Westwood holds Nox Kickoff in the nation's capital. 2-12-2000

This past Saturday, on the twelfth of February, I had a chance to attend a special preview of Westwood's latest RPG, Nox. The event was held at Game Domain, in Springfield, Virginia, from 3-7pm. I had a chance to play the game, and speak with Aaron Cohen, public relations for Westwood Studios.

Nox is both a single and multiplayer action RPG. Players take control of Jack, an average man living in a trailer park, who just happens to have something that a very big baddie by the name of Hecubah needs. She pulls said object into to the world of Nox, and takes Jack with it. The game plays differently, depending on whether or not the player chooses to play as a warrior, conjuror, or wizard.

Many people have compared Nox to Diablo, but outside of a few things here and there, there are much more similarities to Quake and Baldur's Gate than there are to either Diablo title. The graphics are third-person top-down perspective, very similar to how they are in Balder's Gate (Diablo uses a third-person, 45 degree angle camera perspective). The multiplayer options are taken almost directly from Quake, and are various forms of deathmatches. The classes are very similar to Diablo 1 (conjuror is the rogue, the other two are obvious), as is the general action of the game (fight monsters/opposing players by clicking on a mouse button until your finger falls off). Calling Nox another Diablo clone is not only unfair, but generally not indicative of what the game is actually like. Aaron Cohen perhaps puts it best when he says that Nox is a "top-down action RPG. Don't think Diablo, think Quake."

The event itself was very nice. The good folks at Game Domain were gracious hosts, and provided a friendly, clean atmosphere, with nice, fast computers on a 100 Base-T LAN system for us to play on. All the computers were PII-400s with 128MB, and a standard 8MB graphics card. Nox ran well on all the machines with maximum detail at 1024 x 768.

However, you don't need even a PII-400 to play Nox. The recommended specs on the box advise a PII-266, but according to Cohen, the game is playable with detail turned down, even on a regular Pentium 166. It's important to note that you need to turn the detail way down to do it, but it can be done. Nox does not use a 3D accelerator card, instead doing its graphical effects via the MMX instruction set. Nox has a very nice auto-configuration utility that (when enabled) will pick and choose which options will work the best with the system you have.

There are many graphical bells and whistles to behold. Colored lighting and nicely done spell effects abound (even the cursor is well done. It has a nice "sparkly" effect on menu screens which one gamer at the preview said was worth the price of the game alone). Dungeons and especially the outdoor areas seem at times as if they are hand-painted. Perhaps the most impressive graphic effect in the game is the line-of-sight vision. When something blocks your vision, the affected area is blacked out. In dungeon corridors and through tight forest passages, the effect is especially impressive, as it nicely portrays the claustrophobic environment.

Gameplay is basically similar to Diablo- attack monsters using one mouse button, move with another. Note that there is no pathfinding. If you click in an area whose straight line is directly through fire, Jack will walk right through the fire (ouch). This may seem like a strange thing, but once you get used to using your own pathfinding, it gets simpler. Nox uses a paper-doll inventory system (similar to Baldur's Gate).

Character attributes are selected at the start of the game in single player. Multi-player characters receive all the bonuses of a maxed-out player (about level 10). Wizards are basically analogous to their Diablo counterparts: they get the best and most powerful spells in the game. They cannot use heavy weapons or armor, but they have a nice array of wizard-only items to be picked up and used. Conjurors are the Nox equivalent to Rogues. They receive a totally different set of spells, including monster summoning, and bots which can hunt down monsters/opponents. They are also the only class that can use bows. Warriors do not have spells, but abilities that act like spells. To help offset a lack of magic, they have very high hit-points, high resistance, and the use of the heaviest armor and weapons Nox has to offer.

Multi-player Nox is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the game, as it uses Quake-style matches, something that has never been tried in a game of this type. The various participants at the preview enjoyed the Quake-style deathmatches in Nox immensely, and there were a wide variety of very close and exciting contests between players. Nox can be played over Westwood On-Line, or IPX over a LAN, and TCP/IP over either. Up to thirty-two players can compete at one time in standard deathmatch, with or without teams, or play capture the flag, king of the hill (only the wearer of the crown can get kills), or hot potato. Multiplayer games will seem very familiar to those who play Quake-like FPSes, as it offers all the benefits (something new for the RPG genre, very exciting, many options to choose from) and caveats (camping is frequent, spawn points that can be booby-trapped, lag if the person who serves the game plays) therein.

Again straying from the Diablo and Baldur's Gate formulas, the single player game is for one player only- there is no co-op available. The world is not randomly generated, but Westwood compensates for this by offering different paths through the game with each character class. There are a large number of NPCs, all of which have speaking parts, although there are no conversation trees (which may appeal to the twitch gamer groups that Westwood seemed to target).
Attendees at the event received Nox posters and t-shirts, and a free copy of Command and Conquer 2: Tiberian Sun. A generous quantity of pizza was also given to all attendees, and a Nox instruction book was passed around. There was a multiplayer tournament (four players at a time, first to fifteen kills wins) that generated a lot of excitement from players and onlookers. Many people (including myself) explored the single-player game.

Nox will be shipping this week, for an estimated price of $40. The game will ship with two CDs, although all the information necessary to play the game is on one CD. The second CD is for multiplayer gaming. The game will not ship with a level/map editor, but Aaron Cohen advises that there may be one in the works for Nox II, or a Nox I expansion pack.

previewed by Preston White