Monthly Archives: December 2010

GodsWar Online: New Trojan Arena PvP Blurs Faction Lines

GodsWar Online: New Trojan Arena PvP Blurs Faction Lines


In Greek mythology MMORPG GodsWar Online, players can choose between two playable factions. Sparta and Athens are hostile toward each other, giving those on both sides plenty of opportunities to face each other in combat. If they want to engage in PvP against players from the same faction, however, combatants may have been feeling like they were being given the cold shoulder. That will soon change soon with the upcoming introduction of a new arena that promises to turn up the heat. For those who can never get enough PvP action, here’s a preview of the new Trojan Arena.

 

GodsWar New Arena

 

The Trojan Arena

The Trojan Arena is specially designed for PvP. There are no computer-controlled enemies in the arena. As a result, players can focus on PvP combat without worrying about being attacked by NPCs. To enter the Trojan Arena, players will need to speak with a special NPC. Once inside, they will find a heart-shaped, closed area in the middle part of the arena where players can fight against each other. NPC physicians and vendors offer their services to either fully restore dead player characters after resurrection or sell a variety of potions for combatants to use.

 

Free PvP Style Gives Players More Choices

There are no rigid limitations on combat in the Trojan Arena. When players are ready, they simply enter the arena and challenge anyone except their teammates to a duel. The choice is up to the players whether they want to fight one-on-one, solo against multiple opponents, join a group scuffle.

 

More Features Planned

At first, the Trojan Arena will focus on offering players fun, competitive combat against players from the same faction, but the GodsWar Online team expects to add more features in the future. For example, they may give players more areas to choose from, exclusive rewards, or other entertaining options.

Soul Master Review: Is This Perfect For MMORTS Fans?

Soul Master Review: Is This Perfect For MMORTS Fans?
By Michael Sagoe (mikedot), OnRPG Journalist

 

Most MMOs in today’s market have been have straying away from old fashion MMORPGs and instead are leaning towards MMOs that focus on other genres. We have MMO shooters, MMO action games and what not, but these MMOs only focus on one genre at a time. So how about an MMO that focuses on three?

 

Soul Master is a new MMO title published by GamesCampus that mixes arcade action and RTS game play with the features of an MMORPG all rolled into one pretty package. Players can travel the world of Soul Master and participate in story driven PvE or competitive PvP. While the idea of mixing these genres together sounds great, the execution of all three can arguably be seen as hit and miss.

Starting Out

Joining the world of Soul Master starts out with the game’s lackluster character creation. You have a choice between three races (Valiant, Harmony and Holy) and only one character class from each (Knight, Bearcat and Priest, respectively.) Picking a look for your character only comes with five tops, bottoms and hair colors to choose from. To make things worse, each character class is gender locked, so you’ll have to go with playing either a male knight and bearcat or a female priest. There are plans to un-gender lock the classes in the near future, though. For now, it’s either take or leave it.

 

Soul Master Character Creator

 

After you’ve created your character, the game opens up with a few story cut-scenes and then it teaches you the control scheme on how to handle both your main character and battle units, which is simple enough for both casual and hardcore gamers to get a grasp of. Main character movement works with WASD keys, attacks using left mouse button and special skills using the right mouse button. Controlling your battle units is as simple as pressing E to line them up and then pressing left or right mouse button on enemies to make them attack. The main tutorial takes about 15 minutes to complete, but there is also an ongoing tutorial you’ll have to work through in the first couple of story chapters.

 

While the game is called an MMO, the MMO part of Soul Master’s game world comes from the three towns that function as lobbies for players to meet, greet, shop for stuff and party up. The rest of the game is instanced for questing and PvP.

Presentation

Soul Master’s visuals are bright, colorful and full of life. The anime inspired style of characters are just oh so adorable and cute to look at.  The environments are also nice and colorful but are simple and spacious in terms of layout. (Then again, the game is part RTS and gives the units space to move around.) The sound work done on Soul Master is mix between upbeat, energetic, mellow tones that will ease your mind while you play.

All of this mixed together with RPG cut-scene dialogue gives Soul Master sort of a console game feel to it, as if it would be a title that you would find on the Nintendo Wii or something.

 

 

Soul Master Cutscene

 

 

Gameplay

Soul Master’s core game play manages to blend arcade beat ’em up, MMORPG and RTS game play all into one. With your main hero, you can perform combo attacks that are either quick or heavy, plus dash attacks that will knock enemies up for a bit of juggling. When battle units are selected, they can perform one special skill when the player presses the right mouse button. Building and controlling units in Soul Master work pretty much like every RTS title out there, except that most commands are all laid out from Z to N, making option selection nice and easy. The only issue I have with Soul Master’s game play is that you can’t perform attacks or skills with your main hero when you’re controlling battle units, which sucks since I was hoping to be able to switch back and forth between hero attacks and RTS strategies on the fly.

 

Soul Master Combat

 

The questing experience can feel too straight forward since most missions amount to destroying every enemy you see or taking out a predictable boss. Occasionally, the game will throw you a curveball with stuff like escort missions, but then you’ll go right back to doing the same old missions as before.  Doing missions with up to three other players does make the experience a bit more enjoyable, but this will only slow down the feeling of repetitiveness while playing.

 

 

Soul Master Close Up

 

 

The PvP aspect of Soul Master can be addictive, but it’s an experience you might not want to get into unless you have a fair amount of personal RTS experience and a tolerance for grinding. Battles in PvP are basically like every RTS out there as every battle is a race to see who can micro and macro-manage the fastest. Since I suck at both, I was thinking that my arcade beat ’em up skills would come in handy for PvP, but alas, it only got me so far.

 

My thoughts

The balance between the genres in Soul Master tends to lean way too much towards the RTS and MMO parts which I’m kind of disappointed in. Besides PvE, battling with your hero tends to be not as useful in a competitive match, since you’ll just be using your battle units to do most of the damage. My time spent with the game’s PvP felt way too reliant on equipment stats and levels. Even if you have good RTS skills, you’ll have to spend enough time grinding quests for equipment and skill points for attacks and units before heading in; otherwise you may end up losing to opponents simply because they’re a higher level or have better equipment than you.

 

Like I mentioned before, the missions available are all fairly repetitive and can be tiresome, despite all the missions being story driven. The entire plot of Soul Master revolves around an overused RPG cliché theme that the world is in danger and that YOU are the ONLY ONE that can SAVE IT, so it’s quite clear that Soul Master isn’t going to be winning awards for an original plot any time soon.

 

Conclusion

Soul Master is a nice game with potential that’s being held back due to lack of varied content and required grinding in order to advance. The console game vibe it has going for it may be nice, but it really needs a console game pacing to go with it. Regardless, I still enjoyed my time playing Soul Master for its style and atmosphere alone. Those that are into RTSs or MMORPGS should consider giving it a try, but arcade beat ’em up fans should probably look elsewhere.

 

The Lacuna Expanse

The Lacuna Expanse is a massively multiplayer online space strategy game. Think SimCity meets Masters of Orion. You can choose to be an isolationist who’s sole concern is designing and building a sprawling city on a single planet, or you can be bent on utter domination and build a huge empire across the expanse. You can become a master trader or a master ship builder. You can engage in espionage, or become an explorer. The choice is up to you in The Lacuna Expanse.

The goal was to make a fun, space empire strategy game that’s fun for both casual and advanced gamers. Most web games are either too shallow or too complex. The Lacuna Expanse was designed so that casual gamers enjoy building a colony or empire and power gamers can master and deploy advanced strategy and reap benefits from hundreds of (optional) advanced gameplay elements.

 

What’s unique about The Lacuna Expanse?

Play anywhere – web browser or the free iPhone/iPod app

Socialize or Strategize – work with the players around you by forming alliances or strategize against them by planning their demise. Lacuna Expanse is very social and it’s even Facebook-enabled.

Full circle economy – produce resources, manage/reuse waste, minimize pollution, keep your citizens happy, and trade freely with other players on the open market.

Massive universe – More than 1 million planets to explore, each with unique resources.

Build mega-cities – more than 100 different types of buildings means you can build exactly what you need and each city can be unique.

Trade anything – most games only let you trade basic resources. The Lacuna Expanse lets you trade ships, buildings, money, resources, and much more. Enjoy a full player based economy.

The Coolest Spaceships – you’ve never seen spaceships like this! Dump garbage on your opponents planets, transport spies, take satellite images of enemy planets, and much more!

Espionage – take out your enemies without ever firing a shot

Chat – talk in real-time to other players in the game. Built-in translations make it easy to talk with players around the world.

Freedom – choose your own direction. Exploration, expansion, trader, ship builder mission commander, espionage, war, and more.

 

Goal United

Experience the most detailed and fine tuned Soccer manager online today. Goal United received multiple awards at various gaming conventions in 2007, and still dominates its niche in today’s gaming market.

Worldwide Multiplay!

Compete with hundreds of thousands of international managers. This isn’t about twitch reactions and who can press buttons faster. Goal United will test your mental metal. With hundreds of cards affecting the individual players on your team as well as overall team strategy, there will be no easy path to victory in Goal United.

It’s Free!

Play friendly matches, cup and league matches every week for free. No downloads are required either.

More action

The Goal United play-off system really gives a sense that each game matters as you battle for the Cup. When your team’s reputation is on the line, each game matters. No pressure!

Own stadium complex

Increase your income and promote your players by building your own stadium environment. A great soccer team is nothing without funding. Can you acquire advertising and sell enough tickets to keep the top players’ pay roll flowing?

Manager career

Customize your avatar to specialize in tactics you prefer. Only by taking full advantage of the strengths of your coach and the strengths of your team will you find yourself holding the World Cup in the end.

 

Pandora Saga

Pandora Saga is set in a fantasy world of medieval Europe which designed in rich graphic texture and details. Enjoy yourself over the PvP challenge and exciting large-scale war among nations. There are story based quests with cinematics upon completion and various sub quests to complete.

Ultimate Fighting System
Adopted in medieval warfare, players fight on the field with siege weapons and cavalry, besieging castles. Leadership and tactics will determine the victor of the war!!

3 nations, 6 races with unique abilities, 4 basic class which opens the path to 28 advanced classes, 140 skills X 25 category of skills.

Epic Battle
Draw a magnificent story of a fight with the three nations.

Large-scale war against the players at the chaotic borderline of three nations. Kill your enemy to gain honour points.

Honour points determines your ranking. In addition, use honour points to exchange for special equipments from Item Exchange NPC!!

Highly optimized graphics and contents
Gonzo Rosso-GDH brings you the first Japan-made MMORPG

Despite the high quality graphics, lower specification computer able to run smoothly even in a full-scale war with the gaming graphics engine in Pandora Saga.

Remnant Knights

Remnant Knights is an anime-inspired MMORPG with a story written by DC Comics’ 2010 Eisner award winning graphic novelist, Jim Krueger, and dialog by Hunter Brown book series creators, Chris and Allen Miller.  Players will experience the vast and amazing world of Kasmari and learn that they are the last line of defense against an ancient threat that has returned.  After choosing one of the three basic areas of study — Gun Circle, Magic Circle or Fight Circle — players will begin honing their skills at either the Owl or Dragon School. At level 10, players will have the option to specialize into classes such as the Dual Gunner and Heavy Launcher.

EVE Online Incursion Released

EVE Online Incursion Released

 

CCP yesterday launched the first portion of this winter’s EVE Online: Incursion expansion for EVE Online, recent winner of the Game Developer’s Choice Award for Best Live Game of 2010.

The November 30th release, Incursion 1.0.0, is first in a multi-part release for one of the most ambitious EVE expansions to date. It includes a long list of changes, many of which were prioritized and added with the help of the Council of Stellar Management, a representative group of EVE players elected by the playerbase to interact on their behalf with the CCP development team since 2008.

 

EVE Ship

Changes in Incursion 1.0.0 span the breadth of EVE, from the addition of over 80 new storyline missions and the Noctis salvaging ship to rebalancing rockets and Tech 2 ammo. The update also includes improvements to EVE’s user interface (UI) based on player feedback, which should make the lives of all pilots a little easier, whether in a new frigate or contributing to the industrial might of their thousand-player alliance.  A full list of changes is available in the patch notes.

CCP recently launched the Incursion feature site which will be updated frequently throughout the next two months with video interviews, art assets and more information about the expansion. It also features the Incursion trailer, which shows an amazing, in-engine glimpse at our avatar technology and the future of EVE in the character of Sansha Kuvakei, leader of Sansha’s Nation.

Incursion 1.0.1 will be available on December 14th and will couple the removal of learning skills with another holiday gift for EVE players.

 

Incursion 1.0.2 will be available mid-January and includes the stunningly realistic character creator based on CCP’s avatar technology, a precursor to next year’s “Incarna” release. The web-based social networking platform for EVE players, EVEGate, will see a large upgrade with integrated forums. The Planetary Interaction feature will also see significant improvements based on player input. The following week, a vengeance-fueled Sansha’s Nation will invade the EVE universe, causing chaos as pilots join together in twenty to forty person fleets to beat back the new “Revenant” supercarriers, their fierce fighter bombers and the fleets at their command. Victors against these “incursions” will reap tremendous rewards for their bravery.

Runes of Magic: Treasures of the Desert

Runes of Magic: Treasures of the Desert

The latest Runes of Magic update is available now

 

Frogster yesterday released ‘Treasures of the Desert’ a new content update to its popular online RPG Runes of Magic. The update adds a new region, the Limo Desert, and a new instance, Kawak’s Tomb. Gamers are now able to power up characters to level 62 and trade diamonds with a special NPC.

 

Runes of Magic Demon

 

After extensive testing, Frogster has decided to reinstate the option to let Runes of Magic players trade gold for diamonds. The free fantasy online RPG is the only game in the Free2Play segment where players can use the in-game currency to trade for items purchased from the in-game shop. This feature was reintroduced after feedback from the community.

 

The public battle, the ‘Yasheedee Catastrophe’, is also available across all Runes of Magic servers. To prevail in this legendary battle, players have to conquer aggressive foes. In the first phase of the multifaceted encounter, players must use special ropes to capture a horde of nasty worm-like creatures. The second phase challenges players to put as many Resonance Stones as possible in the right place. The more stones they place, the easier it is in the third and fourth phases, where the wicked ‘Hardskin Yasheedees’ and the formidable ‘Crimson Devourer’, an exceptionally tough boss, await.

 

A trailer showing the action-packed Limo Desert together with the dangerous Kawak’s Tomb is also available. The region’s breathtaking landscapes reveal magnificent buildings and Middle Eastern oases. But caution is strongly advised – conflict has been brewing among the local tribes for centuries, and powerful creatures and wild beasts are preparing for battle. Who will carry the day?  

 

For more information on the new region and Runes of Magic, visit the official website.