Lords of The Eternal Realm

Out­break: Undead is a pen and paper role-playing game that allows play­ers to engage in vir­tu­ally any type of zom­bie out­break sce­nario they can think of.

A 460 page hard­cover book; the con­tents include a player’s man­ual, zom­bie guide and GM (Game Mas­ter) sec­tion, which makes the core rule­book and a set of dice the only assets play­ers need in order to suc­cess­fully run the game.

Hav­ing con­sulted real life experts in firearms, sur­vival, psy­chol­ogy and search and res­cue, the team at Hunters Books has really gone out of their way to make Out­break: Undead the most real­is­tic expe­ri­ence one can have in a role-playing envi­ron­ment. The game is unique because it uses real life ele­ments such as Panic, Pain and Empa­thy to tie in vari­ables oth­er­wise not present in most zom­bie or role-playing games.

The cre­ators have even devel­oped a char­ac­ter cre­ation sys­tem they’ve named “SPEW-AI” which stands for Strength, Per­cep­tion, Empa­thy, and Will Assess­ment Inven­tory, which is based off a psy­cho­log­i­cal ques­tion­naire. The “SPEW-AI” sys­tem can be taken on their web­site for free, and allows the player to take the test, receive a set of stats and then jump imme­di­ately into the game, play­ing him­self or her­self as a character.

For more fol­low this link!

By Mike Sharkey | Sep 3, 2010

It’s taken 13 years, tens of mil­lions of dol­lars, and a cou­ple law­suits, but the videogame that cre­ated the Vapor­ware Award is finally, offi­cially on its way. Pub­lisher 2K Games and devel­oper Gear­box Soft­ware announced this after­noon at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seat­tle that the Chi­nese Democ­racy of videogames, Duke Nukem For­ever, is com­plete and will ship early next year.

We’ve been fol­low­ing the rumor the game would make its debut at PAX Prime for a month, but given Duke Forever’s joke-worthy devel­op­ment cycle, we vowed not to believe it until we saw it. Well, today we saw it. Gear­box stu­dio head Randy Pitch­ford debuted the Duke Nukem For­ever trailer and PAX atten­dees were given hands-on time with the game. Seriously.

“I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s totally real. It’s really hap­pen­ing,” Pitch­ford said before explain­ing how Gear­box got involved with the project: “I broke into the indus­try at 3D Realms, and I wit­nessed first­hand how the guys there put their hearts and minds into it. When Duke got into trou­ble, we wanted to help. We couldn’t let the Duke die. We wanted to deliver the game that was sup­posed to be.”

Pitch­ford said Gear­box, of Bor­der­lands fame, got involved with fin­ish­ing For­ever in late 2009. The game is now in the “pol­ish­ing stages” and is set to ship as a mul­ti­plat­form title in early 2011.

We’ll have the trailer up as soon as it becomes avail­able. All hail the king, baby

Atari Europe and Cryp­tic Stu­dios have announced their release date of a new online role­play­ing game, based on Wiz­ards of the Coast’s Dun­geons and Drag­ons fran­chise and the fic­tional city of Neverwinter.

Nev­er­win­ter Online is being pub­lished along­side a book tril­ogy by R.A. Sal­va­tore and a table­top game pub­lished by Wiz­ards of the Coast.  These are to be used to lay down the core story and lore before the “Online RPGs” debut at the end of next year.

The first novel is called Gauntl­grym and is set to release by Octo­ber 5th of this year.  The tril­ogy of nov­els are said to be going to offer the reader glimpses into the char­ac­ters, loca­tions and mon­sters from the PC game, as well as details lead­ing up to the game’s release.

From the press report, this game is noth­ing to write home about so far.  The lack of any men­tion of solo con­tent does not look promis­ing and the press release states that they are only releas­ing five classes out of the 25 or more that have become canon from Dun­geons and Dragons.

Its like they just hit 1–2-3–4-5 on the ol’ RPG machine and called it a day.   You have your stan­dard Fighter, Wizard/Sorcerer, Cleric, Rogue and Ranger.

It seems that some­one in Cryp­tic is long­ing for the days of Dia­blo 2 again.

Cryp­tic Stu­dios, known for the medi­oc­rity that is City of Heroes/Villains and Cham­pi­ons Online as well as the lack of suc­cess of Star Trek Online is now apply­ing their touch to a revered and ancient (in game terms, that is) fran­chise such as DnD. The thought makes my inner nerd shudder.

Also, sur­prise sur­prise, player gen­er­ated con­tent tools! One might say this reflects the suc­cess of the dun­geon set tools from Nev­er­win­ter Nights 1 and 2 in yet another Nev­er­win­ter game, but judg­ing from the bla­tant cut and paste from City of Heroes to the slip-shod graph­ics and game­play of Star Trek Online, it sounds more like a rehash­ing of the less-than-impressive facil­i­ties offered by City of Heroes.

The game is sched­uled for release by the fourth quar­ter of 2011. This seems like an awfully long time for some­thing that smells rather pun­gently of tem­plated work and recy­cled ideas from more suc­cess­ful games.

Recently back from Quake­Con, Dave “Archangel” Hay­dysch, a Pro­ducer work­ing on Fallen Earth, stops by the offi­cial forums to recap the team’s lat­est activ­i­ties, and their plans for the near future. The dev team is plan­ning to take Fallen Earth on the road again for the PAX Prime con­ven­tion in Seat­tle, between Sep­tem­ber 3rd and 5th. If you are so lucky as to live nearby and have an accept­able media affil­i­a­tion, I would highly sug­gest par­tak­ing in this fast-growing con­ven­tion. But, enough about events and road­trips, what about the state of the game?

Ear­lier this week, patch 1.6.2 was released to con­sid­er­able acclaim. A long-running player griev­ance – com­bat ani­ma­tion – has been addressed, and the game already feels more fluid and fast-paced. Among other things, the patch also addressed a respec issue where play­ers were not being awarded the cor­rect amount of AP.

So, what next, then? The Fallen Earth State of the Game address begins with a sin­cere vow to adjust com­bat pac­ing, point­ing at mechan­ics such as dam­age mit­i­ga­tion & spread tweak­ing, as well as armor pre­req­ui­sites. In addi­tion, an intrigu­ing new fea­ture known as “Progress Towns”  is being imple­mented in upcom­ing patches. Play­ers of a fac­tion can band together and com­plete tasks to lit­er­ally build a town from the ground up. Run­ning mis­sions and defend­ing your ter­ri­tory will earn you vital defenses with which to out­fit your fledg­ling town. Hay­dysch adds, “While spe­cial defenses may be crafted to help pro­tect and defend your newly formed fac­tion town, beware, it won’t be an easy task to main­tain control.”

Across the Waste­land, fac­tions have planted flags to spread their influ­ence and fur­ther their respec­tive ambi­tions. Play­ers in PvP areas may claim and defend these flags to earn spe­cial buffs, faction-affiliated guards, or even some nifty har­vest nodes. Always a pro­po­nent of cus­tomiza­tion, Fallen Earth will take the next step in adding social cloth­ing, which will be elab­o­rated on in upcom­ing dev journals.

From Tasos:

We’ve been run­ning final tests on the expan­sion since the begin­ning of the week and we’re unfor­tu­nately still run­ning into prob­lems that make the expan­sion not sta­ble enough to launch.

What’s hold­ing us back are issues with the new world ter­rain sys­tem. This is a mas­sive update to the game, we’ve been work­ing on it for more than six months and it has to be right before we launch. Unfor­tu­nately we can’t sim­ply remove it for now and launch the rest because it’s an inte­gral part of the expan­sion. You can get an idea of how this new sys­tem impacts the game here the screen­shots how­ever do it lit­tle jus­tice com­pared to how things look in the live game.

Real­is­ti­cally, we’re look­ing at a few more weeks of work and test­ing on this. In the mean­while we’ll also use this time to add more fea­tures to the expan­sion and if pos­si­ble fur­ther expand the dun­geon update.

We under­stand this had taken a lot more time than planned, how frus­trat­ing it must be, and we can’t apol­o­gize enough for the bad esti­mates. We’ll give you a new ETA as soon as we have a han­dle on what exactly is wrong and what needs to be done.

From Tasos:

First let’s talk about the ETA for the next expan­sion: We always try to give you our inter­nal esti­mates, rather than play­ing it safe or not giv­ing one at all. This has led us to fre­quent delays but as far as ETA goes, you know exactly what we know inter­nally. This time will be no dif­fer­ent: Our effort is to launch the expan­sion by July 18th. If we miss this date it will be due to issues need­ing atten­tion and since this expan­sion con­tains sig­nif­i­cant changes to the game, it could be weeks before we can have it out. We’re not try­ing to tell you in a round­about way that we’re going to launch this in August. We’re work­ing very hard to meet our dead­line and so far it’s look­ing good.

We’ll give you a brief overview of some of the expan­sion fea­tures here:

This expan­sion is mainly focused on PvE. There are many new mon­sters being added to the game, new mon­ster types, new spawns, new tac­tics, spe­cial abil­i­ties, new behav­iors etc.

Dun­geons are get­ting a revamp, and a lot more than orig­i­nally thought will be get­ting it for this expan­sion. This revamp includes new mechan­ics, new mon­sters, and new quests tied in with the dun­geons and it’s a first step in the mas­sive improve­ments we have planned as far as dun­geons go.

We’re adding new fun resources and fea­tures to the game which play­ers can use to play around or cre­ate events with. We’re also mak­ing an effort to com­plete polit­i­cal tools for clans and play­ers in time to include in this expansion.

It includes new ship types, an addi­tional fea­ture to ships, and new mounts.

There are new intro­duc­tory tuto­r­ial quests for new play­ers, new quests involv­ing dun­geons, and also trea­sure maps.

This next change dra­mat­i­cally improves the look of the game: The Dark­fall ter­rain and tex­ture sys­tem has received a com­plete over­haul. We’ve been work­ing on this for the past six months and were going to include it in Dark­fall 2010, but since it’s done now we decided to add it immediately.

The com­mu­nity liaisons will be fol­low­ing up with more details on the fea­tures of the expan­sion in the spot­light forum sec­tion, between now and the expan­sion launch.

Over the years we all have taken screen shots or done some crazy art­work. If you have any pic­tures from the games we have played espe­cially from the UO Days. Please post them in the gal­leries or in the forums.

Also I have rename the gen­eral sec­tions in honor of the Boduk Town­ship. Reminder Octo­ber is guild month.

Nice to see old and new friends sign­ing back in to the site. Now just need  to get you all post­ing again. I really want to hear from you all. Reminder just cause we don’t play all the same games or even play all any­more doesn’t mean your not still part of us.

Yes, we all have had our dis­agree­ments and such. I know for some the bad blood has run rather deep. How­ever we must remem­ber what brought us together. I posted this some time ago but it has prob­a­bly been lost. “All is for­given, past sins and trans­gres­sions.” I can’t speak on the indi­vid­ual level but I can at this level. Come let’s ref­reash our com­mu­nity with both exper­inced and new. Bring back what was once the most active and best com­mu­nity I think in world.

Tobias

If you go to the forums and check at the top you will see a face book con­nect but­ton. Well see­ing as how most of you have a face­book and use it I thought I would make it eas­ier for us to stay con­nected and maybe spice back up the forums a bit. Let me know what you think.

Thanks,

Tobias

Happy 4th of July!

For all my fel­low Amer­i­can get out there and get some hot­dogs and ham­burg­ers on the grill!