MMO Weekly 07/04

07 Apr 2009 at 15:05:30 by Jeff Hollis

Hey there, fellow gamers, and welcome to this week's edition of MMO Weekly.  In this week's installment, we'll do a lot of poking around.  We'll poke into games thought long dead, games that maybe should be dead, and games that simply refuse to die.  Of course, as we go along, we'll poke fun at pretty much everything we see.  It's part of the fun. 

The big story this week sprang upon us out of the Games Developers' Conference.  Korean developer Webzen had a rather impressive display at which they showed off the long delayed, seldom seen, and rumoured dead MMOFPS Huxley. 

Huxley is a futuristic shooter, with a significant number of MMO aspects incorporated into the game.  The fact that Huxley was even mentioned at the GDC was shocking enough: up until this point in time, “Huxley” has been practically considered a synonym for “vapourware”.  Hell, the game is practically considered the Korean cousin of Duke Nukem Forever.  Nevertheless, Huxley was on display for all to see at the GDC, and it's evident that Webzen has been working, quietly and (evidently) quite hard on the game.

We got a chance to play Huxley waaaay back at E3 in 2006.  The backstory in the game was much more vague; the graphics were good, but not fantastic; the idea that the game would be playable on both PCs and the 360 was innovative, but not earth-shattering.  Quite frankly, the game was simply a shooter.  A fun shooter, to be sure, but nothing truly exceptional.  It was also a popular shooter, as the Webzen booth was full of people playing Huxley. 

The game struck me, at the time, as being a lot like Unreal Tournament.  More than most of the other shooters I was familiar with, it just had a UT 'feel' to it.  It was all run-and-gun, fast paced action.  I returned to the Webzen booth several times at E3 to play Huxley. 

The game had a few oddities about it, both at E3 and as time went on.  To be honest, I couldn't find any evidence of the existence of any MMO aspects to the game, though Webzen assured us they existed.  The fact that PC players and 360 players would coexist was interesting, but the details of how that would work out were nonexistent.  It was a futuristic MMO, and the background story was supposed to be somehow important; for the life of me, I couldn't figure out what the background story even was.  Even more vague were Webzen's reps when it came to a release window - that information was simply unavailable.  What's more, I played a number of shooters at that E3: Quake Wars, a vaguely remembered  iteration of UT, and Battlefield 2142, among others.  Every single one of those games has come and, to a large extent, gone by now.  Huxley was the one game that never launched.  It simply disappeared. 

Now Huxley has reemerged, and everything that was generic about the game is highly refined and, apparently, very sharp.  The graphics are fine tuned and look great.  The interface looks very good, the characters look sharp, and action is fast and fun.  The world has a retro-futuristic feel to it; kind of like some elements from Fallout, mashed up with some from BioShock, and then some Blade Runner thrown in.  More than anything else, however, the game is actually beginning to look like an MMO.

The game takes place in a dystopian future.  A planet-wide cataclysm has left the world devastated.  Two races of human descendants have emerged from this holocaust, the sapiens and the alternatives.  The sapiens are a technologically advanced race of humans with “pure” bloodlines.  The alternatives are larger, muscular mutants, altered by the cataclysm.  Other NPC races – not fully understood at this juncture - also exist.  The hatred the sapiens feel, both for the alternatives as well as many of the NPC races, is the impetus for the ongoing conflict featured in Huxley.

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