Yearly Archives: 2008

Outspark Announces Online Leaderboards

Members of the Outspark community can now track their achievements and see how they stack up against the top players of Outspark’s games using newly launched leaderboards now available at Outspark.com.

Players of the free-to-play MMORPG Fiesta can see how they measure up against the top PvP players by comparing Kill Points, while all of the highest level Secret of the Solstice players are now ranked on the Outspark website.

Leaderboards will be updated every Friday, so there’s always a reason to check back and see where you place in the Outspark.

Darkfall: release date announced!

Audio Visual Enterprises SA and Aventurine SA in a joint statement today announced that their highly anticipated MMORPG title Darkfall Online will launch across Europe on January 22nd, 2009. North American players are also welcome to participate in the European launch of Darkfall which will precede a North American launch.

More details to be announced as they become available.

About Darkfall Online
Darkfall Online is a massive multiplayer online (MMO) fantasy role-playing game featuring a fun, fast-paced, real-time combat system, massive battles, clan warfare and empire building. Darkfall combines role-playing, action, and strategic gameplay. Darkfall has been designed to create intensely realistic and highly immersive combat and a challenging, realistic environment for a more immersive experience. With full collision detection battle lines really matter and well-aimed spell blasts will send opponents flying. Darkfall’s goal is to provide players with a fun and challenging experience through a seamless and zoneless, non-instanced, “sandbox” game world.

Dekaron: the Winter update is coming!

Next week, Gametribe will continue its winter wave of updates with the Premier Free-to-Play Action-based MMORPG Dekaron. Following the new Action 4: The Expedition Add-On, this Christmas update brings great features and items to the players !

The new features to come on December 10th are:

  • Mailing system: you can now send mails, including gold and items to your friends through the mail system. Mailboxes are available near the Teleport NPCs.
  • Black List System: now you can exclude characters from your chat and mail system
  • New skills for the Vicious Summoner
    • Increase Poison at lvl 41 (Staff skill)
    • Shadow Revenge at lvl 74 (Twin swords)
  • New skill for the Bagi Warrior
    • Temperance to the limit at lvl 50
  • Lottery: Dekaron now hosts a lottery system with great gifts to retrieve!
    For a very low price and a limited time, players can try their luck with the Ossuaries which offer many useful items. The 4 types of ossuary, giving different bonus are:
    • Ossuary of Power
    • Ossuary of Attack
    • Ossuary of Enchantment
    • Ossuary of Endurance
  • The Practical, Noble and Expert’s Practical packages have been modified. They will no more contain vouchers (to retrieve items from NPCs) but items themselves. And good news, the Expert’s Practical package is now giving a permanent costume instead of 30 days costume previously.

World of Kung Fu adds New Fortune Box to Item Mall

VestGame Entertainment is happy to announce the addition of a Fortune Box to the Item Mall in its free Martial Arts online game “World of Kung Fu”. The Fortune Box will allow lucky players a chance to receive high powered items for a fraction of their regular cost.

World of Kung Fu, the popular free to play Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) set in ancient China, is adding an important new option to its item mall. The Fortune Box enhances gameplay in World of Kung Fu by introducing the element of chance. Opening a Fortune Box will reveal a prize, which can be any of a wide variety of valuable items. Prizes include items that can help players gain experience, fix or refine inventory items, customize their character, and even transform themselves into incredibly powerful magical beings. Contents of the Fortune Box will be changed monthly so the experience will always remain fresh.

World of Kung Fu players of all levels can expect Fortune Box prizes to help them tremendously in their explorations of the 3D virtual world based on Chinese mythology. Common prizes include items that help players customize their character such as Dye Powder, or a Renovation Hammer that can help players repair broken items. More valuable items include beautiful mounts like a War Horse or Gallant Steed. Players also have the chance to win extremely rare and valuable prizes like Transform Cards or the ultimate mount, a giant flaming lion known as “Nian”.

Items such as the new Fortune Box have been instrumental in adding to the number of registered players of World of Kung Fu, which is now fast approaching the 300,000 player mark.

Angels Online: PVP System Overview–Totem Battle

The Totem Battle in Angels Online was developed with experiences from the Outpost Battlefield, only much fiercer. Today, the Angels Online team is very happy to briefly introduce the Totem Battle.

The top 12 winning guilds from the Outpost Battlefield will own a territory with a symbol of a totem. Each territory possesses a corresponding Mysterious Area in which there are abundant monsters and materials. It is an ideal place for players to level up fast. A guild which has occupied the totem can monopolize all the materials in the mysterious area and claim rewards from the Manor Keeper every day. Possessing a totem territory is the final goal of each guild and symbolizes a guild’s skill and power.
There are 5 kinds of totems from level 1 to level 5. Production players can raise the totem’s level by donating materials. The higher the level of the totem, the more HP it has to resist attacks from opposing factions’. What’s more, players can build defensive towers to offer more HP, MP or higher attacking abilities to their own players.

The Angels Online Totem Battle is held from 8:00pm to 11:00pm on each Wednesday and 12:00pm to 2:00pm on each Saturday. Players from different factions can attack each other on the appointed totem maps. Guilds which possess a totem should make every effort to protect their totem or they could lose it to another faction. After the totem level has dropped to 0, the guild will lose the totem and all guild members will be teleported to their faction city. However, they will have a chance to retake the totem before the event ends.

The Totem Battle has been a hit ever since it’s introduction. After players have leveled up, it becomes more fun to take part in this fierce PVP event. However, only with good cooperation and teamwork among all guild members can a guild win the battle.

Enjoymmo.com is pleased to announce that the Closed Beta of Chaos Online.

Enjoymmo.com is pleased to announce that the Closed Beta of Chaos Online will start on December 13, 2008 at 0:01am EST.
Once the Closed Beta starts, all players’ information will be kept and there will no longer be any server wipes.

Chaos Online is a free to play fantasy MMORPG where modern technology & weaponry battle with Ancient Myth and Martial Arts. The game is made with the latest 2.5D engine: SancoX, specializing in magnificent effects and expandability. The game is designed by a group of insane game makers, implementing all the impossibilities into the game – For example, you can cast spells while riding on a modern motorcycle!

During alpha testing, players contributed a lot good ideas and we have implemented most of them into the game. Like always, we are willingly to listen to our players and we are willingly to make their good ideas come true in the coming closed beta!
Cheers and enjoy Chaos Online this Christmas season!

Ran Online Review

by Gabriele Giorgi, Onrpg Writer

From Godzilla to Evangelion, Japan has always been the first bulwark against aliens, demons and all kinds of enemies who wanted to invade Earth. But mankind was going to be safe, since brave defenders (robots, super-humans, mutants… you name it) would protect our civilization. This time the menace comes from hell itself, and our guardian angels will be… students!

Taught to fight
18 years ago a total eclipse enshrouded Asia and a meteor shower swept the land leaving only destruction in its wake. The affected part of the continent was quarantined by the rest of the world: the meteors had opened a dimensional rift into a demonic realm!

Soon afterwards, a new organization sprang up: it gathered wealth and resources, and built schools meant to train the strongest and the smartest: they would become fighters and make their stand against the uprising evil.
The organization erected shields around the schools, hoping to keep possessed humans and living dead at bay. But in Leonair, one of the campuses, the shields went down and, in but a single night, the school fell.
Now only three of them remain. And the fate of the world rests in their students’ hands.

The training begins
In the intro screen you will be greeted by a greatly-inspired hard-rock tune, which perfectly sets the mood of the game. Unfortunately the music in the rest of the game will be pretty ordinary, but the intro theme really rocks!
You have to choose your campus and your role: each school has its own peculiar style (old-fashioned, mystique, high-tech) while the available careers are four, but each one has two paths to be followed: even if careers are pretty standard (tank, melee DPS, ranged DPS, healer/buffer), specializing in one path is a way to customize them. You will receive skill and attribute points for every level, and you will be able to spend them accordingly, choosing to concentrate only on a few powers or to develop a wider array to draw upon. Just keep in mind that, in order to raise certain skills, you have to meet both level and attribute requirements.
If you want more skill points, you can perform tasks for a particular NPC who will award them on completion: usually it will be a hard task, but it will be worth your while.
As soon as you have spoken with teachers and other persons inside the school to understand the basics, you will be given missions. The first tasks are meant to let you explore the campus and give you an overview of locations (both interior and exterior) and opponents. Missions are detailed in the appropriate panel, and there are just enough of them to go by; usually they will involve killing mobs, but at times you may be required more menial tasks like cleaning rubble… a break from grinding, anyway.

Fighting style
Fighting mobs is pretty straightforward: just left-click and your character will start to auto-attack the enemy. The right button is reserved to use abilities, and you can place them on a shortcut bar, as well as potions and consumables you might need in battle to heal and regenerate power. Standard method, and it works, but considering that, as you progress, fights become more and more fast-paced, a quick activation of skill via keyboard (just like for consumables) would have helped.
Since WASD keys are reserved for items, movement is point-and-click and to rotate the camera you have to keep pressed the central mouse button; odd choice, and awkward at first, but it is balanced by a very efficient map system: you click anywhere on the mini-map and your character will go there, no matter how many twists and turns it takes. You can also buy “tickets” to fast-travel back and fro between the school building and the last place visited… or where you died.
Apart from ordinary loot from the mobs you killed, there is a feature worth mentioning: destiny boxes are a sort of Easter eggs where you can find temporary buffs or, less frequently, bombs and even spawning bosses.
Students also want to look cool while fighting evil: the schools and departments will provide different uniforms as you progress, and if you want to further customize your appearance you can buy other unique outfits from the item shop (as well as other perks to help you leveling). Only the choice of faces is pretty limited.
Scantily-clad girls and fashionable boys will look even cooler while they perform their moves: while the game makes large use of polygons for environment, animations really look great, with plenty of special effects you won’t easily get tired to watch.
And since rivalry is so common among schools, there are limited time frames when members of different college can fight each other in PvP.

The darkness within
Your opponents are the spawn of hell, but in the beginning the mobs you’ll encounter will be just possessed humans; only later in the game you will face monstrous opponents like zombies and vampires. Perhaps the designers wanted to keep the horror theme more on the inside, but maybe some horns, claws and fangs more would have helped.
But the real problem with enemies resides in the lack of information: the only thing you can see is a vital bar, but you will receive no information at all about the challenge level, as in most MMO. As a result, you’ll have to learn by yourself which opponents you can take on, without any means to assess it.

There are other two “dark sides” to be mentioned.
First, since game server are based in Asia, non-Asian players are likely to suffer from serious lag issues, even to the point of seeing their characters dead after a few seconds of (apparent) inactivity: mobs do not care about lag when they want to smash you!
Another flaw is represented by the English translation, often quite weird, and at times the meaning of some sentences is really difficult to grasp.

Conclusions
If you do not experience lag issues, you might enjoy this game: it’s got some nice features, although some parts could have been improved or designed in a better way. If you love manga and anime, especially works by Go Nagai like Devilman or Violence Jack, and want to be a part of a story like that, then look no further.

Pros
– Nice animations and cool outfits
– A good number of skills allowing to customize characters according to fighting style
– Efficient auto-navigation system

Cons
– Possible serious lag issues for non-Asian players
– No stats or challenge levels shown for opponents
– English translation sometimes weird and difficult to understand

MMO Grinding Article

by Joshua Temblett, Onrpg writer

Grinding is the chore that you hate doing, it’s the cleaning the toilet of all house work. It’s horrible. Yet despite this, why do game designers decide to constantly add this “feature” into their games. Do developers really think that we just want to constantly fight the same monsters to level up? Do they really think that we (sometimes) want to pay $15 dollars a month for doing the same repetitive task over and over again? Simple answer, no. Yet we still pay monthly for this chore and still get sucked into the marketing rubbish that this game will be different from the rest.

Before I continue this mother of all rants I just wish to clarify that I personally do not mind “grinding”, a bit of killing monsters on your own (or of course a party) here and there is fine with me, as long as I have a goal to work for. In fact, levelling up for a quest can be fun as long as you know you’re going to get a shiny new reward. What gets me is constant grinding with no (or little) reward. I hate it also when developers and the PR tell you that there is something around the corner, something new, something special. Of course these “rewards” are hours out of reach, meaning it’s going to take you a very long time to get to that one feature which is the reason why you’re playing.

A lot of games choose to follow grinding as it’s an incredibly easy way to keep players hooked and remain in the game. For pay to play games this is the normal case, as the longer you keep them playing and waiting to get to the cool features, the longer they pay monthly, the more money the company get and the richer they become. Grinding and levelling up also make the player think they’re having fun by then addicting him/her as the player will always want to keep playing to achieve that level just above to look that slight bit “cooler” and gain that new piece of gear. Grinding is of course easy to program compared to making real, good content that the gamer will enjoy as all that needs to be done with grinding is to make a load of load monsters inhabit an area, put a level cap on the next major event (or area) and hey presto you have just made a MMORPG. But it does not matter if it is bad, as it is cheap, keeps you playing and brings the money home for the company.

So you have got the grind, all you need now is a very low item drop rate, expensive items, armour and weapons and some awesome “new feature”. There, now your game is set to be distributed to the masses. Slap pay to play on that and you have an instant income.

So how can we stop the grind and rid it from the world for good? Well I would like to say don’t buy or play games that have a lot of grinding in, however I know that this will never happen due to some of these games having good end game features, or features that appear midway through which of course inspire people to play and the fact that there will always be idiots in the world who pay for rubbish like that. The thing is for as long as MMORPGs retain the point and click style of play, there will always be the much hated grind. In order to be rid of such an evil the genre itself needs to break out of it’s tried and tested conventions and create a new way to play and new experiences. But of course this will not ever happen as this method of playing is what made the genre so great and well loved. We need developers to focus on creating more dynamic content and much fun orientated scenarios from which the player can level up in. Guild Wars has started this trend of team bonding mission gameplay that creates a nice environment from which the player can level up in a successful way. Guild Wars has started the trend, and now we have to wait and see what other games have to offer. The genre has always surprised us, its loyal fans, so no doubt we will be surprised very soon.

Voyage Century: Crazy Quizzes Available Soon

Today the folks at Voyage Century are going to give you a little preview of the upcoming quiz system.

Sometimes players get tired of business trips, monster killing, sea battle, or quests, and want to do something different in game. To take care of this, Voyage Century will be launching an online quiz to help broaden their players horizons and also offer them some really nice rewards.

The quiz will deal with diverse subjects ranging from science to sports, space, geography, biology, and even common sense. It is worth mentioning that all of the questions have been suggested by VCO players. In fact the VCO team is still seeking additional questions, so if you have a few brain teasers you’ve been saving, simply head on over to the Voyage Century forum to post them.

Players can obtain credits or items as long as they can give the correct answer to a question. In addition, they will obtain extra credits if they can pass the whole quiz. (credits can be exchanged for rare items in game).

Player will be able to view other participants’ results after they’ve finished the quiz. The results will determine their final rank, which in turn determines their rewards.

GodsWar Online: Overview

GodsWar Online is the first fully IGG designed and produced 3D MMORPG. Top-grade game developer’s painstaking efforts have culminated in the fantastic and mysterious GodsWar Online. GWO offers players distinct systems and activities including enchanting quests, charming game scenery, free character growth, amazing battles and a wonderful gaming community.

Game Type
Based on Greek Mythology, GodsWar Online is centered on the era of Greek Gods and Demigods. It was a time when Gods, human beings, demigods and monsters shared the same world. In the game, players can visit famous scenic spots such as the solemn temples, legendary Greek cities and the realms of the Gods. What’s more, players have a chance to meet Heroes such as Hercules, Theseus, Jason and other Gods and Demigods. In addition, players can challenge Medusa and other monsters. Believe us when we say that history comes alive!

Game Style
The 45-degree visual angle and the cute background will help players feel more comfortable.

Game Features

  • Battle System: The Chain Combo System of the game allows players to hit enemies successively.
  • Class System: GWO offers players various classes to choose from and a class transfer system. Players can transfer their classes according to their demands.
  • Skills and Spells: GWO offers players various skills and spells with amazing visual effects.
  • Faction System: When players create a character, they must choose a faction, either Sparta or Athens, so that they can take part in future faction events, including the much anticipated city wars.
  • Quest System: Players can find out about the two factions’ stories from the primary quests. What’s more, they can learn more about Greek mythology by finishing those quests.
  • Interaction System: Players can interact with others easily using the Friends, Guild, and Team functions.
  • Game Scenes: All game scenes in GodsWar Online are relative to Greek mythology. There are some instances as well