in yesterday's part one of our exclusive Huxley preview, we looked at the player-vs-environment part of the game, the missions you'll undertake, and how your characters will advance. Today's question is: how will it play when you're pitted against other live players? Huxley is just as much a first-person shooter as it is a massively multiplayer online game, and that means it's a dog-eat-dog world. Huxley Studio is drawing from a wide variety of sources when conceiving its PvP game, from the FPS genre's flirtation with persistence to its earliest peer-to-peer roots. Players will also find plenty of familiar genre conventions with some new twists.
At the core of this, however, are two distinct societies locked into a brutal war.
Community, Identity, Stability
Despite the ever-present threat of the Hybrids, the Sapiens and Alternatives continue to be at each other's throats. In yesterday's preview, we discussed how they will encounter each other, from time to time, during the game's PvE quests; that is, if you're a Sapien and you're plugging away at some quests generally minding your own business, you might happen upon a party of Alternatives in the same PvE instance but with totally disparate objectives. Knowing the general mindset of MMO players, such encounters will more often than not lead to bloodshed. But Huxley's PvP game isn't at all limited to these kinds of fleeting encounters. If you want balls-out action against other live opponents, it won't be hard to find.
But first, you need to understand how Huxley will be structured, both in terms of its game world, and the servers that house it. At the forefront are both races' home cities: Nostalonia for the Sapiens, and ESKA for the Alternatives. Both of these capitols will reside on MMO servers, and for all intents and purposes, will resemble the sorts of cities you see in traditional MMO games. There will be shopping areas, town squares and pubs to socialize in, guild housing neighborhoods, even rail systems to help those who can't afford personal transportation traverse the cities' myriad districts. We actually got to see an early version of Nostalonia during our visit to Webzen's studios in Seoul, and suffice it to say that the level of detail was staggering. The city was simply enormous, and the architecture intricate, detailed, and uniquely stylized. We can't wait to see them teeming with thousands of players. Hopefully Huxley's server tech will hold up.
One thing we didn't get to see, however -- and something that could turn out to be one of Huxley's more interesting features -- were the casual peer-to-peer (P2P) battles. That's right, P2P. There will be a location in the cities where you can engage in this, and they'll absolutely zero impact on the game's persistent mechanics. When you participate in these P2P battles, you won't even play as your character. "[This] is another way FPS fans will enjoy combat in Huxley," Producer Kijong Kang told us. "These battles have nothing to do with character development or leveling up. They are for fun, training, honor and respect." There's currently no word on whether or how the P2P battles will resemble the game's actual "Battle Zones," but one thing is certain. You're going to want to get some no-consequences practice in before you stick your neck out.
3... 2... 1... FIGHT!
Keep your weapon clean, soldier. You'll spend most of your time in-game in PvP battles. These will take place in what Huxley Studio is calling Battle Zones. They'll be housed on dedicated servers (think World of Warcraft's battlegrounds) that you can enter from specified places in your home city. You'll simply walk on over to the recruiter for a specific Battle Zone, catch a transport, and get whisked away to the site of the action. There won't be any immersion-breaking loading screens book-ending either side of the journey, according to Kang: "Inside the vehicle, you will see other players on board who will carry out the mission together with you, and even NPCs who wish you fortune in battle," he told us. "And whole scene will not be interrupted by loading screens because of the streaming technology."
In regards to the gameplay within each Battle Zone, Huxley is shooting for expansiveness. They're expecting to have more than 100 players fighting in a zone at any one time (or even more, if you talk to the developers during candid moments). The maps are big enough to accommodate forces of this scale. In the example we were provided, they told us to imagine a large island surrounded by numerous smaller ones. Players will spawn on their respective faction's advance base, located on one of the smaller islands, and from there, they can hop on shuttles and travel to wherever they're needed in the greater Battle Zone.
Depending on where you are in the Battle Zone, you'll have different objectives. Some parts of the map will incorporate capture-the-flag elements -- defending your forward base from assault, for instance -- while others will have you battling it out on the main island to capture resource nodes in order to meet the win quota. Of course, capturing resources means having to physically transport them to your faction's resource depot (which is located on a separate island) so expect to encounter some heavy resistance along the way.
While all the disparate areas mentioned above -- the islands housing the forward bases and resource depots, as well as the large island with resources nodes and the main base -- will be located on different servers, the same principle behind traveling from city to Battle Zone applies. You won't experience any load times while traveling between them, and in fact, you'll still be able to communicate with your team, as well as receive any important metagame orders from the high-ranked players regardless of where you are in the Battle Zone. It all sounds pretty lofty, but if the team behind Huxley can deliver on this, then we're in for some pretty crazy battles.
And strange as it may sound, Huxley Studio is planning to allow individual clans control highly-contested, albeit smaller, Battle Zones. "If a clan wins over a specific territory through battle (maybe a Lunarite mine on a small island), they can accumulate wealth [with which] to buy vehicles and awesome housing for its members," Kang assured us. We're not sure where these areas would fit in context of the game's larger structure, but it sure seems like a great incentive for player-made organizations to get, um, organized.
Compliments to Gamespy For The Preview
