exploration
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Mars Curiosity leaves its landing area, heads to distant frontier a quarter-mile away
Now that Curiosity has survived its thrill-a-minute landing and passed an upgrade and physical with (nearly) flying colors, the rover is off to earn its $2 billion keep. The trip started well, with the buggy driving 52 feet towards its first science site "beautifully, just as our rover planners designed it," according to NASA. The destination, Glenelg, is 1,500 feet away from the now-familiar Bradbury Landing where it first set down, which is pretty far for a rover that treks along at about a tenth of a mile per hour. On top of that, its minders have some stops in mind to test instruments -- meaning it'll arrive there in about two weeks. Once at Glenelg, Curiosity will scope the unusual geology of the region, though its principal destination for science is Mount Sharp, a relatively vast six miles away. Don't worry about it running out of gas, though -- the nuclear power supply will last a full Martian year, or 687 earth days.
NASA maps out proposed travel plans for Curiosity, decides to head for the hills
As the vista on Mars gradually gets ever clearer, and the system checks continue to show that the rover is in good stead, the team behind Curiosity will be increasingly eager to stretch its legs wheels. The first trip might be just a cautious few meters, but plans for a more adventurous jaunt have just been revealed. The first location in Curiosity's sights is an area referred to as Glenelg, which, based on initial pictures, offers three different geological characteristics, as well as potentially being an area where water used to be present. The site is only 1,300 feet (400 meters) from where the rover landed, but it could still take several weeks to get there. This is merely a quick dash compared to the next leg of its journey, which sees Curiosity heading out to an area called Mount Sharp -- a large mound of layered rock which is hoped to contain visible geology potentially dating back millions of years. With seven kilometers (4.4 miles) lying between the rover and the mountain's foothills, it'll be a much longer journey, but one that could provide the first real evidence of the planet's ability to host, or have hosted, life.
Where in Warcraft: The difficult balance edition
It is a difficult balance, you know, writing a guessing game like this. It's a bit like the difficult balance facing developers of computer games. You don't want to make a challenge so utterly impossible that the majority of people feel excluded, but neither do you want to make it so easy that everyone guesses it within a few seconds! But who am I kidding -- I'm not Blizzard! I am, however, impressed with your speed and accuracy in guessing the last Where in Warcraft installment. DavidSikes, almost to my annoyance, had it within moments of posting! Good job, DavidSikes. You win a cave near Ahn'Qiraj and the respect of the girl who writes this feature. (The last one is a rather dubious reward, let me tell you.) Anyhow, as the Foo Fighters sang in All My Life, on, on, on to the next one. The above screenshot was kindly submitted by Trakand of The Maelstrom (EU). Thanks very much, Trakand. And before you yell "faction bias," this scene is out in the world for anyone to find. And that's all I'm saying about it. Or it'll be guessed in all of three seconds again. So you know the rules: I have to be able to find my way to this location with your instructions. I'm also adding a new rule to avoid situations like we had a while ago: Your guess has to be in a new post, not a reply to another post. Otherwise, it's impossible for me to know who guessed first! That leads to unfair decisions, and nobody likes those. In other news, in England, Where's Waldo? is called Where's Wally? There's so much in Azeroth (and Outland!) just waiting to be found. Tip us off. If you've found a fabulously quirky landmark, hidden treasure, or special hideaway somewhere in Warcraft, drop me a line at olivia@wowinsider.com with your screenshot. You could be featured in a future edition of Where in Warcraft!
RealMyst now on the App Store
The original Myst has been available for iOS for a while now, offering up that game's classic click-to-explore puzzles on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. Now, Cyan Worlds has released realMyst, a 3D re-imagining of the old school title that features the mysterious island of Myst. Unfortunately, the game's only for the iPad 2 or the current iPad (iPad 3), so you'll need one of those devices to play the game (presumably because the graphical fidelity just needs that much power). The title includes the full original Myst in 3D, plus the add-on Rime Age and extras like a hint guide, should you get stuck. Right now it's available for just US$6.99, but the price is set to go back up to $9.99 soon.
E3 2012: Origins of Malu brings player-created factions, housing, and exploration to the sandbox
It's hard to remain completely objective about Origins of Malu. The sci-fantasy title from Burning Dog Media is a project I've been watching personally for quite a while now, both because of its ambitious design goals and because of the sandbox affinity displayed by the dev team. At this week's E3, I finally got to put names with faces when I met with senior developer Jason Mitchell and programmer Chris Shaw. The pair had plenty of interesting tidbits to share, and despite the fact that I haven't put my hands on an Origins build yet, it remains very near the top of my most-anticipated-MMOs list. Join me after the cut for some chit-chat about action combat, player-created factions, PvP (yes there are safe zones), and more.
Open source mini sub appeals to our inner Steve Zissou
Quadrocopters haven't exactly opened the skies for DIY exploration so much as they have for acrobatic feats, but the OpenROV project is hoping to make the briny depths friendlier for aspiring explorers and educators alike. The open source rover, spearheaded by NASA engineer and researcher Eric Stackpole, sinks to depths of up to 300 feet (100 meters), runs on eight C-cell batteries for approximately 1.5 hours and can clip by at three feet (one meter) per second. Within the laser-cut acrylic frame, a sealed cylinder houses a BeagleBone, HD webcam and LED lights. This all weighs in at 5.5 pounds and is piloted using a web browser and video feed. The footage is then piped up to a laptop that tethers the vehicle to the shore. Pre-orders for OpenROV 2.3 kits will be taken through Kickstarter later this summer at $750 apiece, though there are plans to sell fully assembled units. For now, explorers can register their interest at the link below and impatient Jacques Cousteaus will be pleased to know that all files necessary to build version 2.2 are available to download now.
The Daily Grind: Does instant travel trivialize MMO worlds?
Among hardcore MMO fans, there's a theory that instant-travel is a bad thing. If you can just click a map or teleport somewhere instantly, they say, you lose your sense of place in the world along with your appreciation for the setting. Everything feels close together when you didn't have to meander there by foot, and sooner or later, you won't bother exploring at all. But the opposite's been true for me in practice. I've done far more exploring in (and have a much deeper nostalgia for the landmasses of) titles like Ultima Online and Guild Wars, which boast Recall spells and map travel, respectively, than I have in less-travel-friendly titles, and I'm guessing it's because the ability to get to strange and out-of-the-way places quickly means you'll actually go there by choice -- because you can. If it takes me two hours to walk to that cool oasis hidden away in a secret corner of your map, I'm probably not going to bother going at all. What do you think -- does instant travel trivialize the MMO world experience? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
EVE Evolved: Preparing for the Inferno expansion
The Inferno expansion is set to launch on Tuesday May 22nd, promising a complete revamp of EVE Online's war declaration system and a whole host of new modules. If you're in a wardec corp, you'll need to make a few adjustments to the way you operate when the patch goes live. The minimum war fee will increase to 50 million ISK even if you're declaring war on a small corporation, making very small corps less-appealing targets. The fee increases based on the number of members in the target corp, but it doesn't start increasing until around the 130-member mark. If you want to get your money's worth, you'll be best off picking a target corp with 100-150 members or selecting very high-value small targets. Be very wary of wardeccing large alliances after the patch. While the previous war system swung in favour of the attacker, the new system has gone to the opposite extreme. Large corps and alliances are now significantly more costly and dangerous to declare war on, especially as the defender can now call mercenaries into the war at any time. Players have complained that the increasing war costs could be abused by getting all alliance members to add alts to the corp, but this would be a logistical nightmare to apply in practice and would increase fees by only a few hundred million ISK. If alt padding becomes a problem, CCP will undoubtedly step in and revise the fee structure. In this week's EVE Evolved, I look at the new modules and gameplay changes coming in Tuesday's Inferno expansion and give some tips on preparing for the patch.
The Daily Grind: How important is surprise to you?
For some players, MMOs are all about discovery. The game is at its most fun when you're just exploring the world, figuring out what you need to do as best you can. But to other players, wandering around without a clue isn't as fun as knowing what to do and enjoying that actual accomplishment. Of course, surprises come in both big and small varieties. No matter how well you might know Star Wars: The Old Republic's quests, for example, you might avoid looking up all of the datacrons and thus get a pleasant surprise when you find one. Or maybe you don't like knowing about the bosses you'll fight in a dungeon until you get into the fight. We all like discovering things, but what we like to discover varies. So what about you? How important is having surprises in a game for you? Do you like to walk in with as little foreknowledge as possible, or do you like to have a pretty good map in your head before you start playing? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Mists of Pandaria beta: New achievements weave together exploration and lore
There seems to be something different about exploration achievement in Mists of Pandaria, and it's different in a really amazing way. To date, all exploration achievements in WoW have involved simply uncovering areas on your map. While that's fine for viewing scenery, it lacks a certain something, doesn't it? Well, the exploration achievements in Pandaria are taking a wholly different path. Hidden away in different areas of Pandaria are shrines like the one pictured above. Each tells a different piece of a story, and each piece that you find unlocks part of the overall achievement. These don't quite seem to be a replacement for uncovering zone maps so much as an addition to them. The stories found in the different areas involve various parts of Pandaria's history. Considering the fact that Pandaria's been shrouded in mists for 10,000 years, we don't really know a lot of that history at all. These shrines and their associated achievements are a wonderful way for lore hounds out there to find out all they can about Pandaria's past. What's more interesting is that there seems to be a new tracker for multi-objective achievements like this one. Each time you find a shrine, a faint window will pop up and notify you that you've completed a step in the achievement's objective. Once it's completed in full, you'll get the full-on burst of light that you usually see with an achievement's success. This is a great way to integrate lore and exploration into something new and fun for players that really love the lore of the game. While these achievements are all marked as Not Yet Implemented, they seem to be tracking progress already. The one and only plaintive request I have is that completing these achievements give the player a specific reward -- a book that contains the full story that they've just completed discovering. What can I say? I like books! Whether or not these achievements will actually be implemented is up in the air, but I hope that they are. Searching for hidden shrines has become just as much fun as questing through the zones themselves. It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!
The Fullbright Company's first game explores the drawers of a strange home
We were excited about The Fullbright Company because it was founded by three ex-BioShock developers, but now we have another, more tangible reason to eagerly anticipate such a glorious union: the games. The Fullbright Company has announced its first project, Gone Home, a mysterious exploration game set in a "modern, residential locale" and shown as a pre-alpha build in the above video.Fullbright hopes to make Gone Home a rich simulation title with an emphasis on interaction, where players are able to open every drawer and examine the smallest details of their environment to unravel what happened there. The video teases these elements, as well as an audio diary system that plays at its end.Gone Home is native to PC but will support gamepad, and Fullbright will not have a Kickstarter for this title. In related news, "Are you planning to do a Kickstarter?" is now a question that developers consider a standard FAQ.
Design your own robots with upcoming MMO Panzer Pets
If you've been desperately hoping for a Pokémon MMO all these years but have been disappointed by Nintendo's unwillingness to release one or let anyone else develop one, you might be interested in upcoming MMO Panzer Pets. Panzer Pets is set in a post-apocalyptic world in which robots have taken over, but robot builders have found a way to build their own pets to fight back. In Panzer Pets, rather than capture creatures, you'll hunt for robot parts and design your own customisable 3-D pet robots. The game focuses on the exploration opportunities that a post-apocalyptic setting delivers, with a world filled with randomly generated zones, dungeons and towns to explore, and robot parts to collect. Players will be able to trade parts with each other, challenge other players to battles, form guilds, and embark on quests together. As it uses the Unity 3-D engine, the game will be released on iOS, Android, and both PC and Mac web browsers. New studio Gamundo has been working on Panzer Pets for free so far but now needs support to work on the game full-time and complete it. If you're interested in exploring a post-apocalyptic world with a customised pet robot in tow, you can help Gamundo finish the game by pledging money to its Kickstarter campaign, which launched last night. The estimated date for completion of the game is October 2012, and the team needs to raise $85,000 to make it that far without giving a publisher or investor a controlling interest in the game.
Did flying mounts ruin Azeroth?
The question of whether flying mounts may have ruined Azeroth is a hard question for me to even posit, because I love flying mounts. I love being able to fly right over things that annoy me, drop right in on quest objectives and soar right out again. I loved that we could finally fly in Azeroth when Cataclysm shipped, and I was absolutely in favor of being able to use my flying mount to skip over stuff I disliked when questing and leveling up. But it's worth considering: Did that convenience that I so love come at too high a cost? Did being able to fly over obstacles keep me from appreciating how much detail went into the zones? Did it ruin world exploration, something that a lot of players got a lot of enjoyment out of for a great deal of vanilla WoW's run? Did incorporating flying mounts into Azeroth, in addition to forcing a complete redesign of the world, also end up stripping out interesting and cool places you had to really work at to find and visit? Let's discuss the pros and cons.
Vendetta celebrating 10-year anniversary, prepping new content
Ten years is an eternity in the game industry, and MMOs that manage to hang around for a decade or more are few and far between. One such title is Vendetta Online, which originally released on April 20th, 2002 and is still going strong today. Guild Software is hosting a couple of celebration events this weekend. The company has also announced that its massive 1.9 patch is coming later this year, followed by an even more massive expansion in 2013. Vendetta is unique among MMOs for its twitch-based space combat and extensive trading, mining, and exploration gameplay. Large space battles, dynamic territory control, and player-generated content systems round out the feature set, all of which is coded and maintained by a four-man dev team. The single-universe game server is accessible from a number of different platforms that include Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. In March 2011, Vendetta became the first PC MMO to jump to mobile platforms, and it spent several weeks as the number one paid app on Android devices. Check out the game's official website for more info, and don't forget to sign up for the trial while you're there. You can also read Massively's latest game impressions in Some Assembly Required. [Source: Guild press release]
A spoiler-free look at the Mists of Pandaria beta
Are you in the beta for Mists of Pandaria yet? Are you fastidiously avoiding spoilers about all beta-related content? As a site that covers Warcraft news, you'll find more often than not that we have a lot of content up on the site that could be considered spoilers. And if you're someone who's avoiding all that spoiler content, it can get a little frustrating to have to keep scrolling past all that information -- or even more frustrating, dealing with the temptation that all of the spoiler information you could ever want to indulge, just behind that click. Well, that's not what this article is about. It's about the beta, but it's a spoiler-free look at the beta. You'll see some screenshots, but mostly what you'll be reading is what the beta is like. No spoilers of cool story information or anything of that nature here -- just information on Mists, how it looks, how it's shaping up, and what to expect in the event that you do get a beta invite and would like to indulge.
Amazon's Bezos finds Apollo 11 rocket engines in ocean, contemplates shipping options
Ya' know, there's nothing like a little rocket engine hunting to save oneself from the doldrums of generating billions of dollars in revenue in the private sector. At least that appears to be the case for Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who spearheaded an ocean expedition to find the F-1 engines used in the Apollo 11 mission. Forget newer stuff like the GENIE, Vega and Slytherin's SuperDraco -- the classic F-1 is still the rocket engine that ignites Bezos' proverbial liquid fuel. Having found his prize resting 14,000 feet below the surface via deep sea sonar, Bezos' team is now trying to recover at least one of the engines. Bezos says NASA still retains ownership of the F-1s but he's hoping the agency will allow one of them to be displayed at the Museum of Flight in Amazon's home turf of Seattle if both are successfully retrieved. No word on whether the rocket engines will be delivered via Super Saver Shipping.
James Cameron journeys to the Challenger Deep, lives to tell the tale in 3D (video)
It's easy for life to imitate art when you're armed with near billion dollar coffers. Taking a cue from his 1989 hit, The Abyss, James Cameron made a solo plunge down to the deepest part of the Earth -- a spot seven miles below sea level known as the Challenger Deep -- and recorded his journey in 3D for our slack-jawed, couchbound amusement. The terrain, described by Cameron as both "desolate" and "lunar," is part of the Mariana Trench and had remained unexplored by humanity since the Trieste first touched down in 1960. That two man crew, hampered by the technological advancements of the time, didn't have the luxury of capturing the undersea trek, so when Cameron's footage finally hits screens, it'll be the planet's first peek at a truly alien world. Conspiracy theorists and New Age-y types will be disheartened by the lack of any reported close encounters of the aquatic or Steve Zissou kind, as the blockbuster filmmaker only spied a variety of small, whitish and, predominantly, eyeless creatures. The trip was seven years in the making, and involved the construction of the Deepsea Challenger -- the high-tech mini-sub which carted Cameron safely to the Pacific Ocean's depths and back. Curious to see what only the world's richest can experience first-hand? Then click on past the break for a brief docu-tease.
First trailer for Anna, a pretty, spooky and pretty spooky title from Italy [Update]
This little indie ditty has been on our radar for a few months now, intriguing us with slick graphics and a mysterious, vague storyline that seems to smear the line between Dear Esther and Amnesia. Anna takes inspiration from ancient legends in Val D'Ayas, a scenic valley in northern Italy, developer Dreampainters says. Anna is a PC-exclusive, point-and-click exploration title which, as is obvious in the above trailer, has a dark, subtly terrifying edge to it. It has three different endings, each taking about three hours to complete, thus bringing the entire experience to around nine hours. Anna is coming at a "budget price," according to Dreampainters. Update: That's definitely the release date at the end of the trailer up there, so keep a lookout for Anna on May 18, 2012. We'd look out for it ourselves, but apparently we need to get our glasses checked.
EVE's Crucible 1.5 patch hits tomorrow, brings new launcher
As part of CCP's refocusing on EVE Online, the studio announced that work had begun on a new game launcher last November. Players with an out-of-date client currently receive a patch popup on logging in that requires the client to be restarted, and frequent optional patches to fix non-critical issues can force you to restart the client several times. The new patcher brings EVE up to the industry standard for MMO clients, pre-loading the game in the background and announcing when it's ready to launch. The new launcher will go live tomorrow with the Crucible 1.5 update, but it's not the only thing getting some much-needed attention in the patch. All of the rookie ships have been visually revamped, three new 2/10 DED complexes have been added for newer highsec explorers, and the overview will now be more responsive. The patch also brings a whole host of user interface changes and bug fixes.
Choose My Adventure: Mainland in black
One of the comments from last week's Choose My Adventure suggested that I must not be enjoying Ryzom all that much. That isn't entirely accurate, but it would be accurate to say that the charm of the starter island has worn out its welcome and then some, which wouldn't surprise anyone, given that last week's poll wound up in a decisive victory for leaving the island and heading out to the mainland. And while there may have been some business left unfinished there, I'm not one to ignore the rule of the polls. And so it was that Corlede obeyed the will of the people and headed off for the Zorai city. Once there, I set about the important business of getting Corlede outfitted, taking some advice, and assembling a team to plant an idea inside the head of a talking lion meant to represent a well-known religious figure. Or something like that.
