38 Studios’ Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, the prequel to the upcoming BigWorld-powered Copernicus MMO now officially has a demo. The Amalur demo takes players through the character creation and intro dungeon tutorial and exposition, then provides 45 minutes of open-world exploration. Fourty-five full minutes of wolf slaying, chicken bashing, and slaughtering of innocent townsfolk (er… so we’ve heard). As a bonus, 38 Studios has teamed up with Bioware to reward players with Mass Effect 3-themed gear for their full purchase of Amalur.
Our early estimation, based on one playthrough, is that combat is the jewel of the title. This probably comes as little surprise to anyone who’s been following the game’s press, but we were nonetheless pleasantly surprised to find that combat is varied, responsive, weighty, meaty and ultimately very rewarding. The game’s environments are rich and immersive, drawing from a wide variety of fantasy palettes, all conveyed extremely tastefully. Character body and facial animations, combined with dialogue, are on par with any of the best AAA RPG titles available. The game provides an excellent balance between quick-draw action and a level of character visual and stat customization that is accessible, and not too shallow nor too overwhelming. The narrative, environments and character design are all exactly what you’d expect from R.A. Salvatore and Todd McFarlane, and the same can be said for the rest of the staff. Amalur may just be the sleeper action RPG hit of the year, this early into 2012.
We look forward to the game’s official release, and are even more excited about being able to tell you more about the BigWorld-powered MMO followup, Copernicus.
EA has brought two of its studios together to cross-promote their anticipated action RPG’s.
If you download and play through the 45 minute demo of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning on Jan. 17th, you’ll unlock a set of Mass Effect-style armor for your full-game purchase. The same works, vice versa, if you play and complete the Mass Effect 3 demo.
38 Studios is building its Amalur followup, an MMO stealth-titled Copernicus, on BigWorld Technology.
It’s no news that iconic fantasy author R.A. Salvatore is part of the team working on 38 Studios’ upcoming BigWorld-powered MMO, Copernicus. He joins Curt Schilling, Todd McFarlane, and a host of game development icons in the MMO followup to the upcoming Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. This Boston Globe article focuses a bit on Salvatore and his role in narrative development.
“I tried to think of the people that were the best in the world at what they did,’’ Curt Schilling wrote in an e-mail, explaining why his Providence-based video game company, 38 Studios, partnered with Salvatore. The former Red Sox ace needed a detailed fantasy setting for two projects: A World of Warcraft-like online game currently called Project Copernicus (still in development), and a single-player game, called Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning (set to launch Feb. 7).
Everyeye.it has released its interview with Alexander Zezulin, lead designer on Wargaming.net’s upcoming BigWorld-powered World of Tanksfollow-up: World of Warplanes. The Interview is in Italian, but Google Chrome does a good auto-translation job, overall, in the event that you don’t read Italian.
How would you define World of Warplanes compared to other games?
World of Warplanes, unlike WoT, is a game with full-scale three dimensionality battle space where every plane is in constant movement, the rate of fire is tremendous and the situation on the battlefield changes so quick (especially true for jets) that it’s getting highly tricky to act timely. Moreover, there are no houses, trees and hills to hide and sneak at the enemy, so have nothing left but to act your fastest and skillfully perform various maneuvers if you’d like to survive. In World of Warplanes landscape and weather will become your enemy unless you manage to turn them to your account.
How far will you push the simulation part of the game, especially the physics department?
In World of Warplanes we are trying to reasonably combine accessible controls with historically accurate World War II machines. A decent balance between these two elements will allow us develop a thrilling title for a wider audience.
Have you got an approximate release schedule (or even a date)?
There’s one thing you can be dead certain about: we’ll release it in 2012. As for more firm dates, it’s too early to speak about them.
Wargaming.net has provided another round of responses to its fan base regarding upcoming BigWorld-powered World of Warplanes. Among some of the topics discussed are the inter-connectivity between World of Warplanes and World of Tanks.
Equal distribution of experience in flight unit, or 60/40 in pair. The dogfight specificity when one attacks another covers and if we count experience distribution as it is in WoT all the XP points will go to the attacking pilot, and the covering one will get nothing. It is unfair. In the case of flight unit, platoon analog in WoT, I suggest Equal distribution of experience Yes, it is possible. Will think it over and check statistics of XP adjustment. Coordination in flight unit seems to be more important than in WoT platoons and such coordinated actions should be encouraged.
Will you make a unififed premium account for WoT and WoWp? It will be implemented however with some peculiarities. We are thinking about it.
Will the pilot’s (not player’s) experience decreases after multiply defeats? No, it would be too cruel. Player looses himself and this could be double punishment.
Will you give us the opportunity to transfer experience and money between WoT and WoWp but with some fee for experience and big commission for gold transfer? There were multiply answers about gold transfer. Your suggestion about taking commissions will be taken into consideration.
Will the game feature not only music soundtrack but also as a real pilots conversation? It can be switched by user Some part of system messages will be stylized in form of pilot’s talks but to make all the soundtrack in this form will be to boring and will distract from important messages.
How about contaminating signals, at voice chat (on desire)? Contaminating signal as an element of entourage will be but if only it is not resource-demanding for other players And we are not going to deteriorate voice completely. First of all it can be hacked on the client and provide some advantages, secondly bad voice chat will lead to using Skype, Teamspeak, X-Fire etc.
2011 has been a landmark year for BigWorld. Our team has expanded, we’ve made some major improvements to our product, and we’ve seen our clients leverage our technology to do some amazing things. We hope yours was as fruitful as ours, and we wish you an excellent 2012.
So, from all the BigWorld cells scattered across the globe, we wish you a happy new year.
