f13.net

We caught up with Wizards of the Coast at E3 2005 for a brief look at Magic Online 3.0, the next version of the publisher's popular online card game. Of course, Magic Online is based on Magic: The Gathering, the tabletop card game that helped Wizards become the far-reaching tabletop game company it is today. Magic Online 3.0 will have an all-new interface that will take advantage of 3D-accelerated graphics to streamline your view and allow for a better look at the competition, as well as to more-clearly render the hand-drawn card art that the game is famous for.

The new edition of the game will include niceties like being able to resize your chat windows and other interface windows, and it will also feature all player avatars as 3D models. You'll still be able to view the active games in the online game lobby (which will still be represented as an open hall filled with card tables). However, all players and all tables will be rendered in 3D, and watching other players' matches will be a simple matter of walking up to their table and zooming in with your mousewheel. On the back end, Wizards is also continuing to work on its server capacity to make sure it can sponsor the sort of huge online tournaments it hopes to. Magic Online 3.0 is scheduled for release early next year, though the publisher also plans to run a beta test toward the end of this year.

I'd been hoping against hope that Wizards actually put out the cash for a fully-rendered game engine and removed the cards entirely ala Etherlords.  Being able to watch your creatures beat the crap out of stuff would have been cool beyond words.  Hugely expensive, of course, to render all of the hundreds of creatures in the game, but cool.