Stargate Worlds

It's hard to see how these mini-games are going to work in the context of missions or combat, and how levelling up is going to affect mini-game abilities. Apparently, higher-level characters in these classes will get time-boosting skills, making it easier to solve harder and harder puzzles, but we're not sure how many players are going to pick mini-game prowess over the potentially more interesting abilities of the other classes.

That said, you can imagine how it could work - every time that Sam Carter the scientist and Daniel Jackson the archaeologist are busy trying to figure out how to fix a command console or unlock a door in the series whilst Jack O'Neill the soldier and Teal'c the Jaffa are busy shooting down waves upon waves of incoming enemies in the series, Carter and Jackson are essentially playing a mini-game trying to rearrange crystals or cut wires or figure out ancient runes before everything explodes around them. It's lovely to imagine this translating well into in-game missions, but we're just not going to be sure if it will work until we get some time on the beta.

The TV show's star team, SG-1, is essentially a ready-made party. In Stargate Worlds, instead of massive guilds, you'll be able to form and be part of small Stargate Command teams of 4-6 people, each with special registration, designation, the works. Given that we rarely play MMOs regularly with more than a handful of people, this sounds like a very good idea. Teams can band together to form Commands, which will be the equivalent of larger guilds, but the game's community aspects are still being finalised.

Naturally, Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment can't expect everybody who picks up the game to have watched ten seasons' worth of DVDs. It's going to be interesting to see how the developer manages to strike a balance between educating the uninitiated and playing to the legions of hardcore fans who will almost certainly be picking up the game. For those familiar with the series, Stargate Worlds is set during season eight, beginning during the ongoing battle with the sinister Goa'uld - so the latter two series' omnipotent and incorporeal foes, the Ori, are thankfully nowhere to be seen. SG-1 and all the other characters from the TV series will feature, all with the original voice talent. There's a lot of space to expand upon the TV series, exploring how its various factions and institutions and alliances came to be, which would at once delight curious fans and provide newcomers with some gentle education.

Stargate Worlds' release model loosely follows the television series'. Large updates and new content will come in the form of new 'seasons', whereas quest packs and other smaller things will come as 'episodes', released continually on a regular basis, and for free, to subscribers. Cheyenne promises to release episode packs every six to eight weeks - an extremely ambitious aim, as MMO content schedules go. Naturally there's room to expand into SG-1's spin-off series, Atlantis, which covers a whole new galaxy and has the potential to bring exciting things like space flight, and vampiric super-enemies the Wraith, into the mix.

Many of Stargate Worlds' ideas are really intriguing; the licence really is an excellent one, and the developer is committed to doing it justice. As ever, it's difficult to see how well all of these ideas are going to fit together without having played it. We're still wondering whether there will be enough differentiation in the classes, or subtlety in the combat, to support a thriving community. Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment has set itself some ambitious targets with Stargate Worlds, but if it achieves them, it could be the sci-fi MMO that many genre-fans have been waiting for.