Reviewing G-Star 2006 Huxley

[yennik]

Short Review of Huxley from the G-Star convention. 11/06

http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/tech...0475711780.htm

“Huxley” is designed to be a rare hybrid. It is a first-person shooting game that features roleplaying, and it will be made in both the PC and Xbox 360 platforms.
The game will also provide a multi-player shootout mode with up to 200 players connected to a single battleground. Fighting in a company of 100 soldiers will give gamers an overwhelming feeling that they’ve never had before, but at G-Star, only 8-to-8 network play was available.
The difficult part for “Huxley” is that the market has been waiting too long for it, and as time goes by gamers’ expectations of its quality have risen, too. When the demo was first shown last winter at Xbox 360’s launch in Seoul, both the domestic and foreign media were impressed with the game’s cutting- edge graphics. But things are not the same now.
“The closed beta test will start this year, and the open-beta test will start early next year,” game designer Lee Dong-won said during a demonstration. He also said that the Xbox 360 version will come at least six months later than the PC version, which means that Xbox users will not be able to enjoy it until 2008. Or in the worst case, never. Webzen should focus on the 100-to-100 network function to make “Huxley” worthwhile to play. Sadly for Webzen, the G-Star exhibition put “Huxley” on a comparison with “Gears of War,” the blockbuster shooting game from Microsoft Game Studio. The two games have similar storylines - soldiers kill enemies with heavy guns. But for everything else, “Huxley” didn’t look as good as “Gears of War.” Moreover, “Gears of War” has already been on the market for weeks, while “Huxley” has probably a year more to go before completion.

Not sure if there is any new info here or not. I was hoping for bigger battle grounds, myself. They state 100x100 (200 players) per battle ground. Planet Side has over 300 players max per battle gound and that game has been out for 3-years. Either way I still can't wait to try the game out.

[connnnn]

Nobody in their right mind should compare Huxley to Gears of War. That's pretty much like comparing a single player Final Fantasy to WOW or something. They run off the Unreal 3 engine, and you shoot people.... that's pretty much where the similarities end.

And of course Epic's (not Microsoft... they just published the game) final product will look better than anyone else's ALPHA; they made the engine :| and they've been working on GOW for quite some time.

The whole review was written from a console perspective though... emphasis on graphics-only, saying no other game has given people a large-scale environment before, and complaining about it coming to consoles after PC.

Interesting to hear a proposed date for beta testing though... gives you some clue as to how far along they are. If open beta does actually start next year, you might expect final product somewhere around summer/fall if you compare it to other games.

[Murvel]

I guess that "early 2007" means Q1, which is pretty good news. On the other hand we still can't take anything as a definite answer. It might just happen to get another year or so delayed. But on the whole, good news. Which brings us to the next question, is the openbeta all-out open, or just selected invites.

[Ao1xSniperkev]

im hoping that closed beta is selected invites, and open beta is everyone, but then again there is a strong possibility that that is not the case.

[connnnn]

I'd personally be surprised if closed beta happens outside of Korea. I would think they're more likely to use Korean servers to test things early, and then use open beta to test the other server clusters (North America and Europe I guess).

It's not like they'll have any shortage of people in Korea to volunteer to test.