The Battlestar Galactica MMO will be a browser-based MMO game. However, as Quake Live proved to players recently, this need not be alarming news. Quake Live, for those not in the know, is a free version of Quake 3: Arena is the original game played in one’s browser. Our browsers are no longer as limited as they used to be and the Battlestar MMO is more awe-inspiring than iD’s browser-based game. It seems to be much more influenced by EVE Online than Jumpgate Evolution. The game is controlled with the mouse and the player has direct control over their ship – it’s not a point and click interface as one may expect from a browser-based game like this.

The Battlestar MMO does not have a planned release yet.

Splash Damage, known for their multiplayer games (they developed the multiplayer components to Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Doom 3, in addition to developed Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars), is showing off some more Brink this year. This is a game that has flown under the radar for a few years – it always gets noticed but never gets a lot of attention. Splash Damage’s hope for Brink is for it to be a mix of single-player and multiplayer. Players will have persistent online characters. When a match starts, characters from the single-player campaign will be talking to the troops – the players (the screen will show the characters in the match, to boot) And the single-player mode feels like a logical extension of the multiplayer. Character customization is the name of the game, as completing objectives and killing characters will give players points to customize their character. Splash Damage’s Brink always seemed a bit ambitious; they’ve noted that there tends to be an issue with single player-focused titles having lackluster multiplayer modes and vice versa. I mean, who plays the single player mode for the Unreal games? They may play some matches against bots, but the dedicated single player campaign is lackluster. Likewise, I never found more than a handful of people willing to play Deus Ex online. Splash Damage hopes to remedy this by giving the multiplayer component qualities of single player games and the single player campaign have elements of multiplayer games.

Brink is dated for next spring.

Six years ago the studio, People Can Fly released their debut game, Painkiller. Painkiller was a return to basics for the FPS genre. Simple, uncomplicated story and hordes of enemies to kill. It may not have been groundbreaking, but it was a very refined shooter experience. Bulletstorm is the new shooter being developed by People Can Fly, but it’s a bit more advanced than Painkiller. In this new title, players shoot through legions of enemies, yes, but the player is rewarded with points for each kill. The points are based on how you kill an enemy. Get up close and personal for more points. Stylish kills garner even more points. The points are used to upgrade weapons and abilities. The hope is to encourage the players to use the environment and weapons creatively to get nice kills.

Bulletstorm is dated for February 22, 2011.

This E3 has been a wealth of information for MMOs. Turbine has taken the time to give more info on The Lord of the Rings Online’s move to the free-to-play model (which was announced prior to E3). We saw a similar move with Turbine’s Dungeons and Dragons Online and it seems like we’ll see a lot of the same changes. The game itself will be free, but the players will be able to buy content and in-game items. Current subscribers will get free in-game currency to purchase this stuff, so it still pays to be a subscriber. This move was likely encouraged by the reaction to the D&DO community to this model – the amount of subscribers (known as VIPs in-game) doubled. The beta for the F2P LotRO started on the 16th.

ACE Team is currently known for Zeno Clash. Zeno Clash is a first-person fantasy game released on Steam that was a bit of a hit, both for its interesting art style and its gameplay. Rock of Ages is a tower defense game (remember when you just played tower defense games in Starcraft and Warcraft III? Who would have dreamt that these would become a full-fledged genre?)  mixed with Marble Madness… yeah, I’m a bit confused too. Rock of Ages is a multiplayer game where players take turns trying to roll their rock into their opponent’s base. The game will have a variety of art styles, depending on the level.

Sadly, not much information is available on this interesting title – I couldn’t even find screenshots or access the official site as I wrote this. However, we can expect to be downloading Rock of Ages before the end of this year.

I have a soft spot for simulators. I’m no expert on this genre. And I do have a preference for the more science-fictiony attempts at simulators, but I can say that I do enjoy the World War 2 submarine simulator Silent Hunter II. There’s something about the slow, methodical gameplay that should be boring but is somehow thrilling. Ship Simulator Extremes is being published by Paradox Interactive, known for their somewhat dense (but never overwhelming) historical real-time strategy games. The developer,VSTEP Software, has made simulations for the government and corporate sectors in the past. Between the two, this game is in very good hands. The amount of content this game is going for is overwhelming, however. You can explore the ships you’re commanding, both large and small vessels, in detail. There are three planned campaigns. In the first you are the captain of a cruise ship, you have to not only navigate the waters, but keep the customers happy and find replacement parts for anything that breaks down. There’s also a Greenpeace campaign which takes place in the Antarctic as you seek out ships engaged in illegal whaling to stop them. The third one hasn’t been disclosed, which is odd considering it’s slated to be released sometimes this year (getting any accurate date is hard, sometime in August seems to be a safe bet).

Remember those all-too frequent ads for Two Worlds a few years ago? I couldn’t watch Seinfeld without seeing these ads at least 3 times and, with how much I watch Seinfeld in a day (when I have access to cable four episodes a day is the norm), I grew a bit annoyed with these ads. The original Two Worlds was not a critical darling, but Reality Pump is hoping that Two Worlds II will be a bit more warmly received. Which for me just requires them to air less ads for their product when I watch everyone’s favourite sitcom from the 90s. Two Worlds II is an RPG very much like the Elder Scrolls series – big, epic, and more than your fair share of combat. Two Worlds II boasts an open-ended development system for characters. The game plays more like an action game than your typical RPG, but that seems to be the trend of RPGs as of late. The game will also feature a multiplayer mode – one of the cooler aspects to this multiplayer mode is for the ability for players to create villages to produce goods for trade.

Expect to save the world and found your own modest village this September.

I’m a nerd, albeit a bit of a frugal one. I love the Warhammer 40,000 universe. It’s science-fiction enough for me to love the setting, but has enough fantasy elements to keep the fantasy nerd inside of me happy. However, collecting those little figures to fight other little figures is an expensive endeavour. The Warhammer 40k universe found its greatest video game success with Relic’s strategy games (I consider the original Dawn of War, and its expansions, to be the best RTS games ever, sadly I haven’t tried Dawn of War II yet). The developers of Warhammer 40k: Dark Millennium Online, Vigil Games, are a bit tight-lipped on this game. The trailer is obviously from the perspective of the Imperial forces in the game. Vehicles make an appearance, presumably they will be player controlled. And the scale of the game seems to be quite huge, with walkers towering over ground forces.

The combat system looks more like a shooter than an RPG. Perhaps we can expect something akin to Mass Effect or Fallout 3. Seeing as how this is set in the Warhammer 40k universe, we can expect a well-thought out and robust PvP. The developers are pretty quick to acknowledge, and distance themselves from, Relic’s efforts with the Warhammer 40k universe. This is not the tactical strategy experience we saw in Dawn of War or the balls-to-the-walls action game we’ll see from Relic’s upcoming Space Marine game; this is a roleplaying game. It’s not known which races will be playable. – Both Orks and Space Marines had their share of screen time in the trailer, but it is expected that all the races currently in the Warhammer 40k canon will make an appearance. Seeing who they make playable and how they handle balance will be interesting, as each side is designed with wargaming (not roleplaying) in mind. At the end of the day, my hope is to play as the Eldar and to engage in some territorial disputes with the Necrons – or if you want it in English, I want to be a space elf and fight space-robot-zombies!

Hopefully we’ll be burning heretics for the emperor in 2012.