MechWarrior Online previews the upcoming mech Blackjack and his tricky high mounted weaponry advantage.
Yearly Archives: 2013
MechWarrior Online Canyon Network Sneak Peak
MechWarrior Online offers a double dose of sneak peak goodness today starting with a new map, Canyon Network.
Scarlet Blade Prepares for first Male Class in Korean Version
Those wanting some sexy chiseled men to balance the overly bouncy all female cast in Scarlet Blade won’t have to wait much longer as the Korean version reveals the long awaited new class.
Dragon’s Prophet Capture, Train, Fight Trailer
Dragon’s Prophet launches into open beta testing with a powerful new video showcasing the unity between players and dragons.
Artillery Revamped For World of Tanks Update 8.6
Wargaming today announced details for Update 8.6 for World of Tanks. The new update will bring further changes and balance to the in-game economy, as well add new SPGs to push that armor line to tier X.
“Update 8.6 is a major step in game balance enhancement and is really going to make SPGs players happy,” said Mike Zhivets, producer on World of Tanks. “Artillery gameplay is going to feel a lot more balanced with a normal ten tier structure, making advancing through that class of armor more comfortable for players.”
Current tier 8 SPGs will be promoted to tier X, while the newly introduced SPGs in Update 8.6 will take their place in the middle tiers. The American tech tree will be bolstered with M44 and M53/55 artillery units, while the Soviet line will be filled out with SU-122A and SU-14-1. The German tech line will be strengthened with three machines: 10.5 GW Mk.IV(e), Pz.Sfl.IVb, and G.W.Tiger (P). Lastly, the French will receive AMX Obusier automoteur de 105 and Bat.Chatillon155 (55) artilleries.
Update 8.6 will also introduce a new premium British medium tank, the A33 Excelsior, and will also introduce a new map based in Korea.
OnRPG Shotgun News 5/21: Dawngate, Scarlet Blade, GW2, Planetside, and much more!
By Shannon Doyle (Leliah), OnRPG Mistress of News
Dawngate Beta Begins Friday
Last week a new MOBA from EA was announced, this week it starts beta testing. You can still register to take part on the official website for Dawngate, so what are you waiting for?
Men Coming to Scarlet Blade in Taiwan
There is already a class of men in the Korean version of Scarlet Blade, and now they’re bringing men to Taiwan, could the West be next? The addition is being made thanks to a large number of players asking for it. You can see the new trailer of men kicking ass and dancing with ladies for yourself below.
Guild Wars 2 Drops in Price
A new permanent price drop has been issued for Guild Wars 2 that will be available starting later today. A $10/£10 drop in price will be available for both the standard and digital deluxe editions.
Dragon’s Prophet Announces Open Beta
Dragon’s Prophet has announced the open beta phase will begin on May 30th. And all founders will have one day early access starting May 29th. In addition to the announcement the Closed Beta NDA has been dropped which means you can find out more about the game.Including the article where OnRPG’s very own ApocaRUFF gives his thoughts.
Planetside to go F2P
Following in it’s sequel’s footsteps the original Planetside is due to go f2p. SOE CEO John Smedly took to twitter last night to make the reveal. Though it was announced in 2011 Planetside would be going F2P it has only partially done so with free time for anyone who has played previously and anyone who has played PlanetSide 2. There isn’t a date just yet though so keep an eye out here for more news on it.
World of Tanks 8.6 Update Incoming
Details for World of Tanks’ Update 8.6 have been announced. Included in the update will be more balances for the economy, new SPGs, a new premium British medium tank the A33 Excelsior, and a new map based in Korea.
Guild Wars 2 Last Stand at Southsun Update Announced
Just 14 days after the last content release Guild Wars 2 players have another to look forward to. This one expands on the trouble brewing in the Southsun Cove, especially dealing with a troubled renegade Sylvari called Canach. But that isn’t all the update has to offer. A ton of new WvW changes are coming in. Ranging from WvW XP, and even infusions and Ascended gear with WvW specific bonuses.
Star Trek Online: Legacy of Romulus Launches
Today is launch day for the first expansion of Star Trek Online: Legacy of Romulus. With new content for Klingons, not to mention the addition of Romulans and Remans there is plenty to keep players busy with for a long time to come. So get out there and go where every man is going now.
Wargaming WWII Movie Weekend
If you’re lucky enough to live in London you could attend a special War movie marathon being put on by Wargaming. The Weekend at War will take place in Stratford Cinema London from July 4-7. They’ll be showing classic WWII movies like The Great Escape, Kelly’s Heroes, TORA! TORA! TORA!, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and others. Tickets will be available for purchase starting May 31st.
Neverwinter Apologizes for Cat-tasprophe
That week went by quickly! The developers of Neverwinter have announced the details of the Caterday Survivor’s Pack. After Neverwinter experienced an exploit which can only be described as economy breaking the servers had to be brought down for the majority of the day before it was finally decided that a 7 hour rollback would be required. Anticipating the outcries of “OMG My Stuff” and “But I got over 9000 levels!” The developers quickly promised a bit of a thank you for the loss and everything else associated with the event. They had said it could take up to the end of the week before they could announce anything but since they don’t like to keep us waiting what the thank you package includes has been announced!
The Caterday Survivor’s Pack Includes:
Stone of Health
Cape of Catastrophe
Dwarven Facemask
5x Teleport Scroll – Protector’s Enclave
2x Adventurer’s XP Booster
The pack will be available for all characters made before 5AM Pacific Time on Sunday, May 19th when the problem was discovered. You’ll be able to find it in your in-game mail attached to the “You Survived!” message.
Dragon’s Prophet First Look
By Jordan Hall (ApocaRUFF), OnRPG Journalist
Dragon’s Prophet is an up-and-coming MMORPG that offers elements of the traditional themepark MMOs we’re all used to, and the sandbox genre that is beginning to take over the market. It is developed by Runewaker, who has previously developed Runes of Magic, and is being published by Sony Online Entertainment in North America. The game is filled with a diverse array of dragons that players can find and tame. It also has the “Frontier System” where players can take control of floating islands where they can build and decorate their homes. Altogether it looks like it will provide an exciting experience for fans of monster-capture games, dragons, and player housing.
Building Your Character
Like most games, you start out with making your character. There is currently one race in Dragon’s Prophet, so everyone plays as human. The first decision you make is your class and your choices are Guardian, Ranger, Oracle, and Sorcerer. Guardians are melee fighters who can either focus on defense or damage output. Rangers are non-magical ranged fighters that can dish out a lot of damage in a short amount of time. Oracle is a magic-based melee fighter who makes up for his lack of heavy armor with buffs and other magical abilities. And Sorcerer is a magic-based damage dealer.
You might notice that all classes in the game have been designed to be damage dealers. I believe this is so all classes can experience the fun of destroying their enemies with over-the-top attacks, while still having plenty of options available to them. Between the talent trees and dragon soul abilities, which I will talk about later, each class has a nice selection of choices to make themselves unique. That’s the theory of how it will go, anyways. The game hasn’t been available long enough to tell if that’s how it will play out.
After choosing your class, you are taken to the customization screen. Runewaker has provided us with a lot of options for our characters. Everything from your eyes to your legs has a slider. You also get a selection of colors for everything, including your skin. You can create a pale-skinned beauty or a purple Popeye-armed monster.
Once you’ve spent a good twenty or thirty minutes designing your character, you will be asked to choose which continent you would like to start on. After that, you are thrown into the familiar cycle of going from quest hub to quest hub and leveling up your character. Each level you are given three points to spend on your stats and at level fifteen you start getting points to spend on your talent tree. You don’t get unlimited points for either, so you will need to choose wisely.
The World
Dragon’s Prophet takes place in a world with a rich lore. You are of the Osira, the first humans and the blood that courses through your veins allows you to bind with the dragonkin. The world is an interesting place, filled with many lands with their own distinct feel from deserts, to forest, to floating islands. Auratia has both a fantasy and a steampunk feel to it, as there is lots of magic but at the same time there are airships, trains and other steampunk-looking technology around.
Unfortunately, the airships are usually static or act as transportation between zones. Speaking of zones, there are currently seven of them. The monsters and NPCs that inhabit them are given routines to do so that they seem more life-like. Animals will walk around and eat the grass or munch on the corpse of another dead animal, or even take a nap. NPCs in towns will roam around completing their jobs and even stop to have silent conversations with each other. However, putting in some voice acting would do wonders with making the game feel more alive.
Nothing like a fight on the streets
There was one glaring problem that I ran into. A majority of the world, or at least the part where you spend the first thirty levels or so, feels like it wasn’t designed with flying dragons in mind. Due to the massive cliffs that you can’t get past, the areas that you can fly in feel very cramped. I feel like the devs made the dragons fly slower than I would expect them to fly for this reason and I feel that it hinders the game a lot. In a world inhabited by amazing dragons, a lot of which have wings, it should largely consist of wide open spaces.
You can only fly in the green spaces, it’s not possible to go past the areas marked with red
That’s not to say every area will make you feel claustrophobic. There were a decent number of spots that actually had a lot of room to fly around in. I just feel that there were too few of those areas and too many of the restricted areas. I shouldn’t have to follow a set path to get to a village when I have a dragon that can fly, just because there are large cliffs on either side of me and a low flight ceiling. Hopefully this will be changed later on, but I doubt how likely that would be.
Every map should be as wide and open as this one.
Controls
The controls in the game worked fairly well. There are some areas that could use work in the way that targeting things works, but I’m sure it will get smoothed out as time goes on so I’m not worried. The only thing I disliked about the combat controls was that it was hard to tell if your combos were working correctly. Later on after you’ve put several hours into the game it’s easier to tell, but you have next to no idea what you’re doing at the beginning. This results in you not making as much use of the combo system.
The Dragons
Before we get too far into Dragons, let’s discuss how they are tamed. First, you will want to know that you have a bar under your health and mana, which is yellow and represents your Dragon Soul Points. These points are consumed when taming a dragon, or using a Dragon Soul ability, and are replenished over time or by fighting enemies. If you want to tame a dragon, it is a very good idea that you are the same or higher level, and that your Dragon Soul Points are maxed out. Trying it without those two things will make it very difficult.
Taming itself is done by jumping on the dragon’s back and playing a mini-game as it struggles against you. The point of the mini-game is to use the WASD keys to try and keep a dragon head icon within the inner-circle shown in the screenshot below. While the head is in the inner-circle, the red bar on the right goes up and the goal is to fill the red bar. As this happens, the yellow bar on the left, which represents your Dragon Soul Points, is depleting. If the yellow bar is empty before you get the red bar to where it needs to successfully tame the dragon, you will fail.
There is a variety of dragonkin available for players to tame. Some dragons can only run on the ground, some can glide, some can swim, and some fly. There are even dragons that can do a combination of those. Dragons can look like what you would expect from traditional European fantasy, like lizards, or they can even look like birds. Some even kind of look like Tonton’s from Star Wars. If you can imagine it, the developers probably already have and put it into the game.
Dragons provide a number of roles. You can use them as combat companions or mounts. You can turn them into laborers to gather resources for you using the lair system. When you tame a dragon, you will find that it is not the same as every other dragon of that type. Part of the fun is trying to find the dragon with the perfect stats and the best Dragon Soul abilities.
Speaking of Dragon Soul abilities, there’s a wide array of them. I’ve found buffs that increase your armor, damage, or stats. I’ve found a number of different heals, too. From heals that will replenish your mana as well as your health, to abilities that will allow you to heal yourself and allies over a wide area. Having a dragon in your dragon inventory will give you access to any of the Dragon Soul abilities they may know, and you can have a maximum of six dragons on you at any time.
I mentioned earlier that you can use dragons to collect resources for you. This is done with the lair system. You will use the lair system to store your extra dragons, to train your dragons, to transfer Dragon Soul abilities between dragons, and many other things. Almost every town seems to have a Lair management NPC in it. It’s a good idea to set your dragon up to train while you’re offline before you log off for the night.
The one thing that I do not like about the dragons is that you can only have them out for a few seconds at a time. It is possible to put points in a certain stat to increase the length of time that they can be out, but I feel like we shouldn’t have to do that. The selling point of the game, at least for me, was dragons. And limiting the amount of time I can fight with them just turns them into some novelty that you will often forget to make use of unless it is a hard boss fight. You can have your dragon out as a mount for as long as you like, though.
The Game
I’m going to start off with the negative here. First, the game has yet to show me anything original in terms of questing. You do your typical leveling up questing cycle that can be found in every other quest-based themepark game. You will start in a town, and then move down a linear path of quest hubs, complete all the quests in that area, move to the next, and repeat that. Occasionally a dungeon shows up and you get to fight an epic over-sized enemy, but that’s not enough to make it fun.
The massive size of these bosses really make the fights feel epic.
Crafting isn’t anything new either. There are six crafting schools that everyone has access to. The most efficient way to get resources for crafting is to have your dragon do it for you, but you can also gather stuff from the world as you quest. This doesn’t require any special skills or tools, so you can just run up and start gathering. Basically, it’s your typical “Collect X and Y to make Z” type crafting. I haven’t been able to tell how important crafting will be in the game yet.
Now that this disappointment is out of the way, I can discuss what I really liked. The combat in Dragon’s Prophet is quite fun. Usually, I prefer ranged magic users in MMOs, but I found myself enjoying the Guardian class the most. I’ve jumped into fight after fight with pure enthusiasm, throwing enemies up into the air and then raining blows on them while they fall to the ground. I enjoy challenging myself by seeing how many enemies I can take on and stay alive.
Combat is an interesting mix of targeting and action combat. I’m not quite sure how to define it. Unfortunately, there is no dodge ability, but it is possible to run out of the way of an enemy’s attack. You can also hit multiple enemies with your attack if they’re standing close enough together. Everything is solid, too, so you will find yourself being thrown or stuck in the middle of a group of monsters if you’re not careful.
This is how you teach a bear to fly
I can’t say anything about PVP, as I haven’t gotten to try it yet. I did notice a PVP Status button in the abilities list, so I assume it’s something you can toggle. I’m not sure if all PVP is consented to via this toggle, or if there will be some areas in the game that force PVP. I also did not get a chance to check out the Frontier, so I can’t mention anything on that either, which sucks as a lot of the game’s most interesting features take place in the Frontier – such as player housing. However, I will be covering it in great detail in my full review of the game that will be coming later, once I get a better feel for the game.
The Cash Shop
Something that has been worrying everyone is the cash shop. I can say that Station Cash (SC) has a hand in almost everything in the game. If you die, you can pay a few SC to revive right where you died. You can also pay SC to make upgrading equipment, crafting, and just about everything else more easy. Anything you can do with SC, you can do with in-game methods as well, but with more effort involved. I also noticed that there was an option on the Auction House to set it up so you sell your items for SC. I do not know if this means that players can receive SC via selling stuff on the Auction House, though.
Conclusion
It’s a bit too early to really judge Dragon’s Prophet. What really has me disappointed is the very linear quest progression, it’s the same system MMOs have been using for over a decade now and I wish the cycle would stop. However, features like the Frontier hold incredible promise and the fact that the diversity of dragons available for taming will probably rival that of the first generation of Pokemon help it a lot. After pouring tens of hours into the game, I’m still as excited about it as I was when I first heard of it months ago. I will continue to play and will be sure to share what I find later on.
Be sure to catch the latest MMOHuts First Look to get a visual look at Dragon’s Prophet courtesy of JamesBl0nde.
Gloria Victis Rolls Out Massive Pre-Alpha Updates
Today Black Eye Games has announced a series of major updates to Gloria Victis, an MMORPG already looking like a breath of fresh air in its pre-alpha state. The forest is now filled with life boasting a wide variety of inhabitants and is now the home of foxes, wolves, boars, sows and wild piglets.
The updates however do not pertain only to the wildlife but extends to the fauna as well. In the forest, players are now able to gather bark and lumber from trees, harvest seven different vanities of mushrooms as well as gather pelts and game meat from slain beasts.
For the more agriculturally minded player, you can now also gather pumpkins, hops, wheat, flax and sunflowers from the fields outside the village, but be wary, there also lurks a mob based on Slavic Folklore that will not hesitate to strike the player.
Another update enlarged the underground area outside of the village in anticipation for a pathway to a completely new area featuring a swamp and a larger village with its own fortified keep. A new partnership with Medieval Worlds has offered new concept art portraying how that village will look. Also in the underground area are five new humanoid thug mobs that the player can test their steel against.
As loot and currency systems are now implemented, our shop system is also online and players are now able to earn their gold to buy their gear. Black Eye Games hope to implement a basic crafting system in the next phase of updates in order to set the frameworks for the dynamic, non-grinding, skill-based crafting system. Of course more alpha invites will be sent out along with the next series of updates so keep an eye out if you’ve applied! And catch all the new screenshots on our profile page.
League of Legends AllStar Tournament 2013 Shanghai
The players have voted and now the favorite players of each region will clash this week in Shanghai in the first ever League of Legends AllStar Tournament.



















