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Black Prophecy interview confirms station walking feature, post-release
Let's face it, playing a sci-fi MMO where your ship is essentially your avatar is a deal breaker for some gamers. Typically we're referring to EVE Online when 'ship-as-avatar' discussions come up, but CCP's game will soon have company in the sci-fi MMO genre, with Jumpgate Evolution and Black Prophecy both on the way. Anyone who's played EVE knows that, yes, you do create a portrait-style avatar during character creation but what you see throughout gameplay is your ship. This will also be the case with Black Prophecy, although character avatars will be 3-D. Black Prophecy's developer Reakktor Media revealed that they'd like to take this a step further and introduce the ability to walk about in stations, post-launch. Black Prophecy's development director Simon Bachmann mentioned this in a recent interview. Simon told Sheila "Jube" Lewis at IGN's Voodoo Extreme: "Your ship is your game character which you can equip like you equip your player avatar in any other MMO. Next to your ship you will also have a fully customizable 3D avatar of your pilot which will appear in conversations with NPCs or other players. This special avatar will become more important in the so called 'Station walking' feature which we plan to implement in one of the future game updates post release."
ION Conference returns for 2009, changes name to LOGIN
Massively's readers who follow the online game industry may be familiar with Evergreen Events. They're the people who brought us the Online Game Development Conference (OGDC 2007) and the ION Game Conference (2008). The next step in the annual conference's evolution entails gaining a new name -- the LOGIN Conference.LOGIN 2009 will be three and a half days of lectures, panels, roundtables, and keynotes focused on the online game industry. Thus far details about speakers are scarce, but one keynote speaker has been announced for LOGIN 2009 -- Charlie Stross, author of Halting State, a thriller that deals heavily with virtual worlds. The call for more speakers remains open, and if ION was any indication of what to expect, a number of industry luminaries are likely to have a presence at LOGIN.LOGIN will take place in Seattle, Washington, from May 11-14, 2009. Massively will have more info for you about LOGIN as we get closer to the conference.
