Huxley. This was catching our eye back in 2005, and reportedly it's finally out this year - though since missing its mooted 2006 release, it had slipped off our radars due to lack of news, and more importantly a lack of details. Vehicles, levelling, 100 man vs 100 man battles, MMO-like special powers, questing - that's about it. It didn't quite have that Planetside vibe- more like massed UT2004 - but it was at least having a crack at a similar concept. I fear after all this time, and now I'm that much more familiar with games' giant promises proving unrealistic in practice, that it'll be a) much smaller in scope or b) more akin to the traditional MMO model than first expected, but that Planetside hope remains.
Developers Webzen's most notable prior game is Mu Online, very much in the Lineage vein - and most reknowned in these parts for being the game that a South Korean chap played for 86 straight hours before unsurprisingly keeling over from a fatal bout of deep-vein thrombosis. It's an unlikely heritage for the sort of persistent world FPS I'm hoping for - but hey, at least we know it's not about Elves (the two playable races are both offshoots of future-humans), so Webzen clearly aren't hanging on to K-MMO stereotypes.
Truth be told, I'd completely forgotten about it until I clocked this story about a late-2008 release on a download service yesterday. I've not heard of iiji.com before, but this will be Huxley's home. I'll have to have a look at some point, as it makes bold promises such as "the greatest online military FPS game you will ever experience" about one of its free-to-play, micropayment (or 'money')-supported titles, the rather brown and Counter-Strikey Solidier Front Reportedly nearly 4000 people are playing Soldier Front right now. Still, it's odd company for what was once considered a very high profile title. Does this suggest that, after this long wait, it's no longer high profile, or just that it's been very canny about selling to the highest bidder?
