Monthly Archives: October 2013

Dragon’s Prophet Frontier Battlegrounds Revealed

By Darren Henderson (DizzyPW), General Manager

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This week I had the chance to sit in on a private demo of one of the first Frontier Battleground matches in the world of Dragon’s Prophet. Senior Producer Todd Carson walked us through the system and, while the overall goal they are trying to reach would put the current state of these battlegrounds at the level of an early beta, the potential here is staggering.

 

Now this system isn’t targeting the typical demographics most recent MMORPGs have gone after. Rather it’s reinvigorating the player drive storylines so common in the post-WoW period of gaming with titles like Perfect World and Aion where PvP was the true end-goal. However rather than just forcing an economic benefit onto the winners to create some semblance of hatred between factions, this system will create an entire kingdom styled rule where mechanics will make it clear who is in charge at the time on the Frontier Isles.

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The Frontier Battleground

So how does it work? Well in the current form it’s still micromanaged by GMs. When the GM feels like it, they spawn a crystal in the Frontier Isles, a place where players can currently tinker with housing and other sandbox elements. Once destroyed, teleporters appear that can usher players into a massive battleground split between five capture points and countless locales of interaction.

Teams inside this realm are based on pre-established alliances consisting of two to five factions. Each faction must establish points through a variety of means I’ll go into shortly to reign supreme, either by having the most points at the end of the two hour time limit or reaching the goal of 8,000 points.

The main way to earn these points is capturing and holding the five capture points. An alliance gains 500 faction points once in control of any of these five points. The same number of points is lost and given to another faction should your flag fall, but points accrued during your time in charge of that point will remain with you. This ensures alliances aren’t just playing musical chairs gobbling up undefended fortresses ala the launch state of Warhammer Online.

Though truth be told the fortresses are never fully vulnerable. Various themed NPC guardians such as harpies, treants, and water elementals hold down your fort and fight to the death in your stead should the enemy’s fortresses catch you slipping. These NPCs typically can handle a full party of level 80 (max level currently) combatants but anything beyond that and they’ll fall quickly so don’t leave them alone too long.

There’s no shared radar between alliance members as of yet so communication is key in this battleground. The distance between capture points (based on a decent speed flying dragon that doesn’t get interrupted and knocked out of the sky) is on average a minute with the map layout looking like a pentagon with a castle fortress slightly further from the rest of the capture points at the northern edge of the map. Pop-ups will fill you in on the major events happening such as forces attacking your NPCs at a capture point but scouts spotting these raids ahead of time are typically your only chance of reacting fast enough to save your control points.

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In our demo this battle involved eighth alliances so overall it was pretty chaotic. Points can be earned simply from killing other players so skirmishes in the middle of nowhere was a common sight. There was roughly 280 combatants taking part which is saying something for end-game PvP on a Tuesday afternoon. This number is expected to climb up to closer to 600 in the coming weeks when the Frontier System is more polished and finished. And yes there’s some serious customization options to tone down the graphics should your rig find rendering such epic battles a bit beyond its capabilities.

Other elements exist in the nooks and crannies of the battlefield to keep players from bunching up in one massive lag fest of explosions. Snowdrift Crystals spawn that can be collected and brought back to your capture points to earn additional faction points. Just watch out as you’ll be marked for your enemies once you pick one up, and they’ll be gunning for you to prevent these freebie points.

A siege master can also be spawned and captured to build weapons of war that can be vital for dislodging a powerhouse alliance from a capture point they’re stubbornly defending.

One of the biggest threats though is a doom dragon spawn that will focus on striking down the faction with the largest point lead after 15 to 20 minutes into the battle. My apologies for slaughtering his name but it sounded something along the lines of Drecontoking Yangman. And yes he’s as intimidating as his name leads you to believe. Think a giant stegosaurus with wings wearing battle armor.

The Mysterious Alter is yet another element added into the mix to spice things up. Around the same time as Drecontoking shows his ugly face, an altar will appear on the map. Players of the same alliance can capture and gather around this altar to summon a powerful dragon to fight for their team. However the higher your lead over other alliances, the longer this channeling takes, so choose carefully if it’s worth the risk.

Finally a War Speculator can occasionally be found and killed to score your alliance some extra bonus points. Little features like this make scouting and communication more important in these wars than nearly any of its kind I’ve seen in the MMORPG realm.

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Looking into the Frontier Future

While we only saw one map, Sony claims there are two complete maps to fight in and more coming with each adding Frontier Isle being added in. Beyond this there are future systems coming in which the leader of the winning alliance will be crowned Highlord of the realm.

As Highlord, they will be able to initiate gathering related special events to boost their realm’s productivity, launch hordes of monsters into the housing areas to be a general ass to their enemies, and build defensive structures to prepare for the next round of fighting to maintain their dominance.

When a Highlord is crowned, they are given three to five days (still being tested) to prepare for the coming assault and abuse their power. After the safety net is gone, they will then be in charge of defending the crystal currently spawned by GMs that controls the initiation of the alliance war front. But while the current system initiates the frontier battles simultaneously upon the crystal’s destruction, the final implementation will give the entire server a day’s warning that war is coming.

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Issues with the Frontier

Although I’m typically pretty critical on the implementation of such features, I honestly don’t have much negativity to say in regards to Dragon Prophet’s. Systems seem well thought out to keep one faction from dominating the world entirely. It sounds like being the winning faction brings in just as much work as reward so it would just grant them complete domination of the lands into eternity like I’ve seen in so many past PvP focused Asian MMORPG grinders.

And best of all is all participants whether they win or lose can earn PvP currency (yet to be implemented) to buy custom skins on armor and weapons as well as other elements of badassery as of yet unrevealed. This should make every faction worth their salt want to get involved in the fights, keeping the event active and popular into the foreseeable future.

An element I’m not terribly thrilled about is that all player kills are worth the same in this event. It gives alliances no incentive to protect their leadership. And it punishes alliances for bringing lower level weaker participants into battle. As far as I could tell, there isn’t a limitation on who in your alliance is allowed to enter these battles, so it may be a liability for guild leaders to even allow lower level players into their faction since they could cost you points in these battles.

That aside, it’s an easily rectified issue that isn’t inherently built into the system. I look forward to seeing the full Highlord system and new maps on display as this game continues to progress. Though it carries a launch label now, it’s still very much a game in beta with plenty of outstanding ideas in the works and coming soon. Here’s hoping we see some underwater fortifications in future battlegrounds!

Brain Storm

Brain Storm is a free-to-play MMO that rewards real-world knowledge within its gameplay. As a new alternative to fossil fuels is discovered, you must work with others, train experts, and build an oracle to demonstrate your cognitive supremacy. Gather knowledge fragments, develop your city, extract precious resources, and race to build the most powerful oracle in the world.

SMITE Hel Rework Patch Revealed

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HiRez must not be getting much sleep as of late as their major SMITE overhauls keep coming in rapid order. The latest in this series of changes offers a complete visual rework to Hel and Jingle Hel along with some adjustments to her skills and stance switching cooldowns. There’s also plenty of other balance changes, mode changes, and even the beginning of an implementation of a jump animation (that’s purely cosmetic… and awesome!)

The full patch notes can be found here.

Shotgun News 10/9: Dragon Nest EU, Tactical Intervention, and Grepolis

By Shannon Doyle (Leliah), OnRPG News Editor

Dragon Nest EU Introduces Academic

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A new class has been introduced to Dragon Next Europe. The Academic is a little girl from 50 years in the future where the evil Red Dragon has turned the world into a wasteland. Along with her robotic butler Alfredo the Academic works to save the world from certain doom. And to celebrate her arrival Dragon Nest will be hosting Flaming Weekends during which players will get more experience and loot.

 

Tactical Intervention Officially Launches

First Person Shooter Tactical Intervention has gone live just a couple of months after beginning open beta. Since then four major updates have been introduced and now that the launch is complete players will have access to two new maps and additional weapons. Tactical Intervention can be downloaded directly from Steam and is free to play.

 

Grepolis Goes Andriod

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InnoGames has announced they have published the Andriod version of the hit strategy game Grepolis. Cross platform functionality does work for all registered accounts. But if you prefer not to register you can still play. It can be downloaded now from Google Play.

Marvel Heroes Review – The Terrible Truth

By Tagspeech

Marvel Heroes Review 1

Marvel Heroes could have ridden the tidal wave of success created by the blockbusters film “The Avengers” and made itself into a truly great, successful, and highly profitable online game on brand recognition alone.  All they would have to do is make the game not terrible, and capable of holding the attention and devotion of Marvel fans.  I don’t consider myself a Marvel fan, but I like many of the characters in that universe, and I especially like smash-tastic smash-fests inspired by the Diablo franchise (namely, the Diablo franchise itself).

 

So, did Marvel Heroes succeed?  No.  Not even close.  A metascore of 58, as of this review, is not something anyone wants to see associated with their game.  Even Penny Arcade slammed the game hard with a hilarious comic that pointed out the very serious problem of being able to see someone else running around as your selected hero.  The entire point of the game is to take on the mantle of a superhero from your favorite franchise and smash evil.  That fun is diminished by seeing your twins jogging along next to you.

 

But apparently the recent release of a major content patch will fix all of these issues and more.  Will it prove to lift this game back up into success?  Or will it just be another futile effort in turd-polishing?

 

Marvel Heroes Review 2

You Are Grounded.

In the first ten minutes of playing the game, something just felt wrong.  While I was initially pleased that one of the free hero options was my favorite Marvel character, Storm, once I got on the ground with her I just felt… strange.  I jogged around for a while, clicking on enemies and roasting them with lightning.  Soon a Deadpool crossed my path and sliced up some things, only to jog off in his own direction.  A Thor and an Iron Man jogged by me and punched some thugs in the face, then jogged away in an opposite direction.  As I continued to jog, I realized something.

 

Why are all of these powerful, iconic heroes jogging?!  Half of these people can fly.  In fact, in the case of Storm, you almost NEVER see her touching the ground in a fight.  This might sound like nitpicking, but half the fun of a video game is immersion, and the only people who are going to be buying this game are Marvel fans.  Ergo, it’s going to break a Marvel fan’s immersion when they see that their hero has been reduced to mundanely sweating out the miles as they fight crime.  This game could have been so cool if it had been given a AAA budget and development team, but instead of being Classic Coke, it’s some off-brand swill.

 

A game with this kind of brand recognition deserves the star treatment.  This is not, as one reviewer is quoted saying on the game’s steam page, “… the best of the MMO genre and the best of the action-RPG genre.”  I wonder if that person has played either genre, at all.   Because boring combat, a misused franchise, and unacceptably shoddy animations and graphics do not a 2013 MMO blockbuster make.  It’s just bad.  Terribly, terribly bad.  And I had to continue playing it.  For YOU, reader.  I hope you’re happy.

 Marvel Heroes Review 3

JUST LET IT END, PLEASE.

The first thing this game wants you to do is go stop a bank robbery.  Uninspiring, but classic.  I don’t know why legions of Earth’s finest meta-humans are all simultaneously bothering with this kind of ground-level mayhem, but I’ll play ball.  On my way to the bank, I fry a few thugs, and some random HYDRA agents.  I realized those agents were being lead by a boss enemy, a la Diablo, and relished in the chance to smite him.

 

Of course, as a boss, he was mostly immune to my knockback attack.  So after killing his minions, I just sort of sat there holding down my left mouse button, watching his health shave off in little bits over the course of about forty seconds.  That may not sound like very long, but when you’re supposed to be playing a game and enjoying yourself, forty seconds of just staring at a green-spandex-clad, limber, floating weirdo being zapped by the exact same bolt of lightning over and over again gets dull.  He didn’t exactly challenge me.  He just made me want to give up and move on.

 

Anyways, he exploded like any other obedient loot pinata, and I continued on my quest.  Once inside the bank, I zapped mercenaries, and was confronted by Black Cat.  The fight with her was standard fare; don’t stand in the green poison cloud she makes, kite, hit with attacks, kill additional mercenaries that appear periodically.  Not exactly complicated stuff for an experienced MMO gamer (which I assume pretty much everyone is at this point).

 

But here’s the thing.  That fight took me four minutes to complete.  Four minutes.  No phases, no explosions, no changes, no exciting clashes.  Just four minutes of exactly what I described earlier.  Over.  And over.  And over.  Forever.  The game lacks Diablo 3’s graphical panache and crunchy combat.  Some of the environment is destructible, but surely not enough of it.  It’s amusing to be able to lift cars and throw them at enemies, but the result is surprisingly lackluster without ragdoll physics.  How can you make a game like this and not have ragdoll physics?  Half the fun is watching your foes and their charred bits pinwheel through the air and skid across pavement.

 

Marvel Heroes Review 4

Who plays you?!

That’s the question I feel like I’ve been asking in a lot of my reviews lately, and it’s especially relevant here.  I feel like this is a game that was made (poorly) with the intention of appealing to Marvel fans who also like Diablo and light WoW-esque MMORPG elements.  But it fails to appeal to Marvel fans by stupidly, stupidly making the game an open-world affair wherein you’ll meet your character’s twin multiple times within the first ten minutes of gameplay (would have been easily remedied by making the game lobby-based, instead).  It especially fails to appeal to Diablo fans by lacking any sort of graphical intensity, meaningful combat, or satisfying violence.  Ragdoll physics on death and force application for attacks is sort of action game 101, and has been an industry standard for years now.

 

Of course, we can’t forget that it fails to appeal to MMORPG fans by being a stiff, isometric-camera affair with no real open world or sense of exploration and immersion.  The developers of this game seemed to think that just allowing players to randomly run into each other, shoe-horning in a barebones crafting system, and adding useless cosmetic pets was going to somehow drive up business and interest.  It’s not.  You guys.  It’s not, and I almost feel bad about pointing all of this out, because clearly the people who made this game are just very new to the whole process.

 Marvel Heroes Review 5

The Cash Trap

We can’t truly ever know the exact mantra that the developers of Marvel Heroes were chanting when they designed the game’s free-to-play model, but given the way the game is designed now, it was probably something along the lines of “GIMMIE URRRRR MOOOONEEEEEY!!!1!!!1”  Because that’s what it wants.  I’m sorry, $49.99 for a hero pack that only has four actual heroes in it and a bunch of stupid skins?  Ten bucks for an individual hero?

 

We’d all be happier if the game would just admit to the fact that it exists solely to cash in on the fanaticism of comic book/gamer enthusiasts.  The game’s design is deceptively free-to-play, given the only saving grace of the entire title is the ability to play as your favorite Marvel character, and people are going to be more than willing to pay money to get their favorites.  It’s like charging for action figures, except the action figures don’t actually exist, and they’re not going to accrue value over time.  Also, no new toy smell.  Remember new toy smell?  Digital characters that cost ten bucks each don’t even have new toy smell.  You can’t even pick them up and make them fly.  You just have to watch them jog around like weight-loss reality show contestants, stiffly waving their arms in a boring, cardboard diorama of a world.

 

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Final Verdict: Ugh.

I cannot in good conscience recommend this game to anyone, anywhere, for any reason.  The latest patch did nothing to address this game’s lackluster core gameplay, which is its biggest fault. If you like Diablo, then go play Diablo 3.  I hear they’re removing that stupid auction house system soon and going back to a more old-school approach.  If you like MMORPGs, then just play Guild Wars 2 or WoW or something.  Yes, you will have to pay money for those titles.  And yes, Marvel Heroes is “Free to play.”

 

But if your attraction to the game is based on a love for the setting and a specific hero or heroine, then expect to pay a pound of flesh; either in time-investment to unlock the character by grinding as one you don’t give a crap about, or by just shelling out the cash to unlock your favorites.  If you do either of those things, the sense of accomplishment and reward will be immediately diminished by running into your favorite character with the username “sloppyseconds” over their head.

 

Tagspeech is the alias of author W.B. Wemyss, who was responsible for the bizarre cyberpunk fever dream called Children of Athena