Alrighty. I got back from the Codemasters Online Gaming event “C.O.G LiVE 2006″ on Friday. The event, directed towards invited press from various online and print publications around Europe was held in Warwickshire, England.

They flew us over on Thursday and then the entire day was spent for the press event and a dinner in the evening, housing us in a very nice hotel/country club for the night.

I had a great time with the C.O.G crew and got to see more of their games. and although the current versions of for example RFO doesn’t interest me much at the moment, the plans they have for that game and their other games (ArchLord, LotRO and DDO) are looking promising. Time will tell. LotRO and ArchLord are the two games that caught my attention the most.

I put up a few photos from the trip in the gallery. And some random information:

ArchLord:

- The game is PvP and guild focused. And looks like it’ll be -very- competitive and objective focused.
- The main goal of the game is to get your character to become an ArchLord. You do this by having your guild elect you as the challenger. After the guild has taken one of three Archons (some sort of artifacts whihc you gain control over after successfully sieging an NPC castle) and then beating the two other gulds who managed to take control of the other two castles. And after beating those two guilds, you apparently have to be elected by your guild to be the challenger and then move forward on your own to achieve the ArchLord status.
- ArchLords gain lots of powers for 21 days. Including massive AOE effects, bodyguards, castle access for their guild, tax control and…a flying dragon mount. The first person to achieve this rank will also receive an RL full scale replica of the ArchLord armour. Every ArchLord after that will receive a fullscale helmet replica.
- There’s supposed to be massive sieges and warfare, which I like.
- Consequences for PK, which will be in-game/in character measures to try and hamper gankings and promote the actual objective of the game.
- ArchLords gets weather controlling powers as well.
- There’s mounted combat.
- Some terrain deformation results were shown and they talked about having some terrain deformation in the game. Such as a forest being scorched after an ArchLord cast metero shower on the area.
- They also said there would be ca 200 000 quests in the game, which I’m skeptical about. But when asked, they insisted on it and said it wouldn’t be just kill and delivery quests. So we’ll see what that’s all about.
- The graphics are imo mediocre. Mostly because I can’t tell them apart from other korean games such as RFO or L2.

Lord of the Rings Online:

- Setting/main story is Angmar, a rerisen ntion under the control of the Witch King.
- Quests helping the original Fellowship.
- Very atmospheric graphics. I love the art style. The Art Director is a Yamin Dee (sp?).
- The char gen looks promising as well
- A very PvE and storyline focused game. Looking forward to it.
- Awesome water. Just awesome.
- Very few instances.
- Semi affecting the world. Ie people completing certain quests will perhaps see things differently than people who haven’t completed the quest. Guess it’s a step in the right direction.

Hoping to get to try these two asap.