Yearly Archives: 2013

Shotgun News 12/6: Granado Espada EU, Warhammer 40k, and Lost Chaos

Granado Espada Europe Announces Closed Beta Dates

EuroGamez has announced that the closed beta for Granado Espada EU will begin on December 10th. Everyone who takes part in the closed beta will be able to take part in several events and giveaways.

Warhammer 40k Adds Eldar to Race List

Warhammer Eldar

The 3rd person action MMORPG Warhammer 40,000 Eternal Crusade has added a new race to the roster. This makes them the final playable faction that will be available at launch along with Space Marines, Orks, and Chaos Space Marines. The Website however has one last thing under Phase 2 that has yet to be uncovered so more may be coming soon.

Gamigo Takes Over Lost Chaos in North America

Aeria Games has handed over all North American licensing rights for MMORPG Lost Chaos over to Gamigo. Gaming operations were all transferred yesterday. The conditions of this licensing exchange have not been disclosed.

Early Access: Aura Kingdom – The Three Cs

By Darren Henderson (DizzyPW), General Manager

Early Access Aura Kingdom

Does your MMORPG lack epic Anime storylines filled with clichés, over exaggerated emotes, and explosions that leave you dazed? Do you have an uncontrollable urge to catch ‘em all but lack friends with expensive 3D Gameboys? Perhaps you’re a pervert that needs ample pantie shots after a hard day’s work?

Aura Kingdom Panty Shot

Well if you’re suffering from any of these problems, 2014 is looking bright as Aura Kingdom is positioned to reveal its western debut with Aeria Games in just a few weeks from now! And to celebrate, not only am here to bring you a more in-depth discussion of what the press was shown in Thursday’s 4 hour demo, but I’ll even be giving out two Aura Kingdom playing card decks to two winners that follow the giveaway instructions at the end of each article!

 

Xlegend Full Circle

X-Legend Goes Full Circle

Many eons ago, I came before you guys to write about the previous X-Legend game published by Aeria, Eden Eternal. That was roughly two and a half years ago and the MMO industry has changed, gamers have been jaded from one too many false promises, and as someone who spent three years reading reviews from forty-six odd (figuratively and literally) free-lance writers, I can say I know this better than most.

So when Aeria told me a few months back that X-Legend was launching a game combining elements of their past successes such as Eden Eternal’s multi-classing, Kistu Saga’s over the top focus on cuteness, and Grand Fantasia’s elaborate (for its time) MMO pet system and social functions, I was skeptical. At least until I realized I had already played this game at last year’s G-Star and found it quite enjoyable as a prototype. The game has come a long way since then so let’s break down where it shines and where it still needs some work. But first we need to lay the foundation by introducing the core customization features.

 

Aura Kingdom Three Cs

Classes, Creation, and Customization

Aura Kingdom nails the all-important elements that make the Anime MMO fan-base get all warm and fuzzy for. If you want classes, it has more than a few while carefully avoiding stepping on each other’s toes with the five-man party limitation.

Aura Kingdom Guardian Class

Guardian- First on the battlefield and last to leave, Guardians work tirelessly to ensure victory through superior tactics. Their sword and shield combo gives them a balanced offense and defense, enabling them to outlast enemies while waiting for the perfect opening – or create one with a well-timed block and counterattack.

Aura Kingdom Ravager Class

Ravager- Each swing of a Ravager’s massive axe delivers a payload of pain, and often collateral damage to any unfortunate enough to be standing too close. With a frenzy in their eyes, they shrug off their own injuries in a race to kill their enemy first, destroying anything that stands in their way.

Aura Kingdom Duelist

Duelist- Speeding like a meteor across the sky, Duelists rush enemies with their razor-sharp dual blades before they have a chance to react. Consummate close-range specialists, these fleet-footed fighters combine acrobatics and a touch of magic to disorient and wear down even the strongest foes.

Aura Kingdom Gunslinger Class

Gunslinger- The quickest draw in the land, Gunslingers pack a punch by peppering foes with magic-laced bullets from their twin pistols. To these hotshots, there’s no such thing as an underhanded move if it wins the fight, and to that end, they employ devious traps and even special bullets that debilitate enemies.

Aura Kingdom Grenadier Class

Grenadier- Grenadiers are known far and wide for the massive cannons they heft into battle. These miraculous feats of engineering are capable of firing missiles, discharging powerful plasma bursts, or launching elementally-charged grenades. With such an arsenal, Grenadiers have a blast demolishing foes from afar.

Aura Kingdom Bard Class

Bard- Consummate masters of support, Bards know just the tune to invigorate their allies. Always a hit in parties, they’ve got the sonic skills to take down foes alone as well. With harp in hand, they can unleash songs to harm, heal, or help, always sure to return for an encore performance. (Holy alliteration Batman!)

Aura Kingdom Wizard Class

Wizard- The ways of magic are mysterious to many, but Wizards see order amidst the chaos, looking to the forces of nature for their inspiration. Using staves to focus raw mana, they conjure elemental spells that can turn the tides of battle, making them respected and indispensable allies in combat.

Aura Kingdom Sorcerer Class

Sorcerer- Few dare to plumb the darker side of magic, but Sorcerers brave its depths with gusto. In the pages of old tomes and grimoires they find runes and sigils that, although forgotten by the world at large, have lost none of their potency. With a host of debilitating spells at their fingertips, none can deny a Sorcerer’s way with words.

 

Mystery Class- What could it be? All that is present is a mysterious locked sign. Perhaps we’ll know when open beta arrives? But based on the melee to ranged ratio, I’m thinking it’s going to be something that gets up close and personal with the enemy.

 

Aura Kingdom Character Looks

 

Creation: Once you have your playstyle in mind, the next step is hammering out your looks. Not only did the version I played beat out most Anime MMOs in number of classes, it also offered the most customization options at creation I’ve seen out of any default slider model. Sure it’s not modded Skyrim facial cheek slider level of detail, but for the F2P Anime genre it’s pretty outstanding.

No class is gender locked. There’s nine face options per gender with ten hairstyles. Every hairstyle has twelve colors you can dye consisting of all the typical natural colors along with the full spectrum of the rainbow. Beyond that you have a whopping twenty eye colors. Skin tone offered four shades starting at peachy white to more Asian tones, though many of our preset characters were various darker shades leading me to believe that a decent number of options are in the process of being implemented here in preparation for the westernized launch.  After twirling through all these options it becomes pretty clear how this game ended up being called Aura Kingdom.

Once all the presets and colors are set, players can zoom in, rotate, and have their character do one of six emotes to confirm you’re looking sharp before slapping on a name and jumping into the land of Azuria.

Aura Kingdom First Eidolon

Well… there is the little detail of selecting from one of four starter Eidolons but I’ll save that discussion for part 2 of our coverage.

 

Aura Kingdom Customization

Customization:

Once your adventure starts, you will find a plethora of options to set yourself apart from the crowd statistically, visually, and sometimes through options consisting of a combination of both.

Aura Kingdom Offensive Stats

Statistically you have the D&D old school freedom to choose your own leveling stats. Except it’s done smarter than the original Maplestory-esque take on the concept by offering you separate points for boosting your offensive and defensive capabilities. Will you spend your precious offensive points on boosting your base damage, upping crit chance, or upping attack speed/reducing cooldowns? Will you spend your defense points on bolstering hp/out of combat regen, offsetting damage you take by a percent, or increasing your gamble factor by raising evade to try to dodge attacks altogether?

Aura Kingdom Defensive Stats

While certain class skills will make the weight of these decisions lean more towards one of the three options than the others, I feel in the end it comes down to personal philosophy and playstyle. Gamblers might lean heavier towards evade for the thrill of uncertain damage absorption while more reserved players might lean raw base damage over crit chance. And while that might be well and good for number pushes and min-maxers to debate over, most of you out there will be spending most of your time focused on the Envoy’s Path decisions.

Aura Kingdom Envoys Path

Envoy’s Path: The Envoy’s Path is a branching and complicated series of seemingly arbitrary boxes laying out your skill and passive options. No box is worth more than the others but since you start in the middle and are limited by points gained from leveling, you will have to plan things out ahead of time to connect boxes from the middle to the eventual boosts you’re trying to acquire. Aura Kingdom adds an additional layer of complexity to this by making some of the far border boxes have the requirement of a specific secondary weapon choice you’ll need to unlock, meaning they are only available for characters at or past level 40 (sorry 40 is going to be the cap in beta testing for a bit).

From my brief testing with the Envoy’s Path, I feel like it’s there and can have an impact of playstyle, but not to the point that a player could cripple their character from competing with others. Most every path seems to offer enough unique advantages to be viable while offering an additional layer of customization to set yourself apart.

Aura Kingdom Dyes

Dyeing: The final customization point I’m going to touch on is the purely cosmetic but ever important feature, armor and fashion dying. Aura Kingdom stays true to its psychedelic rainbow theme but featuring enough dye colors to make a Guild Wars 1 fan nostalgic. Beyond that various gear pieces have multiple color slots, allowing for deviant delights and horrific fashion statements through mixing and matching so many colors throughout your set. The only drawback is dye is rare and trying to acquire a specific color on top of it will be even more so. This is definitely going to be a cash shop draw to the game but thankfully is not a cash shop required feature to enjoy.

 

Well it’s 1am and I don’t want to slip up and share wrong information so I’m going to take a pause before continuing our coverage of Aura Kingdom later today. Remember to visit our forum thread to take part in guessing my favorite Eidolon to be entered into a drawing to win the first pack of Aura Kingdom playing cards!

Aura Kingdom Logging Out

Catch Part 2 covering Achievements and Eidolons now!

Bonus Emote Show!

Imagine Nations

Imagine Nations is a sandbox-style voxel universe simulator that seeks to push boundaries beyond anything seen in Minecraft. You begin as the mayor of a town to people like yourself, but as you craft, build, and expand, you will discover new worlds and cultures beyond your initial horizons. Complete missions or roam the wilderness – the choice is yours.

Features:

Infinite Universe: A procedurally generated voxel universe is created each time you start a new game, infinitely expanding as you explore. Go beyond your own world into space and see new planets!

Customizable Character: Create a character out of various head, body, and locomotion modules to give yourself a balance of strengths and weaknesses; wear armor and equipment; wield tools and weapons; and utilize skills.

Crafting: Use manufacturing and construction resources to build everything from the simplest of tools to complex blueprints for homes or vehicles.

Simulation: Primitive cultures expand into modern technology and beyond, even capable of exploring space. You will discover new, procedurally generated cultures as time passes, which may even be aggressive!

Missions & Events: Four stages of missions are available as you explore the game, ranging from simple tasks to complex and culture-wide scenarios. Want to be a hero? Wait until a catastrophic event hits, and overcome immense challenges.

Modding: Player-created content can range from new textures, audio, and models to new missions, events, cultures, and more. If that isn’t enough, you can also alter the physics, simulation procedures, and more – and access other mods through a safe hub.

Imagine Nations – Kickstarter Preview

By Michael Sagoe (mikedot), OnRPG Journalist

Ever since the global phenomenon called Minecraft, a rising trend of “Make it your own” sandbox titles was created soon after its rise to fame. While a few of them have brought some interesting new ideas to the table, many others were just trying to bite off a bit of Minecraft’s success. Now, a new Kickstarter project called “Imagine Nations” by indie developer group “Cat Banana Studios” is looking to stand out from all the others with unique features derived from almost every genre out there.

With their currently ongoing Kickstarter campaign, Imagine Nations promises a procedurally generated world where players can explore their environment, build a town, battle against hostile creatures and more, all made possible through the use of voxels-based cubes. While it might sound like just another Minecraft wannabe, Imagine Nations goes one step further by integrating a unique Mayor mechanic where players can take direct control of their town and direct NPCs to create various structures, research new technologies and help their society expand and grow. Think of it as a mix between Minecraft and Sid Meier’s Civilization.

image1

In order to drum up some support for their Kickstarter project, they’ve release an alpha demo of the game for everyone to play. With the demo only being under 100mb, I decided to give it a quick whirl during a lazy afternoon session.

The demo starts off by dropping the player into a large forest with scattered hills and crevices in plain sight.  Right inside that forest is a large town house with various civilians pacing up and down the area. As the game mentions upon entry, you’re the mayor of this small town and must begin your duty by helping the townspeople in various ways. So then the game directs the player into the house in order to access the mayor’s console. Once activated by the player, they enter an RTS style mode where they can see the entire landscape of the town and forest from a top-down view. From here, the player can pick various houses to build for their citizens. Just pick a house, select an open spot on the ground and watch the townspeople go to work on it. At the moment, the demo doesn’t seem to include any major resource gathering, as the townspeople were able to build these houses without any wood… or stone… or bricks… or anything else but their pickaxes, for that matter.

image2

After the house was built, it was time to build a barrier around the town to keep any hostile creatures in the forest from coming in. Just what hostile creatures were out there was a bit of a mystery, and I sure wasn’t prepared to fight them off with an axe.

But anyway, gathering wood to use for the barrier was as easy as taking a single whack at a tree. Once a tree was cut down, the wood is placed in my character’s inventory and to be laid down across the floor… sort of.

image3

Yes, I’m sure these floating wood cubes will do a fine job of protecting the town… just as long as whatever creatures in the forest aren’t too big to climb over or too small to crawl under it…

After the town’s awkward looking defenses were up, it was then time to go look for food. The game mentions that a caravan was lost far out into the forest, and that I would have to be the one to go get it. Well geez, I thought I was supposed to be the mayor of this town, not some lowly scavenger…

But regardless, my curiosity over what was waiting out there got the best of me, and so I went off with only my pickaxe to protect me. After wandering the forest for about a minute, the caravan was spotted. I was ready to pull the cart back to town, but then all of a sudden…

…A wild cat goat appears!

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Or at least, I THINK it’s a cat goat…

Well I know for sure that it’s not a friendly cat goat, because the thing attacked me as soon as I touched the cart. With my measly axe, I hacked the cat goat to death, but soon after, even more cat goats arrived. Those feisty things wouldn’t let up. Fortunately, I was able to defeat them all.

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With the caravan secure, houses built and defenses up, the day was saved, and the demo was completed… Time to screw around!

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Overall, the initial product they’ve choose to present to the public may be lacking, but a very good foundation for the game as a whole has been set.  The amount of features planned by Cat Banana could easily make Imagine Nations stand out from all the other sandbox titles that attempted to ride the Minecraft trending train, such being able to fight much bigger creatures, engineer and pilot giant planes or even build a civilization in space.

However, with a couple of weeks left into their Kickstarter campaign and only around 2% of their funding goal achieved, they still have a long climb ahead of them.

For more information, check out the Kickstarter Page here.

WarpPortal Reveals Class Details for Mobile RPG Tower of Ascension

WarpPortal, known for publishing the online and mobile Ragnarok Online franchise, has revealed Warrior, Hunter, and Wizard as the official classes for the highly anticipated Unreal 3 powered mobile game, Tower of Ascension .

TOA Warrior

Warrior:

Among all the heroes of Midgard the warriors are the strongest and toughest, featuring two different play styles; one handed sword and shield for quick attacks and high defense, & two handed weapons for explosive amounts of damage.

ToA Hunter

Hunter:

To offset their small frames, Hunters specialized in long-range attacks, especially preemptive and moving attacks. They may be small, but their guns pack a powerful punch.

ToA Wizard

Wizard:

Masters of magic and sorcery, these heroes have the elements and dark magic at their fingertips. Whether using Ice to slow enemies, lightening to cause massive direct damage, fire to burn groups at a time, or dark magic to curse and weaken, the Wizard is ready for a variety of circumstances.

 

Battle against friends or party up with them to take down some of the vilest monsters in your quest for immortality.

Wind of Changes – New Expansion for Allods Online is Live Worldwide

Allods Bastion

All Allods Online players can enjoy Wind of Changes, the latest expansion now live on all European and American servers. In “Wind of Changes”, some major game features have been redesigned, and one of the most important changes being made is in the new Dominion!

With the new expansion, the Dominion has been significantly altered. Players can now say goodbye to all sectors on dominion map as the old Dominion lacked proper balance and only large and powerful guilds were able to progress on the map while completely overshadowing smaller guilds. Allods Online team has decided to implement a fairer system that will allow everybody to participate and to compete against enemies on the same level. This means that the battles will become more random, guilds won’t be able to use unfair strategies to avoid fighting, or benefit by simply being at the right place at the right moment. The New Dominion will be more fairly balanced, so champions will have to earn their place at the top.

Allods Mount WoC

In addition to the Dominion, players will also get a completely new PvP event in the game called “Scarlet Bastion”. The Scarlet Bastion will allow up to 30 players with different levels of equipment to fight face to face in the same arena. The event will take place twice a day. Participants will be grouped in two teams; the first team will contain 6 players with the highest gear score, the remaining 24 heroes will join the lower gear score team. Both parties will be fighting on a small island, where the six man team will have to defend the fortress against the opposing team of invaders.

With the launch of this new expansion Allods Online players will get an opportunity to try different classes without the need of creating a new in-game character, this is all thanks to the “Core Morpher”, a special scroll that can be purchased only at the auction house. As this item contains great potential of altering the balancing of the game world, it will be available every week from Monday to Saturday only at the auction house and another change will be possible after a month.

Wind of Changes will also bring some minor updates like a new and entirely re-designed in-game mail system which will bring great benefits to all players. We are also introducing new game modifiers to make your Sarnaut adventures even more exciting and challenging.

Shotgun News 12/5: APB, Black Gold, LoL, and Much More!

APB Gets an iOS Spin-off

A new mobile top down tactical shooter has been in the works this year based in the APB: Reloaded universe. Titled APB: Retribution the game takes players through the streets of San Paro where they take on heavily armed thugs. It is being developed by Reloaded Productions and Blazing Griffin and due to be released sometime this month.


World of Warcraft Cast Announced

Universal Pictures has announced they’ve closed deals with Ben Foster, Travis Fimmel, Paula Patton, Toby Kebbell, and Rob Kazinsky for the upcoming Warcraft based movie. Dominic Cooper has also been listed as in the final stages of negotiation. Notibly missing from the list is Colin Farrell who it had been rumored was offered a lead role. Production is set to begin in January and the film has a release date of March 11th 2016.

 

Black Gold Online Reveal Chambers of Greed

As part of the Game feature reveal series Black Gold Online has lifted the veil on the Chambers of Greed. Chambers of Greed are more challenging free for all instances with PvP. These hidden instances will generally require a trigger before entry, most often by killing a gatekeeper.

Warfare Open Beta Dates Announced

NGames has announced the open beta for free to play strategy/RPG/Sim MMO Warfare will begin on December 10th. At the same time they revealed a little more about this post war world. Players begin on their own island not long after the end of WWIII has changed the face of the planet. China, Russia, America, and Germany all fight for global dominance. Players are asked to join one of the four major nations.

 

War Thunder Announces Closed Beta for Expansion and Packs

Gaijin Entertainment has announced that the closed beta for War Thunder’s Ground Forces expansion has begun. The easiest way to gain access to this closed beta is by buying one of the four supporter packs which range from $49.99 to $99.99. They also contain titles, tanks, and decals which will be exclusive to the packs which are available for purchase now.

 

Riot Bans Pro LoL Players from Streaming Competitor’s Games

It has been confirmed by Riot that part of the Season 4 League of Legends Championship Series contract includes players being forbidden from streaming many of their competitor’s games. This includes games like DOTA 2, Starcraft, World of Warcraft, World of Tanks, and Fat Princess.

 

War of the Vikings Offers Free to Play Weekend

Paradox Interactive is hosing a free to play weekend for the upcoming close combat game War of the Vikings. It will appear in the library of every Steam account from December 5th to 8th when players will be able to log in and give it a try.