SOE's Station Launcher details |
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At the Sony Gamers' Day this year, ShackNews' Chris Remo was able to try out Sony Online Entertainment's new Station Launcher. So what can we expect from the Steam-like program?For those unfamiliar about the Station Launcher, it was announced last year and would be most comparable to Valve's Steam service plus more. The software client is slated to be released this summer and will bring a lot of new things to the table of this sort of service.
First off, players will be able to manage their video games in a neat little package including game purchases (expansions, TCGs), updates, and even billing. The service will allow players to install SOE and run games without CDs, they just need to register the CD-keys.
There are also a number of launching options where players can choose to launch games to a certain character in a specific server so they won't have to go through the choose server and character pages. Players can also set games to automatically launch as soon as Windows boots. There's even an option that allows players to skip the End User Agreement unless there's something modified on the document. It will also have a monitoring feature for CPU usage and download status for patches, as well as game specific news panes for updates on a particular title.
Station Launcher will be sporting cross game chat so all players across the SOE MMO universe can stay connected with each other even when they're playing different games. The feature will not be limited to that, though, as it also "retroactively locates the current location of friends met in the past and shows a breakdown of their SOE gaming histories as well as pinpointing where they were first encountered online." Basically, it locates a friend from you met previously in another game.
Nathan Pearce, creative director at SOE had this to say: "What I expect when this goes live is a massive online reunion in all these games." Interestingly, SOE plans to have the service cross over even to games distributed by other publishers. They currently contract services like billing and customer service to other MMO games like Final Fantasy XI.
Even other chat services like AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, Xfire, and Yahoo! Messenger will be integrated to the software client. Windows Live Messenger is also planned to be included in that list. The chat compatibility does not end there. SOE will have "shared game-related functions" between Xfire and the Station Launcher and hopes to have the same thing with Yahoo!.
The Station Launcher will also be mod friendly since the program is based on an open Jabber standard. SOE also plans to exploring giving out kits so that people can make their own skins. The possibility of the software client being available for the PlayStation 3 is also being explored though there wasn't any confirmation from Pearce.
We'll wait for further info about Station Launcher which is currently in internal beta. Reportedly, the software client is going to go on public beta test this spring and will go live in late summer. The current application being used, Launchpad will be subsequently phased out.
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