[urza551]

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That's a residential area; you'll find clubs and bars there. This central part over here is more like a town square where players will gather. And out here in the outskirts we have ruins--the bad part of town." Producer Kijong Kang swoops the game camera for an aerial tour of the central city in Huxley, a first-of-its-kind mega-multiplayer first-person shooter due for the Xbox 360 in 2007. A lived-in-looking metropolis of dunnish apartment blocks, smog-belching industrial parks, and blazing neon signage, the city will hold thousands of players within its nearly one-square-mile area. "At first it was two-and-a-half square miles," Kang says, "but we scaled it down because users couldn't find each other."

Even shrunk down, Huxley is a lot to take in for console gamers, who are used to first-person-shooter multiplayer counts maxing out at 32 players and online worlds that typically don't require their own mass-transit system to get around. And even for computer gamers used to this sort of supersized online gaming, Huxley--which hits the PC first at the end of this year--still comes as a system shocker. It's part first-person shooter, part massively multiplayer online (MMO) role-playing game. It will have PC gamers helping out their console brethren. Even the developers at South Korean MMO specialist Webzen need a whiteboard to chart out the workings of the game's strange new world.
Kang draws two circles on our demo-room board and labels one as the city of the sapiens and the other as the home of alternatives, two of the three races in the game. The PC version packs both cities. He draws a third, separate circle and labels it the capital of the Hybrid Liberation Army. It's the one city in the Xbox 360 version, and it's home to the player's custom-made avatar, who fights for the freedom of the game's third race, the loping hybrid monsters. He then scrawls lines connecting all the cities, showing how they'll sync up for PC and console cooperative and combat missions, before finally drawing separate squares that represent the battlefields outside the cities where all combat will actually take place.
The central city itself will hold 5,000 players. They'll mingle, form clans, buy and tweak weapons and vehicles (for which they'll need special driver's licenses), and talk to nonplayer residents for stuff to do. "There are two types of quests in Huxley," says Kang, "main story quests and side story quests, which link to the main story line. Players will get the quest by locating and speaking with NPCs. They'll also find them by using the in-game e-mail system or other forms of communication."
Once players get a quest, they'll posse up with others who've accepted the same mission and then head to the quest area--always a location separate from the city. It could be in the wasteland of the outskirts, or maybe in the dungeon-like nether regions. Developer Webzen offers few specifics on mission types yet, but it's planning quests that support up to 200 participants for full-on 100-on-100 wars. Some missions will allow far fewer participants. One underground quest, for instance, limits participation to how many players can fit in the elevator to the combat area. Unlike the PC game, the 360 version offers a solo campaign--but even that packs online elements (after all, this is from a Korean developer that makes nothing but online games, in a country where people have actually died of exhaustion from not knowing when to log off). You'll play as a hero of the Hybrid Liberation Organization, and you'll go on missions that often require a trip to PC players' towns for items and info (see sidebar for a step-by-step guide). Again, Webzen offers few solid details on how the game will entice cooperation. In fact, with well over a year to go until the game's release, the developer is hazy with lots of details. Will Webzen charge a subscription fee? (Likely.) How will Xbox 360 players using joypads compete against PC users wielding the superior mouse-and-keyboard combo? (Webzen says it's working on leveling the playing field.) Will console players even embrace the massively multiplayer online shooter concept? (They'll also have Webzen's other 360 MMO--All Points Bulletin, a car-combat game from the creator of the original Grand Theft Auto--competing for their time.)