If there is one thing you can say about Perfect World Entertainment, you can certainly say they know how to stay in the news. PWE is always doing something; whether its launching a new title, or buying a game studio, or having some sort promotion, they always work at keeping their titles top of mind. I think it is going to quickly become a lot easier for them if the 3 games I played at E3 are any indication.
Rusty Hearts
Rusty Hearts is a hack-and-slash dungeon crawler. You play as either Angela, a magician, or Tude, a brutally effective warrior. Perfect World assures us that more playable Heroes are still to come in the form of updates. The game supports PvP in the form of arenas, guild battles and a robust tournament system. You can see pretty clearly when playing the game where their influences are drawn from. Naruto, Dragon Ball and Full Metal Alchemist come to mind.
This free to play title will hit closed beta in July 2011. To keep up to date and join the beta when the time comes, you can visit http://rustyhearts.perfectworld.com
Blacklight Retribution
Blacklight Retribution is a FPSMMO from Seattle studio Zombie Studios. The title uses the Unreal 3 engine and full DX11 support to offer some of the best visuals I've seen in an FPSMMO game. Blacklight players will have complete control over their characters, their loadouts and are even able to design and customize their weapons from head to toe. As expected, Blacklight will have full clan and ladder support.
This title is PC only, unlike most FPS games coming out. Jared Gerritzen, the Lead Designer of the game made a strong point to note that Zombie has no desire to "dumb down" this title graphically to the lowest common denominator. PC only give this game the highest possible graphical quality. As a very devoted PC gamer, I appriciated the passion Jared has for PC games.
This game was a blast to play, and I expect this could be a sleeper hit in the burgeoning FPSMMO scene. This was easily the funnest of the three games I played. While this title is still a ways out in terms of a release date, based on what I saw I would suggest playing close attention to Zombie Studios, Perfect World and Blacklight Retribution!
RaiderZ
RaiderZ is an open world fantasy MMO from MAIET Entertainment in Korea. This was the most unfinished of the titles PWE showed me but what I did see makes a strong case for the future potential of this game as one of PWE's strongest MMO's. Players in RaiderZ have a huge amount of control over their characters and their abilities - with over 350 skills, a player can create any type of character they want and build it to suit their own needs and wants.
The battles were very intense and action packed. Using the Unreal 3 engine, RaiderZ has a lot of eye candy, with great animations and spell effects and environments. Clearly there is a lot more information to come about RaiderZ as it is like a year or more away from a closed beta test.
Thanks to Jason Varden and Christine Yeo from Perfect World and the folks from all three games for the great run through!
