Half a Beeeeelleon!

November 17th will be known for several things. Sony's rich-kid-only PS3 was launched, I don't know if anyone noticed. Another new Bond hit the screen, hopefully he'll do better than the last couple who played that part (although Pierce Brosnan did quite well in the Die Another Day, IMHO).



On a far smaller stage, Kim Chee broke the half-a billion ISK cap today, and can no longer be considered a poor citizen of EVE-Online. While 500M ISK is a drop in the bucket to many players in the game, it's not chump change, and it's actually not a bad accomplishment for a solo player in an MMO that offers huge alliances.







I'd also like to point folks at another MMO. It's one I have very mixed feelings about. On the one hand, it looks stunning and sounds like it's what the original EverQuest would have been, had Brad McQuaid had both the creative control and the experience to make it. This isn't surprising, since McQuaid is at the helm, and this is what he left SOE to do after they took control away from him. On the minus side, SOE is involved again. This time, they're supposedly limited to providing the servers, account maintenance, and marketing. I'd love to believe that, as the game itself sounds remarkable.

I'm talking about Vanguard, of course. As you'd expect, I tossed a few screenshots up for you. The level of detail is very impressive, although it makes me think my poor old computer won't actually let me see THAT while playing. Vanguard seems to be striving for a balance between the photo-realisitic and they stylized comic-book. EQ2 tried to go to one extreme, and ended up with a dead world. WoW went the other way, and made a fun world that looks horrible close up. Looking at the 1600x1200 screenshots, the detail is phenomenal, but it still looks alive.

Vanguard is still in Beta 3. They plan to have 5 stages of Beta before a release in Q1 of 2007. Considering the WoW expansion is out in January, I'd expect them to be aiming for March to capitalize on people who have finished WoW (again) and are looking for something new.