Gamescom 2010 is finally over and has produced a lot of exciting new PC game information over the past four days.
It also resulted in a lot of new game trailers and actual gameplay footage for some very promising upcoming games. So I’ve scoured the web for the most interesting gamescom footage and have embedded it below. Some of this includes excellent gameplay footage of Guild Wars 2 and The Witcher 2, but also featured are interesting trailers for Rift: Planes of Telara, Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium Online and more.
All of this footage is accompanied by brief introductions to each game or evaluations of the footage shown. I go into some detail as to the limitations of the newly launched free version of EverQuest 2, for example. So read on for some of the most interesting stories of gamescom 2010 and be sure to also take a look at last week’s coverage of pre-gamescom announcements and trailers.
End of Nations
Petroglyph shows off some in-game footage of a 30 player PvP match in their upcoming MMORTS End of Nations. It isn’t much of a looker and the units seem fairly standard for the RTS genre with mostly just tanks and jeeps, but it does seem like it’ll have interesting gameplay. This gameplay seems remniscent of Shattered Galaxy (an old MMORTS game) with several control points on each map that need to be taken over to assure victory.
But it is slightly disappointing to see practically no unit variety in this trailer. The two teams have near identical unit compositions and there doesn’t seem much potential for intricate strategies with widely varied compositions meshing together into a stronger whole. Hopefully this is merely because it’s an early build and there are some different units yet to be revealed, but for now it looks very basic. Some form of superpowers do seem to add a little variety to the mix.
It does look like it has some potential so I’ll see about finding some more information and writing up a proper preview sometime soon. For now the world domination PvP element sounds good in theory, but requires much more varied army compositions in practice. Hopefully Petroglyph can pull it off.
EverQuest 2: Extended Edition
Sony Online Entertainment have decided to make EverQuest 2 available free of charge in similar fashion to Turbine’s Dungeons & Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online. An accompanying trailer was shown at this year’s gamescom in order to get people excited for it and point them to the currently ongoing public beta test.
This free to play version does come with some limitations. Only 4 out of 19 races and 8 out of 24 classes are available for free accounts. It also restricts crafting levels, equipment grades, spell tiers, bag slots, coin limit, in-game mail, bank slots, chat and guild functionality. But it’s entirely free to play and does contain a lot of content available in the vast world of EverQuest 2 with its many quests and interesting locations.
It’s definitely worth a look now that the beta has gone public and is available for free to everyone who wants to give it a go. But Turbine is turning its popular fantasy MMORPG Lord of the Rings Online into a partial free to play game as well next month and that certainly does seem more likely to attract players. LotRO is more accessible, attractive and popular so it’ll be tough for SOE to properly market this free version of EQ 2.
F.E.A.R. 3
A short collection of gameplay segments of both Fettel and Point Man gameplay was shown at gamescom. They’re exploring a ruined village which shows off some of the ways in which this game departs from its predecessors. Most notably it seems to add a lot of new guns like dual-wield machine pistols and powerful shotguns, as well as a lot of new horrific enemies. There seemed to be only two returning enemies from F.E.A.R. 2 with the rest all being new additions, such as zombie-like villagers and a freaky monsters with an unhealthily large mouth.
It seems like it will be a decent shooter, but I can’t help but wonder whether it’ll pack the same punch as its predecessors. F.E.A.R. 3 will be a co-op game that has Fettel and Point Man working together. Fettel is a ghost and can possess people and use other psychic powers, which is a nice touch. The problem with this approach is that F.E.A.R. has been a horror shooter franchise and horror usually doesn’t work in a crowd. With two people I fear that the horror moments will simply turn into comedic moments, as is often the case with horror movies.
The graphics in this video are of poor quality, but this may be a console version which would explain why it looks worse than F.E.A.R. 2 on PC. It appears to be the same engine, with actually some similar character models, so I’d imagine the PC version would look no better or worse than the previous game. As a result it’ll likely look a bit dated when it’s released later this year.
Guild Wars 2
This game was the talk of the show as its first ever playable gameplay demo attracted tons of attention and praise. I’m not going to talk too much about it here, but suffice it to say that a segment of the starting area of the humans and a late area of the charr were included. ArenaNet demonstrated an incomplete version of their character creation and also showed some personal story elements and dynamic events.
GameTrailers have a 9-part series of gameplay videos up with full commentary and high quality audio. They’re not exactly top-notch quality, but it properly demonstrates a large portion of the human segment of the gamescom demo. It’s a lot of footage, but it’s definitely worth a look. Set it to continuous play to have the videos play in order and check back here tomorrow for a much more expansive look at all the new Guild Wars 2 information revealed at gamescom.
Portal 2
Valve mostly demonstrated the same gameplay segments shown at this year’s E3, which reintroduced the broken down Aperture Science facility and some new gameplay elements in Portal 2. It’s largely still the same first person puzzle-platformer, but it introduces some interesting new elements to the mix. Repulsion Gel makes surfaces bouncy, Redirection Cubes can divert laser beams, some plates can launch things into the air, etc.
But all of that’s been seen before and thus wasn’t all that exciting. Much more interesting is the new co-op trailer which may not feature actual in-game footage, but does illustrate Valve’s intentions for 2-player co-op. The co-op is entirely separate from singleplayer and involves two robots going through Aperture Science Portal courses with their Portal guns. Actual teamwork is required to complete many of these challenges, as demonstrated in the following video.
Rift: Planes of Telara
Trion Worlds offers a new trailer that introduces the guardians faction for their upcoming fantasy MMORPG. It’s mostly a collection of short in-game shots that illustrate some impressive environments and highly detailed graphics. The visual style seems something of a mixture between realistic (Age of Conan) and stylized (World of WarCraft). It actually looks a bit similar in design to TERA or a more subdued Aion.
There was also an actual playable demo running at gamescom and Trion conducted several live demos. There’s not a lot of footage of these demos, but what I managed to find does look promising. Rift: Planes of Telara offers familiar MMORPG gameplay, but allows players to change their characters into any class combination they desire pretty much on the fly. It also features dynamic content that’s somewhat similar to Guild Wars 2 with staged world events that have a genuine impact on the surroundings.
It’s not quite as impressive as Guild Wars 2, but R certainly seems to be one of the most promising upcoming fantasy MMORPGs.
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
CDProjekt Red had a small but impressive showing at gamescom. One which they publicly announced in the form of a sweet preview trailer that I’ve embedded below.
The preview trailer shows just how far The Witcher 2 has come since the leaked alpha footage. There’s an incredible amount of detail on both characters and the environment to an extent that far surpasses the likes of even Dragon Age 2. But far more impressive still is a shot that demonstrates a huge city that’s promised to be fully explorable. Geralt will no longer be hemmed in by knee height fences in artificially restricted zones!
More interesting still is GameTrailers’ 7-part gameplay demo that shows The Witcher 2 in action. The production values are astounding already, despite developers warning that it’s very incomplete still. And with seemless background loading they promise to have only 4 loading screens throughout the entire campaign! There’s a lot more to talk about here that I’ll try to cover properly in a full-on preview soon.
Take a look at that GameTrailers footage for now and marvel at how good it looks.
The Imperium of Man seems to offer quite a variety of play styles in DMO
Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium Online
THQ and Vigil introduce the least surprising but most highly anticipated playable race for Dark Millennium Online. The Imperium of Man is the most popular race in the franchise and has become practically synonymous with Warhammer 40,000 by now. It would’ve been nothing short of blasphemy had this race not been playable, so it’s good to see a trailer that confirms it as a playable race.
There are some surprises even in this announcement however, as it seems the Imperium of Man will include more than mere Space Marines. The Imperial Guard and Tech Priests also appear to be playable ‘classes’, which seems to indicate that there’s likely to be quite a lot of class and race variety in the game. The trailer also illustrates what looks to be several vehicular gameplay segments with bikes and tanks, which would be a very welcome feature indeed.
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