There are a few new things on the horizon for WingDamage. One of these is HD video. Above, you’ll find a montage of gameplay footage recorded from one of my play sessions of the Lost Planet 2 multiplayer beta. This video is a bit of a guinea pig for video capturing, editing, and processing, so expect quality to increase with future videos.

At the beginning, you can see the basis of the weapon customization system. There are five categories to customize. The weapons dropped on the stage from your point of view will be based on those selections. For example, you might see a short range weapon drop. Depending on your settings, this will give you either a shotgun or a revolver. It’s a really interesting system that I look forward to seeing expanded on in the full game.

The grappling hook is back. It’s a bit short range to keep things balanced, but it’s still satisfying to be able to pull yourself up to a ledge and surprise the enemy. You can also slowly lower yourself from a high ledge with the grappling hook. You can even shoot guys while hanging from it which is nice.

I wasn’t able to get in any of the mechs (other players kept stealing them), but I did manage to pull off one of their gatling guns and give it a test run. As expected, they’re high powered, but you can’t move while firing them. The five different grenade types really keep things interesting. Disc grenades (essentially exploding Frisbees) are my personal favorite.

While there was a standard deathmatch in the beta, every open game chose the other available mode. In this mode, the objective is to capture data posts. It plays similar to the Battlefield series. When you die, you can spawn at any of the data posts in your control. An interesting twist is that your mini-map is entirely dependent on your data posts. If you have no posts, you have no map. They also create a shockwave of the color of the team now in control when one is taken over, indicating to nearby enemies where a post has been compromised.

While the controls are still a bit clunky as they were in the first game, they are manageable enough to get by. Right now, Lost Planet 2 is looking like it has some great potential, though admittedly it’s the campaign I’m most looking forward to.

"The Internet... The Final Frontier"

Space… how many of these beta impression posts on various gaming blogs will start out with the “…the final frontier” line? While I don’t consider myself either a Trekkie or a Trekker, I do love science fiction and have seen my fair share of Star Trek related shows, movies, and games.

The full retail version of Star Trek Online launches February 2nd. Having pre-ordered the game, I have been in the beta for the past week. The game has had several patches in the meantime and a lot of downtime. This is not intended to serve as a review of the game, but as a quick write-up of my initial impressions of the Beta and what I’m looking forward to in the full game.

Being an MMO created by Cryptic, the first thing you’ll find is that there is a very in-depth and fun character creator. I was playing on the federation side of the conflict. This gives you access to several of the affiliated races. This includes Humans, Vulcans, Trill, Bjorin, etc. as well as “unknown”. If you start with one of the established races, it locks you into a certain set of customizable options. There is a lot there to play around with, but if that still isn’t enough, choosing unknown gives you access to all pieces of the creator tools. Here you can mix and match all the different forehead ridges and weird noses you want until you come up with your own unique look.

As with most MMO’s, each race has their own unique bonus attribute. You also get to choose a few more so that you have a total of four. If you are an “unknown” species, you pick four from the generic pool of perks. In the beta, it was hard to tell how much these really played into the gameplay or how they would affect the game long-term. It seemed like a good opportunity to choose bonuses that match your play style.

Star Trek Online is broken up into two major components. Each character is in command of their own ship. Your main character goes out on foot to various away missions, complete with an away team either made up of computer controlled crew members, or other players (if you are in a party). Movement and combat in these sections feel like your standard MMO fair, with a few additions to keep things interesting. You can use cover to help keep yourself from getting a phaser-blast to the face, and crouch to increase your aim (and therefor your damage dealt).

Having an away team with you the entire time also allows for bigger battles. You rarely fight one-on-one. Normally, it is your rag tag group of Star Fleet (or whatever faction you happen to be playing as) rookies against a group of alien pirates, Klingons, or random creatures. The combat is quick and I was having fun with it in the short term. Like anything in an MMO, it will be interesting to see how well it holds up over time.

The other major component is space travel and combat. This is what has really sucked me in. Even being a lowly Lieutenant, you are in command of your own ship. After hailing Star Fleet to get your latest missions, you travel through a sector map which leads you to the known star systems. Once you are in the system, you have a lot of control over your ship. The controls have a really good feel to them, and I think this may be a big focus of the game as a whole. Combat is a lot of fun, especially with multiple players.

Combat plays out in 3D space with rules of engagement similar to navel battles. Since your weapons have a limited radius they can be fired from, positioning your ship for maximum damage, while being careful to keep moving so your shields stay active, all come into play. You can divert power between your engines, shields, and weapons either via sliders or with quick hotkey buttons. Bridge officers, which you can customize and take with you on the away missions, add extra moves and maneuvers during space combat.

Both your characters and your ship can be customized and upgraded as you progress throughout the game in traditional MMO fashion. Every ten ranks you gain a promotion, which gives the current game fifty levels to play through. When you are promoted, you will then have access to bigger and better ships to command.

From the short amount of time spent with Star Trek Online, I am hopeful. They seem to have taken the flavor of the franchise and worked it into a game that is very playable. The real question will be if they can continue to add interesting content and keep the missions feeling fresh enough to keep people playing month after month.

"Not Forced Perspective, She's Just That Short"

“Aion: The Tower of Eternity” is the new MMORPG from NCsoft. The initial beta for US and Europe wrapped up last Sunday and both my wife and I were able to play it (the game has been out in Korea since November).

The premise is that there was a big ancient war that tore the world apart. There is now a dark half of the planet and light half, with a strange abyss in the middle where huge battles constantly break out. To make it clearer, imagine a ball ripped in half, with the inhabitants living on the inside part of the halves. The aesthetic is very cool, as it allows you to look up to see the the other part of the world way off in the distance.

But how was the game?

Let’s start with the character creator. I play Warcraft and one of my complaints is that the character creator is pretty limited. This is definitely not the case with Aion. It uses a similar system of sliders as city of heroes, giving you a lot of control over the look of your character. Rather than choosing a race, you just make a guy that looks like one.

I ended up making a warrior that is as large as possible and a mage that was as small as possible to see the contrast. As it turns out, the smallest characters barely come up to the waste of the larger ones.

You start with the choice of four main classes: Warrior, Scout, Mage and Priest. Once you get past the first area, each of these break off into two much more specialized classes of which you can pick only one. There is a lot more variety once you’ve hit this point (around level 9).

The game plays a lot like World of Warcraft, which is to say like most MMO’s. There wasn’t a lot in the UI to change that. It did do two specific things that sucked me in.

First is that there are combo moves, even within magical attacks. You can cast a fireball that you can then follow up with a combo move that causes a pillar of fire to do even more damage. With my ice, I was able to hit them with a generic ice attack followed by a big ball of ice damage (hadoken style) that also caused knock-back.

The second, much cooler way, is that you get wings. You can only fly in certain areas, but the flight feels really natural. Using your mouse for control, you can fly around doing aerial attacks on enemies. From what I’ve heard, a lot of the end-game content will revolve around this mechanic in the abyss.

Overall, both Brittany and I had a lot of fun playing the beta and if they are able to do some more to make this game unique from all the other MMO’s on the market, it will definitely be worth checking out.