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NCSoft Media Quickie

The Free Games

For the next 4 newly introduced offerings, a very brief demo and trailer were shown for each of them, accompanied by short summaries of what they are about, what their current state of availability or development is, and when to expect them to be available on the English market.

Dungeon Runners
Presentation by Tommy Lieberman, 3rd Party Associate Producer

Dungeon Runners brings gaming back to its dungeon crawling roots. The play style is that of many classic PC top-down RPGs, but mixes it together with all of the benefits of an online world. Players gather a party and head into vast and varied dungeons to work as a team to defeat hordes of enemies for rare treasures ranging from set items, collectibles, or uber loot.

Instances will generate randomly as you enter, and the difficulty and quantity of enemies will scale with the level and number of players. Maneuvering to dodge is possible, and it’s all about charging heroically into masses of foes for slaying.  The skills compliment this approach, and downtime is minimized through many features. There are no death penalties, and dying is essentially a free teleport to town. Similar to Diablo 2, there are potions, teleport scrolls to town, and a waypoint system to keep the pace fast. Dungeon Runners is currently in closed beta.

Exteel
Presentation by Tommy Lieberman, 3rd Party Associate Producer

Exteel is filled with hot blooded robot action. Players can personalize and upgrade their “mech” (a giant robot!) and face each other in glorious combat within a unique player vs. player environment. Exteel features fully customizable robots that sport a wide range of arsenal to tear the competition apart. Whether you want to go it alone or with a team, you can gain new combat moves and utilize brutal weaponry of both ranged and melee. Players can choose from light and agile to slow and devastating. Special combat moves are available that put even the greatest special effects crews to shame, and combos are furious like almost none other. If you might be familiar with anime and its genre of super robot shows, that would give you a good idea of what this is like. Very exciting and it really got me itching for a fight. Live in Korea already; guess most of us will have to wait.

Soccer Fury
Presentation by Tommy Lieberman, 3rd Party Associate Producer

Soccer Fury is an action game that focuses on, you guessed it, soccer. It’s more then your average soccer game though, there are not many similarities between real soccer and Soccer Fury. The player’s goal is to get the ball through the net by ANY means necessary, most notably through combat. Martial arts, special moves, and more are used to battle one another in a 3v3 setting online. Great graphics and the gameplay seems like it might have wide appeal from bringing together commonly separate game type elements. A real contact sport, coming to you in 2007.

Smash Star
Presentation by Tommy Lieberman, 3rd Party Associate Producer

Smash Star brings tennis to a whole new level of accessibility and depth. Players take the roll of a magical character that travels through a storyline while playing tennis. Stylistically, this game could also be considered to have a very anime-like feel. It is cutesy, and it draws upon Asian influences to appeal to a wide variety of cultures and player types. Characters will have magic abilities and special moves to provide a different flavor of tennis. Statistics and advancement are there, and characters and develop in different ways. Outfits will be customizable, and it looks to offer a nice and silly form of fun. No need to be a hardcore tennis fan, the game will be very accessible for anyone! Recommended for lovers of cuteness. This is yet another planned 2007 release. Also, apparently the name will not be Smash Star for a US release, and the name hasn’t been determined as of now.

Closing and Relevant Links of Interest

It all sounds so quick and easy, I really don’t have an excuse to not try these out. And I think that this whole deal is likely to bring in much more players into the NCsoft world, as being free for play really eliminates a large entrance barrier! With this many diverse offerings, it’s almost hard to imagine a person that wouldn’t find at least one of them at least a bit interesting. A smart move in Asian markets, but will this succeed in primarily English speaking markets? We’ll see soon enough.