Bigpoint Blockbuster Poisonville now in Open Beta

    HAMBURG, August 18, 2010 /PRNewswire/ --

    - After Two Years of Production, the Fight for Domination in the Virtual
      City of Poisonville Begins

    - Bigpoint's Most Expensive Game to Date: Development Costs to the Tune
      of Almost EUR2 Million

    - Elaborate Graphics in an Completely 3D World Requiring Neither Download
      nor Installation Thanks to Many Technical Innovations

After almost two years in development, Bigpoint opens the doors to Poisonville at the opening of Europe's biggest game industry trade fair (http://www.poisonville.com): The fight for control of the city streets can now begin. The Hamburg-based developer and publisher's latest 3D action MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) sets new standards in the browser-game industry - with a price tag of almost EUR2 million, Poisonville is Bigpoint's most expensive game ever.

Awesome action in a freely explorable 3D world

The game is set in a fully 3D world of a quality which, up to now, has only been attainable in PC or console games - all with no download or installation, directly in the players' browsers. To make that possible, the graphical programming interface, the 100% Java-based jMonkeyEngine (jME), was severely modified and adapted to the game's needs, requiring an incredible amount of technical savvy.

This is the first browser game animated using motion capture, a technique which is commonly used in console games to film the movements of real actors and translate them into images. Day and night modes, sophisticated artificial intelligence, customizable vehicles and personally designed characters are only a few of the game's many groundbreaking features.

Players are free to explore all aspects of the huge fictional city of Poisonville, including many attractions and shopping possibilities. They can navigate through approximately 600 quests and interact with other players on seven different maps each containing up to 1,500 players (a total of 5,000 per server instance), and participate in battles in the trailer park, where the city's four gangs go up against each other in exciting PvP battles.

Immediate action with an introductory tutorial

Poisonville's innovations are clear from the very beginning: Players can plunge into Poisonville by simply clicking the "Play now" button. Before they even register, they can determine their character's appearance and enjoy an awesome comic strip that tells the Poisonville background story. Then the tutorial teaches them the basic game functions (commands, picking up and using objects, driving, etc.) and finally they must ally themselves with one of the city's four gangs. Only then must the player decide whether or not to register a free game account.

"With Poisonville our goal of revolutionizing the browser-game market has reached completion," explains Heiko Hubertz, founder and CEO of Bigpoint. "A team of top-notch developers has done some great technical and graphical work, and of course we're rightfully proud of that."

Poisonville is recommended for people 16 years or older and is online now in German and English. More languages are coming soon.

Full release and assets: ftp://ftp-private-pub.bigpoint.net, Username: press_gamescom, Password: gamescom_2010

    Contact:

    Bigpoint GmbH
    Rene Hamann
    PR Manager
    Tel.: +49(0)40-881-413-183
    Fax: +49(0)40-881-413-7183
    E-mail: [email protected]

SOURCE Bigpoint GmbH