World of Darkness Preview and Wishlist

A couple of new articles covering CCP Games’ World of Darkness MMO have been released, making the fans’ wait for the game slightly more bearable.

The Penny Arcade Report has a preview:

Like EVE Online, World of Darkness is going to take place in a single shard; everyone who plays the game will be playing together. Unlike EVE, the action happens at a fast pace, and the team is re-writing much of the EVE Online technology to make that possible.

(We’re making sure this is a next-generation MMO. It’s very focused on movement and motion and capturing what it’s like to be a vampire,) McDonough explained. (People ask about our high level designs for World of Darkness, and we’ve called this a vampire simulator. What’s it like to be a vampire. Not a super hero, but a super-powered individual. The way the characters move around the city feels very vampiric.)

The short tech demo we saw during the presentation proved this out. A female character ran along the city, climbing up walls, walking through what looked to be a club. I saw hints of the Disciplines I remember from the tabletop game, such as Celerity and Obfuscation. The woman takes down a single male vampire, before others join the fight. The screen fades to black.

While PC Gamer has a wishlist type gallery:

The supernatural revival craze of the past decade-plus had the unfortunate side effect of diluting the world’s most famous brooding, nocturnal predators into what a fellow World of Darkness fan once referred to as (superheroes that need a lot of sunscreen.) Don’t get me wrong, doing backflips while firing dual machine pistols and jumping off of skyscrapers have their place in vampire fiction. But the key thematic criteria is whether or not the people behind World of Darkness understand the vampiric metaphor. Vampires are meant to be horrifying. And when you’re playing as a vampire, you should be made more afraid of yourself, and the things you’re willing to do, than anything else.

You’re not just a sharply dressed human with powers. You’re a monster. And you should feel like one.