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Most Painful Slip:
Duke Nukem Forever, Dungeon Siege, Neverwinter Nights, and World Sports Cars
Besides perennial favorite Duke Nukem Forever, many anticipated games scheduled for 2001 did not come out. Three of the most painful for eager fans were Dungeon Siege, Neverwinter Nights, and World Sports Cars.
At the E3 Trade Show in May, Dungeon Siege was looking great and ready to kick ass. But then in the summer, the game slipped to September and is now officially due in April. Envisioned by Chris Taylor, designer of Total Annihilation, the seamless 3D dungeon crawl aims to offer non-stop action. Your simple farmer, burned out of his home, seeks vengeance against the Lord of Darkness and his minions. Your party of eight in either single-player or multiplayer will have many tough fights. Furthermore, mod teams and players alike highly anticipate the Siege Editor that will allow them to create their own adventures. May the mule train stop at a store near you in the Spring.
Making your own dungeon modules and playing them on the computer with up to sixty-four of your online friends is the dream of many dungeon masters and computer RPG players. BioWare has been crafting the new third edition Dungeons & Dragons rules into just such an adventure creation set called the Aurora Toolset. Neverwinter Nights also comes with a complete chronicle designed by BioWare. Already over a year past their estimated release date, the recent announcement of legal action worries many. BioWare has ended their contract with Interplay to publish the game, yet Interplay, not BioWare, holds the D&D; license for the game. Here's hoping to adventure in the Forgotten Realms in 2002.
World Sports Cars aims to be the most realistic racing simulation ever. The cars, like the Ferrari and Lotus, will look, sound, run, and handle accurately. Because of the detailed modeling, cars can be graphically and physically tweaked to feel like personal cars. During the race, damage, dirt, and wear will all take a toll on your racing machine as you zoom around eight tracks from Daytona to Monza. Real-time pit stops and weather also add to the gripping realism. Multiplayer racing with friends and creating new vehicles and tracks will keep fans busy for a long time. Looks like West Racing awaits the new model year.
Biggest Letdown at Launch
Building hype around a game can be great for sales, but if you do not deliver, fans can be quite unforgiving. When design and execution do not converge, you get some of our largest letdowns of the year.
Anarchy Online aimed to allow players to live in and explore a beautiful, science fiction world of Rubi-Ka. A four-year story just began unfolding telling the tale of the Omni-Tek Corporation's battle against the rebels. But when the colonists arrived, Funcom was not ready. Even after a nine-month beta period, laggy servers, terrible framerates, bugginess, and many crashes marred the release in June. And considering the game requires a monthly subscription to play, they could not accept credit card orders due to an oversight. In the meantime, Funcom has been fixing the game, having put their other MMORPG Midgard on temporary hold, and trying to restore consumer confidence in Anarchy Online.
World War II Online: Blitzkrieg was to be a massively multiplayer simulation of this year's favorite war, World War II. Playing as either Axis or Allies soldiers, you could captain ships, command tanks, pilot plains or shoot it out as an infantry grunt. But grunt is what people did when the buggy game came out with overloaded servers and confusing interface. The game was even missing some major features mentioned on the box and in the manual. Cornered Rat has spent the last six months fixing the game and intelligence reports indicate they have made a lot of progress. Now it is up to their propaganda machine to get people trying the game anew.
While Black & White broke new ground in animal training and adapting to your warped personality, its execution and bugginess hurt it. Controlling the creature was the most fun, but on several islands it was cursed or imprisoned, and required a lot of micromanagement. The village management was shallow, boring, tedious, and some tasks outside the creature's ability to help. The 3D interface also proved challenging for many people to get used to and the inability to skip the tutorial on subsequent games was annoying. Hopefully, the Creature Isle expansion due out in the next few months will address these shortcomings.
Next: Most Offensive...
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