Lot's happening this week in the world of PC gaming, I'll attempt to round-up what I thought were the most interesting stories so far this week.
War Rock is in it's final week of beta. This is a rather new concept in the realm of first-person shooters. You will be able to download the game for free, but paying members will have access to better weapons. The game has gotten pretty popular with over 70,000 downloads at Download.com, but will gamers pay the subscription fee to get the better weapons or be fine with dying to those who do? I've always surmised that the pay2play players would be made fun of in these games, so that the free2play gamers can insure that everything stays fair. We'll soon see.
Continuing on the FPS break-thoughs front, 1up.com is doing a story on The Crossing , which is a new FPS that aims to meld single-player and multi-player action called cross-play. How?
Skirmish maps have two contexts: either populated by skirmish players only -- the multiplayer people -- or populated by both skirmish players and story players, the "Elites." When there are no Elites around, the skirmish players play a team deathmatch game that can include various rules, such as land conquest or flag conquest. Meanwhile, the Elite players are playing their story maps -- in co-op, usually -- once they're supposed to join a skirmish map, as part of their story. Note that mercenaries can also invade their experience as part of the Agent Smith analogy. Once the story mission -- in a campaign's cycle of story and skirmish maps -- is complete, our servers select an appropriate match according to criteria including difficulty setting, ping, language preference, and so on, and place story players in the queue for applicable skirmish maps. Elites can't join a skirmish being currently played, although it's an option we're studying. Rounds are worked out so that cycles are very short -- a maximum of 10 to 15 minutes.
Blizzard has also announced that they are planning another MMORPG. This one won't be anything like WoW apparently. Read more here.
The Second Life creators are thinking about changing up the LindeX, an exchange for changing Linden dollars to U.S. dollars and vice versa. They have a short survey you can fill out to give your input.
Alien Arena 2007 has released patch number 6.03 which adds many new graphical features and vastly improves gameplay. Check it out at the Alien Arena website.
Finally, IGN has a short piece about pricing for Half-Life 2 Orange and Black , as well as, what comes inside for each version. This is basically Episode 2 for HL2.
