Thursday, January 26, 2012

Traveller Mobile MMO in Beta

ingZ and Far Futures Enterprises have released a beta version of Traveller AR ("Augmented Reality"), an MMORPG for iOS mobile devices. It's interesting to see an old-school RPG--Traveller is almost as venerable as D&D--make the MMO leap, and to a mobile platform.

Traveller's presentation and design vaulted it years ahead of the competition in 1977. Those three little books are RPG icons, with their minimalist black-and-red covers. The rules hit a near-perfect mix of elegance and comprehensiveness that few games before or since have matched.

In the trailer, the game resembles an upgraded, multiplayer version of Space Trader, which I played obsessively on my Sony Palm device six years ago. Of course, Space Trader was an obvious homage to Traveller, so the similarities are no surprise. I don't use iOS, being an android myself, but I plan to insist that all my Apple-using friends install the beta and then borrow their toys to take this for a test jump.

Traveller AR
Steve

1 comment:

  1. I played around with it a bit but I can't figure out how to navigate in space or how to skip the flying about bit and do everything through the hex map. Also, it crashes a lot, but I expected that.

    ReplyDelete