Yearly Archives: 2013

Elsword Introduces Dimension Witch

DimensionWitchPromotion

Kill3rCombo, publisher of the hit free-to-play action MMORPG Elsword, announced today the launch of its latest new class, Dimension Witch as their Transformation Evolution series continues. The Dimension Witch class gives the popular character, Aisha, the power to control time and space with some of the most powerful magic of any character.  Dimension Witch is an enhanced version of the Battle Magician class. It retains the powerful melee abilities that made its base class so unique, but also gains spatial magic that allows her to pull enemies to her range and neutralize their attacks. With enhanced teleportation skills, she also dominates the arena with ultra-fast mobility.

ElswordDimensionWitchAttack

When Aisha began her combat training, she was given a magical pendant to enhance her physical power by her mentor.  As a sorcerer who could hold her own in close-range fighting, she trained and grew, but soon realized her combat abilities wouldn’t be enough to fulfill her potential.  She was given a scroll that informed her of rare moonstones that would fall to earth during the Harmony Festival. When these rare moonstones merged with her magical pendant, her powers were enhanced to the point where she could even control time and space.  With her new spatial magic, she could now show the world the ultimate power of a Dimension Witch.

Kill3rCombo recently expanded their Elsword service to Latin America and is bringing loads of new content to the game.  To play Elsword for free please visit ElswordOnline.com and keep watching the official Facebook page here. Also don’t miss our recent updated review by DizzyPW.

Age of Wushu Yanmen Pass Trailer and Expansion Details

Age of Wushu

 

Age of Wushu’s first expansion, Legends of Mount Hua, is set for
arrival August 8. In preparation, Snail Games has released a new
trailer, additional information and assets on the expansion features.

Yanmen Pass (Video): Take a peek into the conflict that awaits as
players journey through the Yanmen Pass. In this instance, players
will be able to choose which story they want to complete; each has a
path within a major plot at the center of Yanmen Pass war.

 

 

Jianghu Gratitude and Revenge System: Age of Wushu will be adding
exciting interactions that players can take up with certain NPCs. With
a high enough reputation, players can persuade NPCs to fight alongside
their character and provide some security in the unpredictable world
of Jianghu. Players will also be able to use their reputation, and
in-game gold, for darker purposes, like seeking revenge on a fellow
player by hiring an NPC to carry out the dirty deed. Types of
punishments range, depending on how much a user pays. For more
information on these interactions,
visit:http://www.ageofwushu.com/news/view/189.

Jianghu Hero and Treasure System: In the new Jianghu Hero System,
defeating certain enemies will attract the attention of Jianghu
martial arts experts. Players must prove their might and defeat these
challenging foes in order to receive Treasures, a new type of
equipment with powerful stat bonuses. Each Treasure has a different
power rank and offers varying benefits, ensuring a varied result from
each victory. For more on the Jianghu martial arts foes and the
resulting spoils, visit: http://www.ageofwushu.com/news/view/184.

 

Age of Wushu

 

The Age of Wushu: Legends of Mount Hua expansion is slated for release
online August 8.

OnRPG Shotgun News 7/17: End of Nations, Runescape, Everquest

By Shannon Doyle (Leliah), OnRPG News Junkie

End of Nations Is Back!

End of Nations MOBA

The first invitations to the invite-only alpha of End of Nations have gone out. The former MMORTS has been reborn into a free to play tactical MOBA with a streamlined UI, cleaner graphics, and faster paced MOBA gameplay. The new End of Nations features smaller teams, streamlined tactical combat, and much more. Registration is still being accepted on the End of Nations website.

 

Runescape Continues Expanding into Latin America with Spanish

Jagex, along with axeso 5 are teaming up to bring Runescape 3 to Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Columbia, Venezuela, and Chile in Spanish. Runescape 3 will be launching worldwide on July 22nd and thanks to axeso 5 will enjoy full Spanish community support for games, competitions, videos, and more.

 

Everquest Heart of Fear is Live

Xaric Heart of Fear Everquest

The final part of a story started three years ago with the House of Thule is coming to an end. Heart of Fear is the epic conclusion of the story which has included House of Thule, Veil of Alaris and Rain of Fear. The update features massive creatures of nightmare, the story of the fear god, new class specific weapons, new items for all classes, new collections, and achievements. All of this on top of missions, raids, quests, and story.

The Love/Hate FFXIV Relationship

By Darren Henderson (DizzyPW), OnRPG/MMOHuts General Manager

FFXIV Love Hate Relationship

Special Thanks to various members of the beta forum community for taking some of these amazing screenshots used in this article!

 

Looking at positive reviews by both press and players alike across the net, it’s clear Yoshi’s team has done a tremendous job reviving Final Fantasy XIV from the graveyard of a launch in 2010 to the beautiful new world preparing for final open beta testing for the August release in 2013. Still the more I play this game, the more I begin to see cracks in the surface and glaring blemishes in an otherwise smoothly polished title. In the meantime I continuously stumble onto more well kept secrets that makes the game even more amazing and more importantly, addicting. This love hate relationship has me swearing the title off forever one minute and spending 6 hours straight the very next day completely immersed in the happenings of my home city of Ul’Dah. So how do you make a game that can give someone such a twisted mixed feeling on it? Let’s look into the good and the bad that has me so torn.

FFXIV Hogwarts Kitten

First off, the game is beautiful. As soon as the opening cutscene transitions into actual gameplay and you realize they aren’t just over glorifying the game with CGI, your mouth drops open. No matter what city you start in, it has that oh so hard to capture feeling of being a real metropolis. NPCs run back and forth acting busy and moving with purpose. Merchants turn their head as you pass by seeming to call out to you to check their wares. The tavern is so filled with roleplayers and chattering NPCs that at first glance you won’t even know who is real and who is a prop.

Expanding on this simple motif is the Levee system that allows you to take a set number of quests for various rewards based on your class. While this might sound like a repeatable quest system in your typical MMORPG, it becomes so much more with the highly interactive crafting system and crafting classes. Players acquire unique gear related to each craft and even learn skills that can be used to manually impact the success and quality of gear you’re crafting over time.

FFXIV Crafting and Levees

The Levee system contributes to this by addressing NPC guild orders to prevent the market from being flooded with the lowbie mats needed to level your craft. Meanwhile the quests reward you for your competency of being able to make these lowbie mats yourself without directly purchasing them. The sheer number of crafts available is a nice touch to make you feel unique and valuable thanks to what you’re skillful at. The limited number of Levee quests also prevents a single player from rushing up and mastering all the trade skills without suffering personal out of pocket costs.

FFXIV Sisters

Public Questing has been done countless times over the years but the Fate system in Final Fantasy XIV turns nearly the entire world into one constant PQ. If at any time you get tired of grinding monsters or running quests, you can typically roll into an in-progress public quest in less than a 2 minute walk from anywhere. Combined with the level sync, the number of party quests applicable to your progress is perhaps not endless, but more than enough to satisfy your social needs for grinding down epic monsters and mob trains with strangers.

Most importantly the free flowing story and unique class quests makes the world feel alive. You’re not, at least on the surface, the great warrior that is going to bring peace to a dying world. There are hints it might be you, but unless you actually put in the time to earn the title you won’t be addressed as such. Instead your class solo quests combined with the occasional main story quests makes you feel like you’re a dedicated party in mastering the art of your school while being a side character in a greater plot occurring on a worldwide scale. I’m skeptical if voice acting would improve or weaken this part of the experience but for now it’s in a fine state.

FFXIV Combat

The combat experience is interesting as well. I think this and the solo quests are where the biggest break between love and hate of this game occurs. I more prefer action based twitch combat than tab targeting systems like FFXIV, but they manage to do it in a way that still feels quite action intensive. Constantly players have real consequences for dodging or not dodging. Running can be a viable tactic when facing a foe. Turning your back on a foe will even allow you greater movement in exchange for losing your visual of their tells. Attacking from the sides and back has purpose, and more so depending on secondary skill effects. Pulls and knock downs exist and placement all around is more important here than most tab-target based MMORPGs. Some classes can use skills while moving and others need protection to unleash their true damage spectrum. These all add small amounts that build into a satisfying system overall.

The problem comes in with elements of RNG that don’t necessarily add any satisfying gameplay benefits but sure can ruin your unlucky day. For instance the Pugilist guild requires you to fight against a wave of enemies that can AoE destroy you in an instant if you get too close. This creates a dilemma in that you have to stand near your ally to receive heals necessary to survive as a few of your foes will focus your character automatically with dps beyond anything a character can sustain.

FFXIV Solo Quests

On that note the solo quests are level capped and force you to leave party. This means there’s no ‘get friends’ answer to your failure. There’s no ‘grind more’ answer either. I love this idea if the difficulty made sense. But when you just explode with no idea as to why… or don’t receive the random healing and die slowly as you spam potions on cooldown… frustration sets in. Why did I fail? How can I improve? There’s no obvious solution beyond trial and error until you get it right.

This becomes a greater issue when you combine secondary class skills into the mix along with main story solo quests that are tackled by every class at the same level. As you can imagine it must be a nightmare trying to account for all the factors involved with creating such an experience that’s both accomplishable and still challenging for such a wide possible arrange of class and race set-ups.

FFXIV Masked Mage

But combine it with the RNG element, in the case of the story quest a mage that has a poison spell that will kill you if you don’t have an antidote. However sometimes he casts it twice and the antidote has a 3 minute cooldown. Unless you have a class with intense healing ability, that second cast is a death sentence.

Uldah Improved Map

This FFXIV Guild made a cleaner map, possibly in paint.

These are primary problems that are hard to ignore. But there are lesser issues with the UI that grind hatred into my soul at a much slower pace. The map is atrocious. If you disagree, comment and tell me about it. Personally I felt it was not obvious that you could zoom the map to make the text on it more defined. In tightly compacted cities with multiple levels, you will feel lost for days until a wiser resident of Eorzea demonstrates how to utilize it. As much as I dislike autopath systems, FFXIV should consider implementing some guidance in the major cities until they iron out their UI a bit. Quest in another zone you’ve never been to? Well good luck with that as the already ridiculous map UI will hide your destination within the fog of war. It’s ok though as at least the fog of war is clean and concise in comparison.

Other minor issues you’ll run into include the menu systems. If you’ve been at the MMORPG game for a while, everything will feel like it takes extra clicks to accomplish compared to the standard modern MMORPG UI. Or having to click and drag quest items into a box when it’s obvious what they want and which item goes in the slot. Why isn’t this automated? There’s just no reason for it.

FFXIV Spa

I gave up on getting where I was going and just decided to chill in a fountain while my anger subsided.

One final quirk is the odd localization that often adopts stylization over functionality. Now this in part might just be my lack of experience with other Final Fantasy titles so I don’t know the lingo. Still both teleport crystals and various merchants carry names that could be simplified to make their purpose more clear. I suppose if you’re hardcore into RP it might make the world feel a little less real. For the rest of us though it’s just a nuisance adding to the learning curve with experiences that serve more as a time sink than a fun experience.

In the end FFXIV is far from perfect. And no I don’t want the “it’s still in beta” excuse as there’s only so much even a team as skilled as the Realm Reborn team can accomplish in a month. The game has been made and remade again. Put through three separate long duration beta phases. The time is now or never for Final Fantasy XIV. Still despite all these pet peeves and inconveniences, the game is gorgeous and, possibly more importantly, is launching in a complete void of quality MMORPG releases. Somehow this is occurring in the final hours of summer and before the winter rush to top it off. It seems the stars have aligned for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and I wish them luck in dodging another mass meteor extinction. It’s rare you survive such events and I doubt FFXIV can handle a second catastrophe.

Path of Exile Offers Integrated Twitch Streaming

Grinding Gear Games today announced that Twitch, the world’s leading video platform and community for gamers, has been integrated into their online action RPG, Path of Exile. Path of Exile now allows players to stream gameplay from inside the game client, including full support for streaming webcam footage and integrated Twitch channel chat. Twitch integration also enables players to know who on the leaderboards is racing at any given time for real-time spectating.

Path of Exile Twitch Partnership

Leveraging Twitch’s new software developer kit, Path of Exile is able to add functionality beyond the live broadcasting of gameplay. When Path of Exile and Twitch accounts are linked, users viewing the Path of Exile website will be able to see little Twitch icons next to player names wherever they appear on the site while streaming and can click on the logo to visit the user’s stream. In addition, while a Path of Exile race event is in progress, the leading streamer for that event is shown on the race page. Since all streamers are marked on the leaderboard, players can switch between them and watch them play directly on the race page.
“We’ve witnessed first-hand the rapidly growing appeal of live streaming gameplay, so it’s great to see Grinding Gear Games integrate Twitch functionality into a compelling title like Path of Exile,” said Matthew DiPietro, VP of Marketing, Twitch. “Equally notable is they’ve embraced Twitch’s ability to leverage game data to make leaderboards more dynamic so that players are able to know when their competition is streaming.”

Additionally, Twitch channel chat is integrated directly with the Path of Exile game client. Streamers can chat to their viewers in real-time without having to check a separate chat window. In Path of Exile, Twitch chat appears as another chat type alongside global, local, party and trade chat.

Further information about streaming Path of Exile can be found on the Path of Exile website at www.pathofexile.com.

Fortuna

Fortuna is a browser-based MMORTS from Perfect World Entertainment. Develop your city, and your army, to dominate and conquer Europe. Who will prevail – the Medici, the Fugger, or the Tudors?

Features:

Build a City: Watch your city grow rich in resources as you develop your city’s infrastructure, upgrade structures, and expand the territory of control.
Join Forces With Others:  Engage in trade and diplomacy to build your fortune and gain powerful allies. Develop your alliance and rise to power together.
Strategic Battles: With over 20 types of military units, and a large collection of unique generals, Fortuna’s robust combat system offers a wide array of strategies. Develop your army and lead your troops to battle for fortune and fame.

RedBull Prepares to Zerg Florida

Competition never sleeps. On the heels of the inaugural Red Bull Training Grounds at Red Bull North America headquarters in Santa Monica last month, the next stop for this professional videogame athlete invitational will be the sunny skies of Florida, July 26th – 28th. Fans from around the world can tune in to the live digital broadcast, as eight invited pro players will head to Full Sail University in Winter Park, for a weekend of intense scrimmage and expert analysis. With Blizzard Entertainment’s award winning real-time strategy game, StarCraft® II as the playing field, on-site experts Sean “Day[9]” Plott, Marcus “djWHEAT” Graham and Ben “Mr. Bitter” Nichol will call the shots for the viewers at home, as well as give each player a turn in the analysis booth to discuss the performance of their competitors and develop strategies for upping their game.

 StarcraftRedBullTrainingGro

Located just outside of Orlando, Full Sail University is opening the doors of their state-of-the-art performance venue, Full Sail Live, to host this elite eSports tournament. An award-winning media and entertainment institution, offering campus and online degree programs in areas including Game Development, Game Art and Game Design, Full Sail University alumni and staff have contributed to some of the biggest titles in gaming, past and present. No strangers to the enormous eSports scene, Full Sail students will also be invited to witness these heated battles live, from the comfort of their own campus, and the thousands of eSports fans at home can tune in via the Live Digital Broadcast on www.redbull.com/eSports, which airs all three days of the tournament.

 

After two days of round-robin competition, day three of Red Bull Training Grounds culminates in a tournament between the final four players standing, with the top cash prize of the weekend on the line – as well as an invitation to a future high stakes tournament in 2013.

 Red-Bull-LAN-Orlando

The first ever Red Bull Training Grounds took place June 21st – 23rd at Red Bull North America headquarters in Santa Monica focused on Blizzard’s StarCraft II, and provided over 200,000 views to 26,000 peak concurrent viewers on Sunday, June 23rd alone, with over 20 hours of expert play and in-depth analysis. After three days of battle, Jo “Golden” Myeong Hwan, a Zerg player from South Korea, came out on top, taking home the $2,500 prize purse after a grueling set of matches against teammate Bae “Sound” Sang Hwan.

 

Visit Redbull.com/eSports for news of who the lucky eight initiates will be at the Red Bull Training Grounds at Full Sail University, with StarCraft II as the playing field. Fans can also view the action live as it happens all three days of the Red Bull Training Grounds by visiting Redbull.com/eSports, which uses the Twitch TV player for all of its LIVE eSports coverage. Follow @redbullESPORTS and @FullSail on Twitter, #traininggrounds.