Yearly Archives: 2012

OnRPG Shotgun News 9/14: Shadowland, Firefall, SWTOR, and more!

OnRPG Shotgun News 9/14: Shadowland, Firefall, SWTOR, and more!

By Shannon Doyle (Leliah), OnRPG Journalist

 

Shadowland Online Launches

 

GameSamba has announced that their social strategy game Shadowland Online has launched. The post-apocalyptic fantasy game combines elements of empire building with strategic warfare and diplomacy. Mini games which include farming, mining and exploring are an integral part of the social experience. It is browser based and free to play.

 

 

Black Prophecy Tactics: Nexus Conflict Closed Beta Phase 2

Black Prophecy Tactics: Nexus Confict goes into the second phase of closed beta today. Since the first phase a number of changes have been made which include changes to pvp, the map, 18 new missions for each faction and player trading. For the chance to take part in the beta testing register on the official website [http://nexusconflict.gamigo.com/en/] and put in the code NEXUSCBT2 but do it fast as it is limited use.

 

 

City of Heroes Players Buy Developers Dinner

 

In less than three hours the players of City of Heroes under the leadership of TonyV and Maressa raised $1,000 to buy staff of Paragon Studios dinner. The dinner is expected to take place sometime next week at a restaurant the studio was known to frequent previously.

 

 

SWTOR Prepares High Population Server Tech with Tests

Bioware is asking for player help in testing out the new high population server technology which is meant to provide a better overall playing experience. To take part if you have a character on an East Coast server log into the high population test server which can be found in the server list as you log in.

 

 

Firefall’s Latest Milestone Focuses on PvE

 

The most recent update to Firefall is focusing on the quality of life for PvE. This includes combat, content, and making sure players are guided through the content in a way that flows. In addition changes to the login dashboard are expected as well as working on getting EU servers on and localized for German and French.

 

 

Arctic Combat ESL EU Finals

Tomorrow Arctic Combat will play host to the European Qualifications Tournament Finals to determine which of two teams will advance to the Veterans League – World Championship. To commemorate this event the closed beta servers will be open for 24 hours starting at 1:00 GST on Saturday.

 

 

League of Legends Fall Cup Sign Ups

Sign up for this year’s fall cups end this coming Sunday so players are urged to get organized quickly if they haven’t already signed up to take part. ROCCAT is providing prizes which include $2500, and hardware.

Minecraft – Imagination is the Only Limitation

Minecraft – Imagination is the Only Limitation

By Umar Farooq (Kluey)

 

 

Imagine being able to play a video game that allows you to do whatever you like. Imagine being able to create complex circuits like a 16-bit computer or even simple mechanisms like an automatic door. Imagine having to survive in a realistic world where various monsters come out at night. Having to build your own shelter and hunt your own food. This is all possible in the extremely successful B2P ‘indie’ game by Mojang, Minecraft. Minecraft is a sandbox type game that uses a unique block graphic style. There are various textures of blocks and the combination of them can make marvelous creations. Minecraft also has a well designed survival mode where building isn’t your primary goal; surviving is. Furthermore, Minecraft’s community has been extremely passionate about mods and add-ons to the game that supply an endless supply of fun.

 

 

Your World

Starting off, you can choose between survival and creative. Creative allows you to not worry about food, monsters or gathering resources and only focus on building. Blocks are already set in your inventory and all you have to do is lay them down. The second choice is survival, the mode in which you must start a new life and survive on your own. In survival mode, you must hunt food to stay alive and gather resources to upgrade your equipment. While this may sound bland, Minecraft has little that you must do. The choice of what to do next is entirely yours.  Many players like to focus on projects that make life easier like automatic farming or experience farms in survival. In creative mode, players prefer making large architecture and showing it off to others.

 

Automatic wheat farm! Water pours down, harvesting the crops.

 

 

Multiplayer

Multiplayer is quickly becoming the norm in Minecraft. Playing with friends vs. playing alone isn’t exactly a hard decision. The Multiplayer feature is quite simple. One player needs to host their map and anyone he or she allows can log on. Manpower allows you to make bigger and better structures. It’s also an opportunity to fight each other as PvP is now a thing. And lastly, PvE is also becoming a thing in Minecraft nowadays. Dragons and other stronger monsters are being released which require more than one person to fight. Currently, the only official boss monster is the Ender Dragon.

 

Ender Dragon!

 

 

Multiplayer also comes in the form of public servers. You may have to search around for a bit to find a server that you really like as most are full of trolls or are just empty. Public servers may have features such as clans, raids, banking, economy and many more.

 

 

Special Gameplay Features

Minecraft is always being developed. New content will always be introduced and this is one of the best things about Minecraft. That being said, this list of Gameplay Features may not include every single feature present, it will only feature the ones released at the time of this review.

 

 

Redstone – Redstone has been one of the key features in Minecraft. I personally think that without Redstone Dust, Minecraft wouldn’t be nearly as popular. Without going into too much detail, Redstone dust is the wiring used in Minecraft. Any automatic anything uses Redstone plus many other types of blocks such as repeaters, torches, switches, pressure plates and more.

 

Mining/Logging/Digging – There is grinding in every game. If all you had was reward, reward, reward, you wouldn’t feel the accomplishment as deeply. In Minecraft, the grinding comes in the form of mining, logging and digging. These are made easier by achieving better tools like wood, stone, gold, iron, or diamond.

 

PvE – In survival mode, monsters such as zombies, spiders and skeletons come out during the night. Also, the creeper is a moving bomb that will explode when it comes near you. On the contrary, pigs, cows, sheep and chicken are abundant during the day and can be used as a source for food. All these monsters will drop experience points that can be used for enchanting.

 

 

 

Enchanting – After acquiring the experience points, an enchanting table will allow you to enchant tools and armor.  Enchantments like “Sharpness II, making your sword do more damage” or “Fortune III, giving a chance for an ore to be multiplied when mined” are extremely helpful. Also, your tools/armor will glow.

 

The Nether – The Nether world is a second dimension in the Minecraft world. It’s commonly referred to as “hell” because of the fire and lava textures it has. You can enter into the Nether by creating a portal with obsidian blocks. In the Nether there are valuable resources as well as Endermen, teleporting mobs that can be a challenge without the right equipment.

 

 

Final Conclusion

Overall, Minecraft is an absolutely brilliantly designed game. It’s not a graphics showboat but rather a game that uses its gameplay as the main attraction. I’ve been playing Minecraft for over a year and have never gotten to the point where I have nothing left to do. The only thing that I can complain about Minecraft is the lack of challenges in PvE. The Ender Dragon is starting to address this issue but it is still only a large dragon with a lot of hit points. That being said, Minecraft isn’t exactly a PvE focused game.

 

 

Rating – 9.5/10

Good:

– Gameplay quality

– Gameplay quantity

– Various modes to play

– Large community involvement

 

Bad:

– Graphics

– Repetitiveness

Character Development: Lore, Restrictive or Freeing?

Character Development: Lore, Restrictive or Freeing?

By Shannon Doyle (Leliah), OnRPG Journalist

 

 

Through my many years of roleplaying I’ve met all sorts of people. Some of them love games with deep lore and enjoy making a character that fits into that world. While others find lore to be too restrictive. I have a friend in City of Heroes who will only roleplay in City of Heroes because she likes being able to make any character she wanted without restriction. She also plays Rift, and SWTOR, but she won’t roleplay in those worlds. On the other hand many, many years ago I created a chatroom roleplay that gave the players the ultimate freedom. They could create any race they wanted. But ultimately everyone wanted to play humans or cat people. Then there are people in the middle, like me. I love roleplaying in City of Heroes. I can make just about anything I want. But I also love the lore of The Secret World and Rift. And I make my characters fit the setting that is given to me. There is also another type of person. The person who will ignore the story and setting and make the character they want. They choose to only use the bits of the story they find useful. I’ll try not to get too ranty about those sorts of people, but they really bug me.

 

 

I’m not saying that games like City of Heroes or Champions Online don’t have lore or backstory. They just allow for more flexibility. Because a super hero can be anything, with any origin. So in those sorts of games I think a lot of people find roleplaying easier. At this point in my City of Heroes life I’ve played well over 60 characters, and roleplayed all of them. And yes, I do love being able to take advantage of the freedom the game gives me. After all what other game can allow you to have a catgirl, an angel, an alien and a plant/human hybrid all in one roster? The freedom is liberating. So why is it I’ve seen a million Wolverine clones. And even more Sons/Daughters of Statesman? Why can’t people embrace the freedom given to them?

 

 

The best roleplayers can embrace the lore and use it to create the foundation for an amazing character. The way I see most MMOs is that they’re a story. A book which we have the pleasure of stepping into. We should respect, enjoy and cherish what has been given to us. Which is why I cringe anytime I see someone playing a half Elf/half Kelari person (In Rift you can’t have biracial characters. Except in the case of Bahmi and Humans.). Or when I hear about players in WoW having Death Knights who are very much alive I roll my eyes and wish you had to sign some sort of thing saying you will obey the rules of the game.

 

 

So where does that perfect balance come in? Is a lot of history and lore a hindrance or a blessing? Is this something that depends on the person? I think it very much does depend on the person. Some factors are how good a person is at roleplaying, how creative they are, how willing they are to use what is presented. I think another important factor is how long a person has been gaming and roleplaying in particular. I don’t mean actual time, since I’ve been roleplaying for 15 or so years now at this point. But I think for everyone there grows a point where you just want to do your story. Now, maybe MMOs aren’t the best place for that. But it is a very big medium these days. Especially since the death of chatroom roleplay.

 

 

Worse even more than ignoring the lore and rules of a game is playing a world that doesn’t, shouldn’t exist in the game you’re playing. I’m looking at you WoD and Dresden rpers on Virtue. These really are the sorts of things that belong in their own game/chatroom. I’m not talking about the people who do it as a joke. I thought it would be amusing to have characters from Rift somehow find themselves going through a rift into the plane of City of Heroes. Ultimately I never made the character but it amused me for a time. I have seen an amusing application of something similar to this that I think worked very well and I accept. A group of friends many years ago at this point created characters in City of Heroes on a server they don’t normally play on. That’s nothing to write home about, right? Well these characters were actually meant to be characters in a super hero game that were being played by the main characters of the people who were playing them. It’s like MMO inception!

 

 

Embrace it, ignore it, twist it to make it your own, there is no denying that MMOs give you the ultimate freedom. Just remember that you are responsible not only for the quality of your experience in the game but also the experiences of everyone you interact with.

DK Online Shadowmage Dev Blog

DK Online Shadowmage Dev Blog

By Aeria North, Aeria Games Representative

 

 

Welcome all dragon slayers,

 

It’s that time again—time to talk about another enigmatic DK Online class! Today we’ve got the Shadowmage, who has emerged to take the spotlight for our latest class reveal. Shadowmages and Sorceresses are closely related, yet they are worlds apart in their chosen arts. Though the Felynx are kin to the Elves, they turned their back on the Elven elemental magic to study forbidden dark sorcery, and thus the Shadowmage was born.

 

 

So there’s definitely a stark contrast in the lore, but how about the gameplay? Shadowmages depart from their Elven cousins (and the rest of the DK Online cast, for that matter) by being a primary support class. And though the term may be thrown around a lot, we really think “jack-of-all-trades” applies perfectly to it. The Shadowmage has a ton of debuffs in its arsenal to throw on hapless enemies—and just as many buffs for allies.

 

 

Name a status effect, and the Shadowmage can probably sling it. Poison, silence, paralysis, bleeding, slow, shock, and MP loss are all nasty tricks that an opponent can suffer at the hands of a capable Shadowmage. They can also throw tons of helpful buffs out for the party, like increasing max HP, defense, evasion, regeneration, magic power, movement speed, and certain elemental resistances. When the party goes up against a debuff-happy enemy (or an opposing Shadowmage), they can even put up a buff that increases resistance to a variety of foul status effects.

 

 

So you can tell that a smart party will definitely want to bring a Shadowmage along to perform at peak effectiveness. That isn’t to say that they aren’t capable solo fighters either, but they have to take a more tactical approach to combat than their comrades. Shadowmages don’t have much in the way of “spammable” spells, so they achieve competitive dps by weaving their direct-damage and debuff-applying spells in tandem.

 

 

Our Favorite: One of the Shadowmage’s high-level talents is Delusion, which grants a massive boost in HP and MP regeneration to all nearby allies for a short duration on a very long cooldown. It essentially gives the party a major shot in the arm, to be used only in dire situations when all else fails. We like this ability not only because of its awesome utility, but also because it highlights the dual nature of the class. Shadowmages can be just as beneficial as they are harmful—it all depends on how you want to play the class.

 

 

That wraps up the class spotlights (for now)! We hope you enjoyed learning some more about the denizens of Latos, and keep a look out for more dev blogs focusing on other aspects of DK Online as we move along toward closed beta.

Light The Candles For 9Dragons’ Birthday Cake

Light The Candles For 9Dragons’ Birthday Cake

 

9Dragons

 

Leading online game publisher GamesCampus today begin a massive celebration for their martial arts MMORPG, 9Dragons. Players new and old can take this time to reflect on their skills, friends they’ve made, and enemies they’ve conquered during the last year. Events will be ongoing from now until October 10th, so don’t tarry!

 

 

“How did a year fly by so quickly? 9Dragons has grown in so many ways and has exceeded our -and we hope the players’ – expectations.” said Hubert Yee, Head of Marketing at GamesCampus. “We’re both looking back at the lessons learned from the last year and looking forward to the next year; 9Dragons will continue to grow in exciting new ways.”

 

 

The 9Dragons anniversary is split into three parts, so players of any level can participate. First, all characters between level 2 and 30 will receive a complimentary bundle of five EXP Cards. Talk to Tan Xiang to claim these special items. EXP Cards grant players a 100% bonus EXP rate, and will stack with all EXP events held during the anniversary celebrations.

 

9Dragons

 

Monsters throughout the lands that are level 30 and above will randomly drop new anniversary treats; Szechuan Treats instantly heal 10% of a player’s life, Moon Cookies restore 10% of a players Vital Energy, and Skewered Sweets grant 10% bonus weapon damage for 10 minutes. Don’t like your candy? Talk to Jiang Daxi to trade in your candy haul and trade in ten for the player’s choice of a 7-day Dragon Banner. Each color (white, red, blue, black, and double) grants players an unparallel buff.

 

 

Players can also save up and resist the urges of their sweet tooth for the ultimate prize. Trade in 30 of each candy and receive a Blue Dragon Treasure Box! This item is normally only found during sales on the CampusCredits (CC) Store, and contains the game’s most valuable mounts, costumes, materials, and much more.

 

 

No matter what level your character is, they will receive one commemorative coin for each full hour they remain logged in. Trade in one coin for the candy of your choice to complete a Blue Dragon Treasure Box, or save up 50 coins for a selection of exclusive anniversary masks: Ox, Panda, Lunar Rabbit, and Mysterious Rabbit.

OnRPG Shotgun News 9/13: LoL, GW2, Blade&Soul, and More!

OnRPG Shotgun News 9/13: LoL, GW2, Blade&Soul, and More!

By Shannon Doyle (Leliah), OnRPG Journalist

 

 

League of Legends Spotlights Syndra

A new Champion Spotlight video has been released which features Syndra, the Dark Sovereign. She is a ranged mage who manipulates dark spheres. The video as with others released by Riot Games highlights her attacks and gives basic and advanced tactics as well as going into detail about the best items to have. To find out more watch the video below.

 

 

 

Guild Wars 2 Breaks 2 Million Units Sold

NCSoft and ArenaNet have announced that Guild Wars 2 has sold over 2 million units. This is despite the fact that digital sales were temporarily halted to maintain the optimal player experience.

 

Save City of Heroes Campaign Announces Next Event

 

Leaders of the campaign to save City of Heroes have announced the next in game event. Next week two different events will be held to run the first of the task forces, Positron. This is in recognition of the Matt “Positron” Miller and all the development team from Paragon Studios. Following in that line of thought they have added the #SaveParagon hashtag to the already popular #SaveCoH Twitter hashtag which during the rally was a top trender.

 

 

NCSoft to Bring Blade & Soul West

Just 11 weeks after the Korean launch of Martial Arts Fantasty MMO Blade & Soul NCSoft has announced plans to bring it to Western audiences. There is no exact release date as of yet but NCSoft is already working on tailoring the title for western audiences while working with Team Bloodlust.

 

 

The Secret World Issue 2 Delays Again

An exploit that was discovered in Issue 2: Digging Deeper is keeping Funcom from releasing the Issue this week. The announcement insured that they would work on it all weekend until the issue was removed and replaced. As of this moment Issue 3 is still scheduled to be released on time.

Nvidia Reveals GTX 660/650 Graphics Cards

Nvidia Reveals GTX 660/650 Graphics Cards

 

 

Earlier this week I got to sit in on a conference call with Justin Walker, Product Manager for Geforce’s GTX products to check out the latest addition to their Kepler GPU line-up. And I must say this is an occasion for desktop PC Gaming enthusiasts to rejoice as the next-gen graphics power of the GTX 600 series is finally being released at a reasonable price of around $229 for the 660 and $119 for the 650. This is of course a big deal as to get a Kepler level card with support for all the latest important features made available by DX11 and PhysX you would be dishing out $300+

 

 

Here’s the specs we’re looking at with each card:

 

GTX 660

 

 

GTX 650

 

 

But if you’re more of a gamer than a techy I’ll break down those numbers into something that’s far easier to understand: frames per second and performance versus past generations!

 

 

When tested against the GTX 660’s comparable cousin from 2008 (the GT 9800), the GTX 660 brought 4x the performance on average, bringing in 51fps on Borderlands 2 vs 10fps with the GT 9800. Furthermore when tested running GW2 in 3D, it still managed to chug out an astonishing 41fps compared to 16fps from the GT 9800. Finally in the screen recording department it managed to snag 49fps. With DX11 being adopted by over 30 major developing companies now, this power requirement is starting to become the norm, not the exception. Also if you’re a true enthusiast and looking to bridge cards, the GTX 660 can do so with up to 2 other cards in sli.

 

 

But for those that feel the GTX660 is still too pricey, let’s look at the lower-end GTX650 and how it stands against the graphics juggernauts of our day. When compared to its 2008 cousin the GT 9500, the GTX650 averaged 8x the performance! It also consumes half the power of its 2010 cousin the GTS450! Throughout many of the top titles on the market today it averaged 47fps while still offering all the important support of DX11 and PhysX.

 

 

Both are available for purchase now so if your PC desktop hasn’t been cutting it lately, you know what to do!