Massively^™

NCsoft Europe announced that it has begun selling in the U.K. what it calls "starter packs" for some of its games - City of Heroes, City of Villains, Guild Wars, and Lineage II. Tabula Rasa will follow later in the year. The packs cost £1.99 at retail, and come with all game content plus a two week trial subscription period, encouraging players to return to buy the game at retail when the period ends.

This is essentially your standard 14-day trial -- a staple in the industry -- made available through retail for would-be subscribers who might not come across such opportunities on the web. NCsoft hopes that this move will net some new customers -- especially for its struggling properties.

"In an ever increasingly digitally orientated retail environment, encouraging players to return to retail is a win-win for both outlet and publisher," said an NCsoft rep. We had heard that the whole digital download thing could be the saving grace of the PC platform, but whatever!

PMOG is a multiplayer game that's not actually a game... or is it? Developed by a few programmers who have been fishing around for funding in a few different places, PMOG is actually a Firefox extension that turns web browsing into a "passively multiplayer online game"-- as you surf different web sites, you can gain experience points and currency, and then you can use those to build a virtual empire on a meta-level. Users can build traps and set off on missions on the web, and even wage war over web sites themselves. "Playful annotation of the web at large" is how they describe it-- sounds fun.

It's just recently started up a closed beta, and apparently there's still more testing to go through before the concept is opened up for everyone to jump in on. There are other concerns, too-- privacy, and how they'll make their money (will they require users to visit certain sites or see ads to play?), but hopefully those questions will be answered soon, as they plan to have a demo at GDC (Massively will be there and keep our eyes open for it). The Passively Multiplayer concept itself is definitely an interesting one, though-- it only takes a small, even inconsequential reward system to turn something that's usually boring into something that people get excited about.

[Via Wonderland]

On a side note, any resemblance of the above spaceship to a phallus is completely incidental and we think it's very immature of you to suggest otherwise.

WanderingGoblin.com has posted their extensive impressions of some time spent with Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning whilst at the recent E for All event. Seeing as no one else gets to play Warhammer at the moment, the hands-on may provide a much needed hit for anyone experiencing withdrawal symptoms.

The article discusses various aspects of the game. There is a breakdown of some of the standout classes, of which the Warrior Priest sounds quite interesting. It is also noted that the two factions in the game, Destruction and Order (referred to as Chaos and Order in the article), do not simply contain identical classes with different names. This has weighty player-versus-player balance implications, and you can be sure that the game's forums will consist mostly of threads beginning with "___ class is OP!", followed by "It's fine, lrn2play", but it is a bold move nevertheless.

Speaking of PvP, it seems that EA Mythic prefers to call it Realm vs Realm or RvR, which hearkens back to Mythic's much earlier MMO Dark Age of Camelot. The article includes a reminder that players will gain leveling experience and loot by killing other players, a concept which should tickle the fancy of anyone fond of PvP. The full article is linked below and contains much more about WanderingGoblin's time with with Warhammer at E for All.

I spent a little time today to download and look at the Hellgate: London demo. Now, bearing in mind that I don't have what anyone might reasonably describe as 'reflexes' and my hardware can only aspire to being as good as lousy compared to the rigs around these days (that Radeon 9200SE has got to go).

If you don't want to flip below the fold, and just want the short form, it rocked. Download the demo, run through it, get your credit-card out and preorder. Longer impressions after the jump.

There's a Hellgate London demo out, for those of you who've been waiting for this maybe-MMO from the makers of the original Diablo (and lots of team members from the old Blizzard North). I say maybe-MMO because it'll be a lot like Guild Wars, in that it'll be free to play out of the box, and there will be a lot of single player fun available. But it's also got that MMO bent to it, in that you'll be able to pay for more exclusive content, and there will also be guilds and player housing. Oh, and did I mention it's an FPS with heavy RPG elements?

So yeah, it's a game of many contradictions. But worry not-- you can try the game out yourself right now by downloading the hefty 1.4gb demo over at Worthplaying, GameDaily (disclaimer: AOL owns GameDaily, and they also own Weblogs, Inc, which owns Massively) or FileShack (shudder-- FileShack and I do not have a good history). KillTenRats says the demo lets you play as a Blademaster or Marksman, and that it'll take you through part of Act 1. He also hears that the demo is singleplayer only, so any big MMO elements will probably have to wait until the game is released.

And the good news is that that's not too long a wait-- we should see Hellgate: London in North America on October 31st. Let us know what you think of the demo.