Huxley

Finally, the social aspect of an MMO is fulfilled via the City mode; similar to the town hubs in Guild Wars. Inside the various cities, players wander around in search of trade (both with NPCs and other players), group gatherings (for either Quest or Battlezone squad groupings), and even housing. Basically, any community activity that doesn't involve shooting people takes place in the city. Heck, you can go down to the Chinatown district of any city and create quests for other players, so if you're too lazy to go out and earn some ammo or items, you can post a quest that outlines what you need and what you'll give.

Making Sure Your Skills Can Indeed Pay Your Bills

Interestingly, Huxley will be more gear-emphatic than most MMOs, as it's your gear that gives you skills and levels. Each piece of body armor has a set of skills attached to it, and allocating skill points to these helps define your in-combat abilities. For example, helmets will contain vision modes (infrared, hitpoint scanning, and sometimes a rear-view window!) and even anti-headshot protection (thicker armor, a warning system) that increase in effectiveness based on skill point allocation. On the other hand, your boots determine whether you have a rocket jump or a stealthy stride.

An additional tactical mechanic is the fact that you can only have four weapons and five skills active at any match or mission; meaning you make choices like whether you outfit yourself with heavy weaponry and minimal non-shooting skills, or maybe load up on stealth and vision skills to be a sneaky but weak spotter. While the skills are attached to armor, the actual player character have license points, which determine things like what vehicles they can drive or whether they can be a squad commander.


At press time, Kang said that players can have one character per server, and Webzen is still figuring out just how many servers/characters you can have total. That's just one of a few smaller details that will reveal itself when Huxley is in a more playable state. So far, what Kang has shown and talked about sounds pretty neat, but everything is still quite controlled and not quite ready for public scrutiny. That said, we still can't wait to get onto a live server, if only to see how well the game's many unique ideas are pulled off.