E3 2005: The RPGs June 14, 2005 Jakub Wojnarowicz

Guild Wars & Auto Assault

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NCSoft didn't have much new to say about Guild Wars, except to emphasize its success. They claim that there are a quarter of a million accounts created in America and Europe, with another half million made in South Korea. Their expectation is one of steady growth, spurred on by regular free updates, including a major one this summer - Sorrow's Furnace - which looks like a rather intricate and complicated map.

Also coming in updates will be a Broadcast Observer mode, meaning that thousands of people will be able to view battles between two guilds. ArenaNet is obviously expecting that this will continue to foster competition and drive the userbase to continue playing. Combined with live tournaments held around the world that are leading up to the international finals this fall, complete with prizes, we expect that there may be a market for it after all.

Little - actually nothing - was said about the first paid expansion, other than Chapter 2 is expected in the first half of 2006.

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Auto Assault

Auto Assault's buzz seems to have come as a bit of a surprise for NCSoft. After a small showing last year which created the hype, the publisher has gone all out this year in promoting their vehicle-themed MMOG.

Auto Assault is a difficult game to describe, it certainly abides by most MMO conventions - improvement through continued play, item looting and so on - but in some ways it seems similar to Guild Wars. The game is clearly loot- and action-oriented like Diablo, but in a massively multiplayer context and rewards.

There are three player races, which compete with each other and AI versions of each other on the main servers, but there is also a PvP mode that will work across servers, meaning that the best teams can compete with each other regardless of what server they're on.

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Tabula Rasa & City of Villains

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Tabula Rasa has undergone extensive changes since the last show, focusing less on instances and more on changing the persistent state of the server. This is a fancy way of saying that players and AI compete for territory, with the more territory that's held meaning more advantages for the winning side.

The AI is very active in the game, with NPCs going after objectives on their own. These objectives are rather involved as well - the player can choose to isolate one by taking down its defenses, or go straight at it if he feels he can muscle through.

Though dubbing itself a first-person shooter style MMO, Tabula Rasa is still more RPG than action game, with the results of combat being decided by dice rolls. Player actions, movement and weapon choice of course have effects on the rolls, but this isn't World War II Online or PlanetSide where it's all in the hands of the player. Still, from the demo it actually feels as if the game has struck a good balance and shouldn't alienate all but the hardcore shooter fans.

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City of Villains

City of Villains is City of Heroes, but now you play a villain instead of a hero. It takes place not in Paragon City but in the Rogue Isles, though NPC heroes from CoH will be spotted in CoV, particularly in some missions.

The game will have 7 PvE zones and 4 PvP zones - which obviously means that PvP is being integrated from the start, though we doubt that this means cross-over CoH/CoV PvP. Though it naturally bears a strong gameplay resemblance to City of Heroes, City of Villains has a different style. Players don't fight crime, they make crime. The Rogue Isles are ruled by a mysterious supervillain who encourages chaos and evil and all sorts of nasty stuff, to separate the strong from the weak. It's not complete chaos, of course, but certainly it helps to be on your toes a lot more. Whereas City of Heroes had the player stopping random crimes on the street, he will be committing them in City of Villains.

CoV uses the same engine as City of Heroes but looks crisper and more refined. The developers boasted of expanded character customization options, both gameplay and appearance.

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Elder Scrolls Oblivion

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The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is the much-anticipated sequel to Morrowind from Bethesda. Yet again, as has been the case with every Elder Scrolls game, the game engine will bring computers to its knees and place the player in a wide-open world that is full of detail. The story revolves around an open gate to Oblivion, the realm of the Daedra, and presumably the player's quest to close it.

Take, for example, the 50 hours of recorded dialogue. Even common NPCs will talk rather than print up dialogue. There are 200 hand-built dungeons, complete with traps that can be sprung on the player or that players can turn around on the enemies within.

And yet, this isn't even the tip of the iceberg. Where Oblivion really takes the cake is in the technology department. It is easily the most impressive game we saw this E3, right along with the Unreal 3/Unreal Tournament 2007 demos. Much of Oblivion is spent in the woods and for once, forests actually look like forests. Bethesda apparently had a geologist or other kind of scientist explain the nature of a forest, and the game engine generates it by itself. From slopes and hills and kinds of rock and bushes, to how trees are arranged - it is mind-bogglingly beautiful. Take out the monsters and you could probably sell it as a hiking simulation, it looks that incredible. It is even populated dynamically.

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The Witcher

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The Witcher, on the other hand, is almost on the complete opposite end of the RPG scales (Final Fantasy and other Japanese-style linear RPGs would be the actual opposite end). Running a heavily modified Neverwinter Nights Aurora engine, the Witcher is quite possibly the most engrossing traditional RPG we've ever seen. Though many questions remain unanswered, the developers, CDProjekt of Poland, certainly have some fascinating ideas in mind.

The most tantalizing, something that's been hard to find outside the long-gone Fallout games, is that of ambiguous morality. There's no clear-cut good and evil. It's not necessarily always particularly well obscured, but often the decisions are much more complicated than they seem. An example from the demo was that a king sends the player out to hunt down a monster in the sewers beneath his castle before granting him an audience. The player hunts his way through various minor monsters, encounters the final beast itself only to learn that it can talk and used to be a human being. OK, standard-enough fantasy fare, right? Well, the problem is that the player needs this monster's head before he can see the king, and to make matters even more complicated, the monster was actually someone that many of the townsfolk are glad to be rid of - because when he was a human being he wasn't exactly the nicest guy in town.

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