QJ Previews: Huxley

Korean publisher/developer Webzen is going to be pretty darn huge in a little while. They’ve got an envious slate of MMO’s lined up that include Project Wiki, Soul Of The Ultimate Nation, an unnamed Red 5 project, and the highly anticipated MMOFPS Huxley, and yeah, that stands for Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter.

Now stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but it’s the future and it’s a post apocalyptic landscape, earthquakes, tidal waves and massive climate changes have ravaged the earth, cutting continents off from one another and throwing human civilisation into chaos.

       

The survivors of these catastrophes dream of the days when things were better and life was simpler, the sudden appearance of mutants among the population causes further anarchy, racism and oppression rear their ugly heads and a human civil war breaks out. The Alternatives and The Sapiens wage bloody war and battle for control of a powerful energy source, the Lunarites, created by scientist and possible savior, the titular Huxley!

Get the skinny on Webzen‘s epic sci fi fantasy MMO after the jump!

Korean publisher/developer Webzen is going to be pretty darn huge in a little while. They’ve got an envious slate of MMO’s lined up that include Project Wiki, Soul Of The Ultimate Nation, an unnamed Red 5 project, and the highly anticipated MMOFPS Huxley, and yeah, that stands for Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter.

Now stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but it’s the future and it’s a post apocalyptic landscape, earthquakes, tidal waves and massive climate changes have ravaged the earth, cutting continents off from one another and throwing human civilisation into chaos.

       

The survivors of these catastrophes dream of the days when things were better and life was simpler, the sudden appearance of mutants among the population causes further anarchy. Racism and oppression rear their ugly heads and a human civil war breaks out. The Alternatives and The Sapiens wage bloody war and battle for control of a powerful energy source, the Lunarites, created by scientist and possible savior, the titular Huxley!

   
The Alternatives. Nice tan buddy.

 
The Sapiens. She’s hawt.

The whole MMOFPS thing has been tried before, most notably by Sony Online Entertainment’s Planetside, but Webzen aims to deliver a different experience. Huxley promises to deliver the kind of complex gameplay and character growth options we’ve come to expect from traditional RPG’s while at the same time satisfying the need to twitch that itchy trigger finger in massive battles featuring hundreds of combatants. You’ll be able to evolve your character by enhancing your combat styles and acquiring new weapons, armor, vehicles and character upgrades.  The world around you will be brought to life by the power of the Unreal Engine 3, capable of rendering highly detailed characters, NPC’s and environments in incredibly vivid detail.

       

        

With all that Huxley promises it’s no wonder many MMO and FPS fans are eagerly looking forward to it, Chris G and myself were unable to get our hands on the title at this year’s E3 but media reactions have since been decidedly mixed. So far all we’ve seen of Huxley has been top class, great art, slick screens, and an intriguing (if derivative) premise. It’s probably the fact that Webzen really is an unproven developer in the west coupled with  the failure of the only other entry in the MMOFPS genre of note (Planetside) that’s reigning in fan excitement. Rest assured that as soon as QJ’s able to get some quality time with this baby we’ll let you know how it really looks, feels and plays.

   

If you haven’t already seen it be sure to download the high resoultion first trailer for Huxley, it makes little sense to me, but it sure is purty. – [Download: Huxley, First trailer. HD-720p] – AVI – 110MB

So what do you guys think, is there a market for an MMOFPS, or do people just want the MMO genre confined to the RPG sub-genre?