WAR details

By way of tobold and the greenskin I found a terrific overview of the forthcoming Warhammer MMO. It has lots of flavor text mingled with incredibly detailed descriptions of the game, and reveals lots of fun things being planned that I hadn't heard about before. One that really caught my eye:

Your WAR character will not be staring blankly ahead, but will instead express its emotions with a range of facial animations. As a player you will be able to set your character's mood, and everyone else will be able to see it - meaning you can give your character a brooding, sad or happy temperament (among others), and the world will know it. As you do things, your character grimaces and looks excited and otherwise changes expression to react to the activity.

It's like facebook, only more so. And, let's face it - if you don't see social networks and web 2.0 sites merging with MMOs in the coming years, I think you're probably not looking.

A social networking site for gamers?

TechCrunch, a site that reports on new web projects, is reporting that a new site called UGAME is aiming to be the facebook of PC gamers. It has all the basics, plus some new twists:

They’ve built in lots of functionality that will be immediately familiar: news feeds, profiles, friends, blogs, photo galleries, status updates, etc.

But they’ve also added gaming twists to these features and built out new features that don’t exist elsewhere. To name a few: members can post their gaming achievements from both tournament and non-tournament events; they can list their favorite games and computer hardware specs; and they can join teams that are allotted their own public-facing profiles.

I like some of the ideas, though I'm not really convinced this couldn't work better as a facebook app.

Web 2.0 and gaming

There's an interesting post over at Aggro Me about integrating social features (so-called "Web 2.0" features) into massive games. On some level this has already happened, as the game integrates text (and now voice) chat, friend lists, etc. But there are obviously levels and levels. AM's post explores some of those options. I especially liked the random place the comments went, talking about what kind of webpage cats would make.