Yearly Archives: 2010

Kingory Review: No Random Half Finished Browser Game

Kingory Review: No Random Half Finished Browser Game
By Kei Beneza (dividelife), OnRPG Journalist

 

Kingory is the international version of the famous flash based MMO RXSG. The game is well known and is played by people all over the world, or so the it claims. The game revolves around ancient China, with structures that resemble ancestral Chinese buildings and characters that look like war emperors and empresses. In this game, players strive hard to build their war-worthy empire and try to best other players in battle. The game sports a strategic concept of game play (will be discussed later ), with a massive micro-managing system that is said to surpass a majority of browser games.

 

It was said that Kingory sort of acts as the completed version of various games in terms of the traditional war based browser game system. Do other web games really lack so much compared to this game? Or is it just another claim that’s yet to be proven?

 

Kingory Select Lord
Select your lord

 

Please Select Your Lord!

Upon logging into the game, players are prompted to both choose and name their respective lords and select their desired prefecture. For those people who are too tired or confused to pick their own prefecture, you can always choose the random button to let the game decide your place on the map. The game is also gracious enough to give you extra resources upon starting the game (awwww… how nice). The tutorials are great and are essential for newbies. The tutorials sport a step-by-step definition of how the game is played, something most browser games fail to feature. As far I know, most browser games give you nothing but a page full of words, which takes 20 minutes of your time before you even start playing. The game even dims the other filler words and highlights the important part of each definition, which really helps the player cope with the game.

 

Quests

Once you’re done with the tutorials, the quests take over as your teacher, educating you on how to expand your territory while rewarding you in the process. Perhaps the best part about Kingory’s quests is that they come in packages. You no longer have to wait for one quest to finish since you can always do the other ones while waiting for this one to complete. Quests always lead you in the right direction, so keep doing them to avoid running out of resources.

 

Kingory Quest List
Kingory Quests

 

Real Time

Some buildings and upgrades may take hours to complete. Although the game gives a hefty waiting time, it does let you do a lot of things before giving you the mandatory break (while waiting for the buildings to finish). You can also speed up the building time by using items, just in case you’re not willing to take a break just yet.

 

Heroes: Those Greedy Bastards

If you really want keep winning wars then you should know that heroes play a big part in achieving that goal. Your troops will always have to face the sharp edge of the sword if you don’t have an epic dude backing them up. Heroes can be recruited in the tavern, and each is built with their own individual stats. Having a hero is essential for your success, but caring for them may be a pain. There’s always a price for greatness, so make sure you arm your heroes well. Heroes can wear equipment, with some matching their builds perfectly. Unlike other MMOs, Heroes charge you per hour of service. It’s not a big problem if you’re making a lot of money, but I sure wish they’d just fight for honor or something. Although the whole concept of salaries is harsh, it does add to the realism of the game, as no warlord would fight without a fee (unless you hold their families for ransom… damn why isn’t there an option for this?).

 

Kingory Greedy
Those greedy bastards

 

War Here We Come!

Simply clicking on your enemies and hoping on a random victory doesn’t do you much good in this game. The game really makes you eat dust if your army is not prepared. If you think that your army of newbies can even the odds, then you’re in for a big surprise… Always make sure to upgrade your units religiously to boost their performance in battle. Having a pimped up hero may increase your chances, but they’re also sitting ducks if you take your army for granted.

 

Graphics and Interface

Definitely one of the best I’ve seen, though it has an advantage over other browser games due to its flash base. The interface is easy to understand and provides enough interactivity to let players enjoy clicking from one place to another. The font used is easy on the eyes and allows players to effectively separate the important details from the filler words. The town looks great as well, and the background is just marvelous. The bar on the top left corner also indicates your building time, allowing you to see it no matter where you are or what you’re doing. Overall I don’t think I can find anything wrong with the game’s graphics. It managed to present an awesome set of elements that blended well with its surroundings.

 

Graphic Interface Kingory
Graphics and interface

 

Ze Item Mall

Yeah, what’s a free MMO without the traditional Item mall? One thing about the game’s item mall is that it’s HUGE (with more emphasis). There are tons of items to choose from, whether it’s for boosting your army’s performance or speeding up your building process. For those peeps who are willing to spend money on this game, you won’t be disappointed.

 

The Verdict

This game is one tough beast. They weren’t kidding when they said that this is one of the most expansive MMO Browser games of all time. There is tons of stuff to work on and definitely a lot of things to consider when it comes to overall game play. Whether it’s the hero system or simply just the building of structures, you’ll find that this game has a lot of things to offer. Definitely super. I’d give it a 9.5…

 

Pros:
– Excellent Graphics
– Hero System
– Lots of things to do
– Accessibility
– Eye Candy.

 

Cons:
– Hero salaries can be a pain.
– An hour of waiting can be pretty tedious.

Guild Wars 2 Looks At Healing And Death

Guild Wars 2 Looks At Healing And Death

 

 

After the success of their first game the Guild Wars team has been working on its successor, Guild Wars 2. This highly anticipated game seems to want to break with tradition, and innovate, rather than follow the masses.

Jon Peters, one of the game designers on Guild Wars 2 takes us into deeper into how death and resurrection will work in Guild Wars 2.

Defeat in Guild Wars 2 is intended to be an experience, not a punishment.

The first interesting quote from Jon is “Defeat in Guild Wars 2 is intended to be an experience, not a punishment.” He follows this up by adding “Let’s face it: dying never feels great, even without a death penalty. As weird as it might sound, we decided to look into what would make dying a more enjoyable and memorable play experience.”

The secret to how the Guild Wars 2 team will be addressing this pressing question is a new feature called ‘Downed mode’.

“Rather than being presented with immediate failure, when a player loses all of their health in Guild Wars 2, they are put into ‘downed mode’. In this mode, the player has a number of downed skills they can use to target enemies and fight for a chance to survive. A downed player can still be attacked, which will send them into a defeated state, leaving them to either wait for an ally to resurrect them or to resurrect at a waypoint.”

While down a player can still use special ‘Downed Skills’:
“Downed skills are less-powerful skills that a player can use in a last-ditch effort to turn the tide. A warrior might daze an enemy by throwing a rock. An elementalist might lock down their foe with Grasping Earth.”


Guild Wars 2 - Rejected Downed Skills

And it even adds the possibility to get back into the fight:
“While you are downed, if you manage to kill an enemy, you will rally, returning to life to fight again. When you rally, you are thrust right back in the action. This potential to rally from the edge of defeat adds greater drama to combat and gives a player some tactical control while in a state where they normally have none.”
Why should we debuff you, take away experience, or make you run around for five minutes as a ghost instead of letting you actually play the game?
And to make sure the act of dying isn’t an unpleasant one the death penalty in Guild Wars 2 has been diminished to almost nothing:
 “If no one revives you, you can spend a small amount of gold to come back at a waypoint. It’s as simple as that, and why not? Why should we debuff you, take away experience, or make you run around for five minutes as a ghost instead of letting you actually play the game? We couldn’t think of a reason. Well, we did actually think of a reason–it just wasn’t a good one. Death penalties make death in-game a more tense experience. It just isn’t fun. We want to get you back into the action (fun) as quickly as possible. Defeat is the penalty; we don’t have to penalize you a second time.”

Read more about this interesting new mechanic on this developers blog.

EpicDuel

EpicDuel is a player-versus-player MMO set in a sci-fi universe where players can choose between three fully-customizable character classes, the Tech Mage, Bounty Hunter, and Mercenary, and fight millions of other players with a variety of high-tech weaponry.

Developed by Artix, the EpicDuel planet is an ever-expanding space adventure filled with dangerous space creatures and a deep world ready to be explored. Survive by upgrading your character’s abilities by purchasing armor and weapons and fighting other players inhabiting EpicDuel!

Legendary Champions

Legendary Champions is an MMORPG that assembles some of the greatest figures from history, mythology, and popular culture, and pits them against each other on the battlefield.

– Transform into over 60 heroes including Dracula, King Arthur, Joan of Arc, Lu Bu, Beowulf and more.
– Choose your champion and engage in 5 vs 5 DotA inspired battlefields.
– Rise to fame by dominating rewarding and robust PvP combat.
– Team up with friends and take on powerful, massive monsters.

RealID On Blizzard Forums, A Good Idea?

 

RealID On Blizzard Forums, A Good Idea?
As we reported yesterday, Blizzard has announced that they will be introducing the use of real first and last names on their forums. That this has led to a huge outcry will not be a real surprise. Some of the events that took place since did shock us a bit.

Blizzard Poster Bashiok decided to answer the question “Will Blues also post with their real name” by saying: “Yessir. Micah Whipple, at your service.”

Micah Whipple, at your service.

The reactions at first were quite positive, as people were pleasantly surprised that a Blizzard employee would share their real name as well. There was some doubt that this was his real name however, and with a name such as Micah Whipple, how can we not doubt!

Puntable’s response on the second page of the thread is quite hilarious:
“I was going to report this because it ‘contains personal information about another player’as is against the TOS, but apparently you can’t report blues :)”

All still in good fun, but the shit started to hit the fan for Blizzard on page 3 when poster Issakk started getting personal with Bashiok:
“473 Avenue B, That part of your address? I also found the rest of the address and a phone number. That was just using google for like 3 minutes.”

Preview took it to a next level:
“So, does it bother you knowing that because your name is so uncommon, I just found your Address, age, race, whether you own or rent, a front door view of your home (since you live in a place that google did a street view), your income, the projected value of the homes around you and the number of people in your home?

THERE IS NO WAY you can be OK with that….right?”

On page 9 it goes a step up again when Giygas gets anonymous involved:
“So do we have his personal info on 4chan yet?”

Micah (as we can now call him) responds:
“My name has been out there for a while, I get friend requests all the time from random people. No, it does not bother me. I don’t add them.”

So, the community seems to think this level of privacy breaching is unacceptable but Micah seems to hold up pretty well all things considering. This is not the last chapter of this story yet, that is for sure!

Blogger Zeroday seems to think that this change may be pre-empting a lawchange in South Korea:”

 
“I’m going to make the suggestion that South Korea’s Real Name System. In 2009 South Korea’s government created a law that was meant to curb online defamation by insisting that all users who comment on sites with greater than 100,000 users per day must use their real name.

Given these facts it might not make sense why South Korea might enforce the Real Name system on Blizzard.”

Keep discussing this topic on the OnRPG forums!

Eternal Lands Interview: Yes it’s still in Beta-But it packs a punch

Eternal Lands Interview: Yes it’s still in Beta-But it packs a punch
Questions by: Vincent Haoson, OnRPG Journalist
Answered by: Radu Privantu

 

OnRPG: Hello, thank you for giving us the opportunity to talk to you guys. It seems you’ve just released version 1.9.0 of the game a few days ago, what has been the effect of the patch update on the game?

Thank you for contacting us. The main benefit of the update is that 90% of the artwork (2D, 3D and animations) was totally redone. Now the game looks much better than it did before, and all players seem to enjoy it. Another benefit is that we added a few features that allow us to have better quests, and an improved tutorial. The interface has been changed a bit too and now some tasks are easier, and being able to have emotes is quite nice.

 

OnRPG: Is the game still in beta stage?

Yes, the game is still in Beta. The term “Beta” is not very well defined, it just means something like: “almost done, but not quite”. There are still a few things that I would like to have before removing the Beta part from our game. One of those things is have full 3D terrain support. And I would like to add 200 new NPCs in the game and more quests. Many other games are Beta, they just won’t admit it.

 

Eternal Lands Arius

 

OnRPG: The game seems to be limiting itself and the number of actions a player to only 12 actions where other games have more than that. Is this a disadvantage for Eternal Lands or now? Why do you think so?

I think 12 skills is quite nice actually. Some games have a skill for everything, and then they can brag: Over 100 skills and professions. Does that mean you can do more things than in a game with just 10 skills? Some games have a skill for every weapon, like sword, axe, staff, hammers, etc. We have two skills for melee combat (attack and defense), one skill for ranged weapons (ranging) and one for making and placing devices such as caltrops and mines (engineering). Magic and summoning are also two skills that play a role in combat.

 

Harvesting is the generic skill for collecting resources of any origin. You can use it to pick flowers, mine coal, all kind of ores, and even dung from the outhouses to make potassium nitrate, which is used in the gunpowder for mines. Of course, we could have split the Harvesting skill in other skills, such as Plant Lore and Mining, but sometimes less is more.

 

The alchemy skill is used both for making ingredients that are used in magic spells and refining metals (smelting). Again, we could have split it in 2 skills, but I am not sure that would be better.

 

OnRPG: With the seeming graphic and feature limitations of the game compared to other MMOs, what do you think is Eternal Land’s edge against them?

I think that after our latest update, Eternal Lands looks just as good, and sometimes even better than many other MMOs out there. You can compare our latest screenshots with the screenshots of other MMOs and see for yourself. And while we are still lacking true 3D terrain, I don’t think that is a crucial factor. In fact, I don’t think the artwork matters that much in a MMO. RuneScape is a testament to that, it is one of the most played MMOs in the world, and their visuals are not the best.

 

In terms of features, I don’t play other MMOs, but the only big feature we are lacking is thousands of quests. We started adding quite a bit of quests lately, and we will keep adding. Since last year, we added 15 new quests (real quests, not just kill 10 rats), and many more small quests, as well as 5 daily quests, some of them with 20-30 random objectives.

 

Leopard

 

But what I think gives us an edge over other games is that our players are more friendly and helpful. They will generally help you if you ask questions, some will even give you free items and many will return the items you lost when you died.

 

 

OnRPG: With the game having features that you can find in other P2P MMOs, what do you think is different in Eternal Land’s features aside from it being F2P?

Feature wise, I don’t think we have more to offer than big house P2P games. They have much more manpower than we do, so they can add a lot more in terms of world size, number of quests, animations, etc. But we do have more friendly people, and the game style is more laid back. Sure, some people grind a lot, but a lot of players are taking it slowly, with little pressure. From what I heard, in some games you need to spend a few hours on the computer during raids, or else your team is going to be really pissed at you. Here the raids are less frequent and usually take just about 1 hour, which is less straining.

 

OnRPG: What do you think is the game’s main draw for players? Why do you think that?

A lot of people like the idea of no classes, of doing whatever you want to do. The community feeling is pretty strong. In a city, for example, people don’t know each other. In a village they do. Similarly, in games with hundreds of thousands of players, you will only know the members of your guild. In a game with thousands of players, you will get to know people from other guilds as well, because you provide services for them and/or they provide services for you.

 

One other thing we have and most other games don’t is the fact that the game is not only focused on combat and killing stuff. Some players are more peaceful and they harvest resources, make items and try to control the market. There is a lot of interaction between players of different ‘professions’. For example, the fighters will have to buy their mana potions from potioners, their healing supplies from alchemists and gear from the manufacturers and crafters. All this adds to the community spirit and it is more or less how things were done in the medieval times.

 

OnRPG: Is Eternal Lands a PVE centric game or not? Why or why not?

I would say neither. Some people like the PvE aspect of the game, some like the PvP aspect, some both and some are not really into fighting, but more into harvesting, making items, or just doing a bit of everything.

 

OnRPG: How do you think is the game retaining the current amount of players it has? Why do you think it’s that successful in retaining the game?

Actually, we did lose about 30% of our player base in the last year, so we are not retaining as many as I’d like to. One reason we lost players is that they got bored after playing the game for years, and went to play other games. We didn’t really focus on making the game easier for new players until a few months ago, and the old tutorial didn’t help much either. Now we are trying to get some new blood into the game and I hope that with some advertising and better tutorials we will start to increase our player base again. Those who stay usually stay because they have many friends and/or still have a lot to do until they get bored and try some new game. We also add new features every few weeks and that gives players a reason to keep playing.

 

Tirnwood

 

OnRPG: How involved are the players in the game’s development? Do you accept every suggestion that players give the dev team?

Our client is open source, so a few players contribute quite a bit to the client. Others write NPCs or quests, report bugs, or suggest changes or new features. Do we accept every suggestion? Well, do you accept EVERY suggestion from your readers? If so, I am going to suggest a new background for your site, something with a lot of glitter and a few of my favorite songs put on autoplay.

 

OnRPG: Is the game’s f2p income system a factor in why the game is taking a long time to go out of beta? Why or why not?

No, the f2p system is quite viable, some companies make many millions every year from f2p games. The problem is that we are a very small, independent team competing with big companies that can spend million of dollars in development and advertising. In fact, I tried to advertise on Google recently, and the bid for words such as “Free MMORPG” was over 3 bucks per click! Considering that only a very small fraction of those clicks will generate new players (that will play the game for a while), and only a small fraction of them will ever buy stuff from our shop, it is not hard to see that a small team has a hard time competing with big companies.

 

OnRPG: Why does Eternal Lands provide botting service for paying players when other MMOs restrict such practice?

We do NOT allow botting in the game. Macro-ing or any form of automatization is forbidden, and the punishment ranges from an in-game fine to character deletion. What you are probably referring to is allowing sanctioned merchant bots in the game. Those bots must respect some rules (not allowed to make items, harvest, fight, move around, etc.) and they act as a storefront for players or guilds. They benefit the players and generate some income for us, so they are a good thing for the game.

 

OnRPG: The choices players can have in terms of character customization seems to be quite limited, will you be adding more choices to the game in the future? How customizable are the characters in Eternal Lands?

We try to have realistic looking avatars. We don’t think huge oversized boobs, and armor that exposes everything is realistic.

 

You can however customize the colors of your boots, pants, shirt, hair and skin. You can chose your gender, head/hair style from a predefined list. You can even change your size a bit for a small fee.

 

Allowing total customization is nice, but there are some disadvantages that come with it. Not only that it is more complicated to implement, but you need to send more bytes down the pipe when someone enters your viewing range. Not everyone has broadband, and for big parties that can become a problem for those on dial up or mobile modems.

 

OnRPG: How many emotes are available in the game update? Will you be including more in the future?

Right now we have 9 emotes, and yes, we plan to add more. We will eventually have support for poses too, for example different ways to sit or walk.

 

OnRPG: Can players suggest quests that you can include in the game?

 

Yes! We implemented quite a few quests suggested by players. I can’t give you an exact number, but over 10. In face, we added daily quests because some players suggested that we should have them. Regarding players suggested quests, there are a few requirements. First, they have to be implementable, and relatively easy to implement. Next, I only implement the quests if the players write all the dialogues and everything that is needed. I will not implement a quest if someone says:

“lol y dont u add a quest like where u have to kill 10 foxes then talk to this dude and make some fur clothes”. I also ask some players if the reward seems reasonable.

Dragon’s Call Expansion Gets A Name

Dragon’s Call Expansion Gets A Name

 

According to the official announcement, the first expansion pack of Dragon’s Call titled “Clash of Guild” is scheduled to be released in July.

DC has not released any further info but we did learn that the name was created by players in a forum contest. 

The first expansion pack of Dragon's Call is titled "Clash of Guild"

After a fierce debate at EverDream Studio before the name was decided. But not through conventional means:
 
“Oh, we finished that debate by PVP in game”, said Torrez, the chief marketing officer, with a frown and orc voice.

Audition (Season 2) Review – Get “served” online!

Audition (Season 2) Review – Get “served” online!
By Michael Sagoe (mikedot), OnRPG Journalist

 

Everybody loves to dance. Or at least, everybody loves to try and dance. For those that want to bust some moves without busting their hips in the process, games such as “Audition” will allow them to do just that. Audition Season 2 is an online multiplayer casual rhythm game produced by T3 Entertainment. You’ll play as either a male or female dancer against other players while grooving to some of today’s popular dance beats on your way to becoming digitally famous.

 

Starting out

When starting out, creating your character is pretty basic as there’s only a few hair, clothing and shoe styles to choose from. After creating your character, you’ll be given a quick tutorial that will get you up to speed in less then 10 minutes. After the tutorial, you’ll have access to the Audition Town menu including the Item Shop, the Audition Studio, the “FAM” office for players to join or create FAM groups, which are Audition’s version of guilds, the rankings list, and the dance hall for creating and joining dance battles.

 

Audition Party Party Town
“Welcome to Audition Town, where all your dancing dreams come true”

 

Gameplay

The main gameplay in Audition is similar to “Bust-a-groove”, an old 989 studios published game made for the Sony Playstation (and when I mean similar, I mean it plays almost exactly the same as.) Players will press arrow keys corresponding to the order shown on screen and press the spacebar key before the 4th beat of every song. Certain moments or modes while playing allow you to “freestyle” your key inputs by pressing up to three keys of your choice. Nailing the 4th beat on every turn requires a good amount of timing (especially on songs with high beats-per-minute) and getting perfects multiple times in a row will earn you tons of points.

 

From time to time, the game will throw you a few curve balls with red “chance” arrows that require you to press the opposite of the key shown. In certain modes, players that are skilled or daring enough to deal with chance arrows can switch on the tab key and play with all the arrows set on chance. I wasn’t very good at playing with chance set on, but those that can handle it will be able to rack up high scores to blow past the competition or make huge comebacks.

 

Audition features tons of different game modes that all use the same core game play mechanics such as beat rush, battle parties, club dance, ballroom dance and my personal favorite, b-boy mode.

 

Audition Steps
“These suckas are getting SERVED!”

 

Audition has game modes that use completely different game play mechanics such as one-two parties and beat up mode. Using beat up mode for an example, arrows fly towards the middle of the screen and you must time your arrow presses with each one on screen, similar to games like Dance Dance Revolution or Pump It Up. You can enjoy beat up mode even more and hook up a dance pad to your PC if you know how to use external programs such as Joy2Key. It just goes to show you that there’s a style of play for everyone in Audition.

 

Audition Auto
“It’s like I’m really playing Pump it Up!”

 

Presentation

The presentation used for Audition gives players the feeling that they’re stars of a music video. The opening of each dance battle showcases the players and the song they’re about to dance to, all on “Audition TV”. Since this is a music game, the soundtrack is filled with dance (of course), house, pop, club, and many other genres of music to groove to. Audition also features tons of licensed songs from today’s popular artists such as Lady Gaga, Sean Kingston, Fall Out Boy and more.

 

Audition Battle

 

Audition’s overall visuals are ok, but are filled with blurry textures on just about everything and hefty amounts of jaggies on models making Audition feels like some kind of bargain bin title, not to mention that the faces on each player model are static and never animate, which looks silly. On the upside, the developers put a lot of work into having the player models dance throughout each song with the use of motion capture for animation. You are able to make your character do the moonwalk, the robot, one-two step, pop n’ lock and tons of other dance moves. While almost all the dance moves look motion captured, the finishing moves look terribly sketchy and un-lifelike.

 

My thoughts

My favorite thing about Audition is the game’s item shop. There are tons of outfits you can choose from so you can make your dancer look his/her best. As a nice bonus, most of the items you can buy with cash are purely for cosmetics, meaning you can play through the entire game without buying any cash shop items and still be a great player, which I feel that more free-to-play games should be doing.

 

Item Mall Audition Dance Battle
“Just about everything in the item mall is just for show”

 

The collected songs used in Audition are pretty nice, but some songs have censored or removed lyrics that can completely throw off the feel of the song. I know the game is trying to maintain an E+10 rating, but there really should be an option for players over the age of 18 to filter lyrics on and off. Not being able to hear the lyrics to some of the songs (such as Audition’s “New York” song which is a remix of 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” with lyrics by Tupac) was kind of a deal breaker for me.

 

Outside of beat up mode and one-two party, the feeling of rhythm in Audition is quite awkward since the only real moment where rhythm is required was for nailing the 4th beat using the spacebar. Everything leading up to getting the 4th beat just feels like random button mashing. I will admit that players inputting those arrow keys on songs with high beats-per-minute and nailing multiple perfects is quite masterful.

 

One last thing I should add: There were some noticeable synchronization/lag issues that would make arrows go blank on screen. I’m not sure if it was caused by my own net connection, but it definitely screwed up a couple of my rounds.

 

Summary

Overall, Audition’s game play is a bit simple but exciting enough to keep you going. The community is decent and most players will enjoy dancing with you whether they win or lose. There is also great support from Redbana with tons of updates, events and community involvement. If dancing and music is your thing, you might want to consider signing up for Audition. (Signing up for Audition… Get it? GET IT?)

 

Pros:
– Simple, yet exciting rhythm based game play
– Tons of game modes and some game modes with alternative game mechanics
– Fair and balanced item shop for paying and non-paying players
– Good and various selection of dance music
– Nice motion captured dance animations

 

Cons:
– Muddy visuals
– Censored/removed lyrics from some songs
– Possible lag/synchronization issues.