 with a sour taste in their mouth, and hope that this year will more than make up for the failures of the past.

2011 sure does promise a lot of new games worthy of our attention…or so it seems at first glance. Perhaps, a few of you have lost all hope for innovation in the industry at this point. No? Then let’s examine some of the concepts that new games aim to either introduce or develop further in the year 2011.

“If everyone is different…are they not the same?” – Philosoraptor

Probably the most noticeable difference is the expansion of the term ‘MMO’ to include games that significantly differ from each other, much as their single-player colleagues do. Judging by existing games like Global Agenda, Need for Speed World and upcoming titles like Firefall, World of Tanks and Tribes Universe, it seems that the ‘MMO’ label can be successfully slapped onto a sandwich, provided that it is eaten by fifty or so gourmands at the same time. Whether this adds more choice to the genre or is just a cheap way to monetize gameplay, which should have accompanied a single-player release, varies largely from game to game. Coupled with a wider acceptance and prevalence of free-to-play projects, this can lead to some interesting combinations. Let’s just hope that these newer titles are examples of quality before quantity, which was a problem of the early F2P genre.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a T-Rex (Ed’s Note: Someone training to be a paleontologist?)

Combat in 2011 is moving towards relying more on action elements and player skill, rather than pure number-crunching we’ve been used to in the ‘good ol’ days.’ Games like Blade and Soul and TERA aim to challenge our agility, precision and situational awareness. For some gamers, this really brings out the issue of player skill, one that has been lacking severely in old-school games. Finally, we get games where gear isn’t the deciding factor and where true winners can carve their own success.

To others, this might be an unwelcome introduction to a genre that previously took a deliberately slower approach to action and was (somewhat) akin to a speedy game of chess, albeit one with unicorns (Charlie!) and spells. With existing projects like Vindictus and DCUO beta, another important issue has been brought up in the fact that some players can’t always handle the physical strain that these games deliver. Thus, whether the newer releases will create a successful blend of both traditional and new combat systems is still up for debate. Continue Reading

The dust from BlizzCon 2010 has settled, and so we’ve decided to turn our attention to the biggest announcement of that weekend and give it the full attention that it deserves. Yes, the announcement of Tribes Universe far out-shinned anything Blizzard announced. But, like Blizzard, Hi-Rez Studios didn’t really announce all that much.

We know that the company now owns the beloved intellectual property, and that the company is working on turning the property in to an MMOFPS. But that’s about all we know. And that’s not enough for us. So we put on our thinking caps – they have light bulbs on top – dug deep for some questions and chained the CEO of Hi-Rez and Chief Designer of Tribes Universe, Erez Goren, to a computer until our questions were answered.

Lore Hound: The company recently announced that it was taking Alpha registration for Tribes Universe. How far along is the game at this point? How large is the team?

Erez Goren: The majority of the work that has gone directly into the game thus far has been in building the technical foundation to support large battles on massive, open landscapes. We are much earlier on when it comes to gameplay.

Fortunately, when we built Global Agenda, we did so in a way that left us with an amazing platform for building a Shooter/MMO on top of the Unreal Engine. This means that much of the work around adding weapons, tuning gameplay, etc, is now able to go very fast as we finish the core technical work.

LH: Speaking of the Alpha, it is currently restricted to max-level Global Agenda players. Is this to reward those who continue to support GA, or do you believe these players are the best testing group? Continue Reading

Penny Arcade hit it on the nose six years ago -- nothing can quite replace the feeling of playing Tribes.

With all the hooplah around BlizzCon this weekend, it’s sometimes easy to forget that there are games besides Blizzard’s that are worth paying attention to. And Hi-Rez Studios is making damn sure that they aren’t forgotten in the midst of ElfFest 2010 with the announcement of a project so potentially awesome that the loins of long-time PC gamers around the world have already begun tingling: Tribes Universe.

After all, few things in life are more satisfying than hurtling down the side of a hill and destroying someone’s face with a disc launcher.

According to the news post, straight from CEO Erez Goren himself, the company has already acquired the rights to the Tribes franchise. Now, if you’ve played Global Agenda, you know that the game is already heavily inspired by Tribes, with emphasis on class-based play, territorial control, and most of all, jetpacks. But the problem is that it’s tuned for smaller 10 vs. 10 matches, and that ended up not jiving with Hi-Rez’s plans to implement large-scale Warzone maps.

Solution? Combine the two, of course. Goren says that they’ll continue development on Global Agenda just the same, and that a second development team has been added to take the reigns of the new project and focus on providing gameplay for at least 100 players at a time. Considering that Alpha testing for the Tribes MMO is slated to start three months from now, it seems that a lot of work has already gone into creating it. In fact, the news comes with a list of features you’re likely to find in the upcoming release:

* Three Tribes (factions)
* Full clan (agency) support
* First person view (third person for some vehicles)
* Full vehicle support (ground and air)
* Full persistent world with territory control (no instances)
* PvP focused
* Huge outdoor maps (about 10x the area of sonoran desert)
* Large scale fights (100+ players)
* Jetpacks, skiing, lots of weapons, etc

I’m faithful that Hi-Rez will do a good job of putting this together, considering their obvious love of the franchise and the completely solid game that Global Agenda has turned out to be. Lord knows that various attempts at restoring the Tribes name have been made over the years, but it finally looks like we’re making some real, forward progress. I also expect a continuing, and healthy, disdain for our long-eared brethren. Considering you need a forum log-in to see it otherwise, I’ve reproduced Goren’s full announcement after the break. Continue Reading