E3 Aftermath

by Eddie Turner on July 25, 2008 2:00 AM EST

Damnation is a third-person action title whose focus is equally distributed among various type of gameplay, including shooting, platforming, and vehicular combat. While still very much a shooter, Damnation extends its massive streaming environments vertically as well as horizontally. Characters in the game will perform death-defying acrobatics over 1,000 feet above ground in order to shake down an unstoppable arms dealer in a post-industrial conflict to save humanity. Damnation is yet another promising title set for release this fall on PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 from developer Blue Omega Entertainment.

This year's E3 conference, as usual, has been saturated with multi-platform games. So I actually had to do some digging to uncover some titles that hardcore PC gamers can call their own. And I'm happy to report the discovery of three more PC-exclusive gems that you can look forward to this year.

First up, we have Black Prophecy, a futuristic MMO set in the realm of outer space. Choosing to join forces with one of two dominant human races, the Tyi and the Genides, your key to survival in the game is to infiltrate an alien stronghold who has taken over a third human race called the Restorers, whose fate marks rise or fall of mankind. Take a look.

This next teaser trailer is for Empire: Total War, a real-time strategy game published by Sega. Set in the 18th century, this latest installment in the Total War series introduces global conflict with the implementation of 3D naval combat. Excited about the new offering in the RTS genre, developer Creative Assembly's Lead Designer James Russell states, "The scale is a lot greater than previous Total War titles. The campaign map now encompasses not only the whole of Europe and the Middle East, but also North America and the Caribbean, and the Indian subcontinent. It's a truly epic canvas for the gamer to play out their strategies for world domination."

Now let's take a look at what BioWare has been up to. While the development team has been dropping hints left and right about their work on a third KOTOR game, it wasn't until E3 that gamers got a whiff of Dragon Age: Origins, an upcoming PC exclusive "dark heroic fantasy" RPG of epic proportions. Check out the teaser to see what the creators of Mass Effect have in store.

What evil lurks in the hearts of men? It's a bird, it's a plane, it's...
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  • yyrkoon - Friday, July 25, 2008 - link

    " Rage has been announced as a DX9 game with no plans for DX10 support. Here's to hoping the developers have a change of heart. [Ed: Interesting to note is that Rage for the PC will apparently not use OpenGL as is standard for id Software; however, the Mac version will use OpenGL. Perhaps DirectX has reached the point where Carmack no longer feels it's a handicap, or maybe he's just throwing in the towel as one of the few remaining holdouts.]"

    Or Maybe idsoft wants to port the title to the xbox360 ?
  • JarredWalton - Friday, July 25, 2008 - link

    I've had a few debates/conversations with people online lately about the state of DX10 games. With no DX10 hardware on consoles, and with a huge installed base of DX9 hardware... plus with the Vista requirement for DX10... basically, I don't think we're coming anywhere near to utilizing what DX10 really can do. Everything so far is a DX9 game with DX10 stuff added, because no one is willing to ditch support for all the XP and DX9 user base. It's almost as bad as the state of 64-bit applications. Almost. Still, the fact that id is releasing an OpenGL version on Mac makes the use of DirectX on the PC interesting.
  • yyrkoon - Friday, July 25, 2008 - link

    Actually Jarred, what I meant was that I'm nearly positive that the xbox360 uses Direct3D 9, and there is a development kit for Directx that can be used for PC, or xbox360 titles(sorry, I do not recall the resource kit name). What I was trying to get at here was that IF IDSoft has any hopes of releasing said title for the xbox360, Directx9 *would* be the only way to go, and since this resource kit can be used for xbox360 AND PC titles . . .
  • JarredWalton - Friday, July 25, 2008 - link

    But since they're doing a Mac version, they've already got OpenGL. There's some confusion on the subject of whether or not it's really using DX9, or if it's a DX9-class OpenGL solution. Not that important in the grand scheme of things, of course, as the final game and gameplay is what matters.
  • phideo - Friday, July 25, 2008 - link

    The PC/Windows version still uses OpenGL according to John Carmack. It's a D3D9-class renderer, not a D3D9 renderer.

    "The PC version is still OpenGL, but it is possible that could change before release...I am going to at least consider OpenGL 3.0 as a target, if Nvidia, ATI, and Intel all have decent support."

    'Course, this was way back in September of 2007...

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