Huxley Takes Shooting Massively Online

WebZen is aiming to squash first-person shooting into a MMORPG experience. Oh, and it's built with the Unreal 3 engine. HD videos you have to see inside.

Massively multiplayer online games are nothing new, but Korean developer WebZen is trying something different. It's latest game, Huxley, is a first-person shooter based on a solid MMOG foundation.

Built as it is on the Unreal 3.0 engine, Huxley looks the part. The engine has allowed the developers to create a highly detailed vision of a post-apocalyptic world. Two of the games three races, the Sabians and the Alternatives, are playable, while the insectoid Hybrids are there mostly as canon fodder.

Each server in Huxley will allow up to 5,000 players to play together. Characters level up and get access to better weapons as they do, but there's also a marketplace where you'll be able to buy higher-level weapons from other players. WebZen is promising a huge game world, and there are people carriers and trains to shuttle you between the city's major areas.

Since not everyone has the time to sink into MMOGs, the developers are including shorter fragments, where you can simply pick a spot and blow stuff up for 20 minutes.

And if that name sounds familiar, it's because Huxley is named after Aldous Huxley, author of seminal dystopian future novel Brave New World, on which the game is apparently loosely based.

There's no solid release date yet for Huxley, but all signs point to a 2006 release on both PC and Xbox 360.

Alex Wollenschlaeger
Editor, Kikizo Games