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10th June 2002:
Neocron
Living a double-life has never been so easy; what would you do inside the futuristic virtual world of Neocron?
Posted by Marc Hull - PC - UK and Europe

We've all seen games promise to offer the freedom to do anything inside a virtual world, but rarely have they delivered anything close to the hype they've generated. However, the futuristic world of Neocron has been designed around these ideas, and we had the opportunity to take part in its beta testing to find out how it is coming along.

When you first start up the game you'll create your character by mixing and matching preset body parts and clothing, before being placed inside an apartment in one of the city's districts which your character will call home. Here's where you'll first notice one of the things that sets Neocron apart from most other 'MMORPGs' (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games); it plays entirely from a first-person perspective. While this leaves your carefully crafted avatar out of view for most of the game, so only other players will use it to identify you, it actually makes a lot of sense when you start navigating around the massive world on offer. Whereas other RPGs don't give your character a great deal of freedom to move about their surroundings, by using the standard keyboard and mouse first-person-shooter combination in Neocron you're able to move and look around easily and precisely. This system also gets around the problem of dodgy camera angles that dogs third-person games, allowing you to control how you view the action at all times.

Looking around your apartment you'll notice that quite a few objects are 'targetted' when they move past the crosshair at the centre of the screen, and their names will appear above them. This indicates that you can interact with them in some way by pressing the 'Use' key, and applies to loads of things from other players and non-playable characters to cupboards, chairs and even cardboard boxes in the street. 'Using' is also context-based, so applying it to a container will bring up a list of its contents for you to loot, a non-playable character will speak to you, or another player will enter trading with you.

Of course, with over 1,000 players expected to connect to a single game server, a pretty large world is needed to support them all, and Neocron's certainly doesn't disappoint. The city itself is split into three main areas: ViaRosso, Plaza and Pepper Park; with each having a different look but all in keeping with the game's futuristic theme. The ViaRosso and Plaza districts are mainly peaceful, residential places, where players can meet up and trade while computer-controlled security guards prevent player-vs-player conflict. Pepper Park is the city's red light district, with minimal security and some very dodgy bars, giving you the freedom to fight out your differences with other players. The city also has a subway for quick transport between each area, and a sewer system that can be explored, including rats and fierce dogs to be dealt with.

Each of Neocron's districts is split up into many different areas; when you cross the border out of one the game will quickly load the next and synchronise with the server. However, this process currently takes just a matter of seconds, and doesn't disrupt play in the slightest, so you really do get the sense of being part of one massive world. It doesn't end at the edge of the city either; in fact, much of the game world exists in the OutZone, where there is no security and beasts run wild ready to attack you if you get too close. While this area is mainly full of open landscape and forests, there are various buildings and complexes dotted around the place to explore, some with shops that offer more than those in Neocron itself. Of course, it would be really tedious having to travel across the large expanse of the OutZone every time you want to visit places you've previously discovered, but fortunately the game's developers have included devices that make life a lot easier. Gene Replicators are found in Neocron and other built-up areas and act as teleporters between one another. When you first venture into a new territory you can locate its Replicator and 'activate' it for a small fee; from then on you'll be able to select that location to teleport to from other Replicators. Fortunately, there's a pre-activated Replicator in your apartment that you can teleport to at will, so you don't have to worry about the long trek back if you go out exploring. The other useful device is the GoGuardian, which is like a Universal item store. You can simply drop objects you're carrying into one, and can then pick them up from any other one you find around the game world. This becomes increasingly useful when you build up a large number of items, since they can weigh down your character and slow down your walking speed.

Although the beta version we're playing is still quite early, with the developers promising many new features including implementation of 'factions' that each player can join and vehicles to make traversing the OutZone faster, the game's shaping up well and has loads of potential. The only problem we've encountered so far is that newcomers to the game can find the scale of the world bewildering and not know where to start with the game, but we hope to run a series of articles before its release that will give our readers a running start for when the full game hits the shops later this year.

Marc Hull

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