Monthly Archives: January 2014

Elsword updates with new dungeons, mounts and more

It’s time to saddle up! Kill3rCombo, publisher of the hit free-to-play action MORPG Elsword has introduced its brand-new mount system and it’s how all the heroes of Elrios are getting around. Players can now ride, play and fight in villages, fields and dungeons.

Elsword Mount

Elsword’s new mount system will have players quickly traveling from village to village at breakneck speeds. Three different mounts are available at launch. Mounts automatically come with enhanced defenses to ward off monster attacks, and each Mount has their very own arsenal of attacks including heat-seeking missiles, epic laser flares and kickin’ incinerator death-breath. Regardless of which mount you pick, they have you covered with just the push of a button. All players will get a test-ride with new in-game mount system events. This is a limited-time offer so players should climb aboard now before it’s too late.

Elsword Sander Dungeon

Just when players thought things were cooling off, the battle for the village of Sander erupts into an all-out war! The two latest Dungeons of Sander promise to take the heroic epic of Elsword into the next chapter. The menacing subterranean Trock’s Lair, and the squall laden floating valleys of the Caluso Tribal Village each cast their very own spell of mystery and intrigue upon the land. It’s up to players to help our heroes fight for their lives and halt a seemingly endless war of attrition! Or is this all part of something bigger . the quest to find the Wind Priestess and uncover the mystery of Sander continues.

Additionally, players will find the level cap raised from 64 to 67.

For more information, visit ElswordOnline.com

World of Warcraft 2014 Review – Standing the Test of Time

By Jason Parker (Ragachak)

Table of Contents

The Basics of Class & Caste

The Hard Truth About PvP

Turning the Wheel of Progress

Manifest Destiny

 

World Of Warcraft Review 8

Opinions, Opinions Everywhere

Everyone has an opinion about World of Warcraft.  Everything from “It’s complete garbage,” “Vanilla was better lol,” “Best game of all time!” and so on.  I am in a difficult position in that while I have played the game since the original “Vanilla” World of Warcraft (before the expansions), my personal thoughts will be broadcast throughout the internet, for good or for ill.  I am not here to hoist Blizzard’s creation above all things, but there are good and bad things to be said for the game, and while it may not be for everyone, Blizzard has made a game that is for “most” people. While it is not the best MMO, or even my favorite of those on the current market (That spot belongs to Final Fantasy XIV, without question) it certainly holds a lot of fond memories for me.  That is not to say that I wear nostalgia goggles while I play.  There are lots of things that made the game incredibly frustrating for me, and no doubt, for other players.  Unlike several of my close friends, I do not have a host of level 90s.  I have an overwhelming tendency to get distracted, or disinterested with a playstyle, and try something else.  I also have to take this time to thank Seamus McCarthy, and Courtney Jackson for providing the additional Alliance screenshots for me.  Many thanks, you two!

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft was born out of a PC series of strategy games called Warcraft.  It began with Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, and then we had Warcraft 2: Tides of War, and then its expansion, Beyond the Dark Portal.  Finally, we had Warcraft 3, which expanded the war beyond just Orcs and Humans.  Now we have the Undead, Night Elves, Orcs, and Humans.  Warcraft 3 also added “Hero” units, more powerful people, born of the lore, that shaped the world.  This was just another step towards the MMO.  And now we have it.  November 2004 changed the way we viewed MMOs forever.  Before World of Warcraft, we had other MMOs.  WoW was neither the first, nor the last MMO; before it came EverQuest, Ultima Online, MUDs (Multi User Dungeons), and Final Fantasy XI, just to name a few. WoW took the best parts of its competitors, and made them its own. Blizzard cunningly set up a system that was easy to get into and would grow more and more challenging to master as the years went on.  Two primary factions were duking it out for control of the world of Azeroth: The Human Alliance, and the Orcish Horde.  Each side has its own races, with their own classes they can use.  Let’s start with a bit of an overview on the game itself:

 

World Of Warcraft Review 7

Class and Caste

World of Warcraft is divided into two factions, which have their own unique races.  The Alliance is made up of the Humans, Dwarves, Night Elves, and Gnomes originally.  In the Burning Crusade, the Draenei showed up to aid the humans, and during the Cataclysm, the Worgen came forth.  The Orcish Horde has the Orcs, Undead, Tauren, and Trolls.  The Blood Elves and Goblins came forth at the same time that the Draenei and Worgen appeared. Lastly we have the Pandaren; they are a neutral race which only changes at the end of the zone where you pick a side to stand with.  Personally, I was always a fan of the Horde. I prefer their version of the lore over the Alliance. I would rather strength and honor, over the vaunted justice of the Alliance.

The classes themselves have changed constantly over the years the game has been played.  The balancing has not always been fair or correct from my personal point of view, but it is there, and the staff at Blizzard do their best to keep it enjoyable for all.  Originally, the Alliance had Warriors, Druids, Rogues, Mages, Priests, Warlocks, Hunters, and Paladins (Alliance-Only).  The Horde had Warriors, Druids, Rogues, Mages, Priests, Warlocks, Hunters, and Shaman (Horde-Only).  For balance purposes, the opposing faction were given the unique classes and later still we would see the Death Knight hero class, and Monks, which are available to both sides as well.  Each class has three sets of specializations, which vary from class to class.  Each one has a purpose, from the myriad of damage types like Rogue and Warlock, to the all-purpose Druids and Paladins, who have a Tank, Healer, and DPS tree to assist in whichever position they are needed.

Initially, there were three trees with dozens of talents that a player could take. They were specialized, in that Paladins would have Holy (healing), Protection (tanking), and Retribution (damage).  These talent points could be spent in any tree, allowing a great deal of customization, but also a great deal of confusion could be garnered from this.  As time progressed, the changes went to the talent system over and over, making it more and more general.  Now the class talents are broad and generic, with the main abilities of the class being based on what specialization you choose.  There was a time where you could take some of those abilities with some careful juggling, and have a vast array of skills and abilities.  In the current iteration of the game, this has become standardized, even simplified.

World Of Warcraft Review 6

This is a rather unfortunate turn of events.  One of the more interesting things about the talent system was the ability to do virtually anything.  Now the class trees are more akin to bushes.  Abilities are cut off based on what path you choose and I have not felt that many of the talent choices I made were particularly useful one way or another.  There are choices that make or break a specialization but far and wide they do not make a lot of difference in the long run.

The Repopulation reveals new lore: “Evening Star”

Evening Star

The world of The Repopulation gets fleshed out just a bit more with new lore revealed on January 14th, with new short story based on the landing on Rhyldan which is entitled “Evening Star”. This story guides you through the initial landing on the planet and is comprised of seven chapters. Due to the size of this feature we will be releasing a chapter a day. It was written by Fran Macjus and Paul Bloom and we hope it helps to shed some light on the early bits of the games lore.

The first chapter is now available and can be read visiting their site: https://therepopulation.com/index.php/component/content/article/2-uncategorised/134-evening-star-chapter-1-green-lights

For more information on The Repopoulation, visit https://therepopulation.com/

Rise of Mythos, Angels and Dragons in Update 1.4

Dragon_Queen_Danika

GameFuse, the leading publisher of free-to-play online games, is pleased to announce that Rise of Mythos, the #1 Strategy/RPG card game, is releasing the first part of the new massive Update 1.4 with new cards, quests,  and numerous new in-game features to enhance the player gaming experience.

Update 1.4 will be broken into 3 different updates. Part 1 introduces players to two new races, Angels and Dragons. Angels are powerful warriors on the field of battle and amazing support cards! Angels feature a relatively low attack but decent health scores, making them good damage sponges in a fight. However, their abilities make them some of the best support cards in the entire game.

Angel_Lightbinder

Dragons are introduced as offensive powerhouses sure to strike fear into the hearts of your enemies. Flame Dragons have relatively low cooldowns combined with high attack scores and a moderate health score. Their Flame Wing ability not only grants them the power of flight, but also reduces fire damage taken by half.

In addition, there will be two brand new events called: “Red Dragon Lair” and “God in the Tower”. The “Red Dragon Lair” allow players to summon their courage to face the powerful Mother of Flames, Veraaksia!  You’ll need to fight your way through waves of her draconic offspring to take her down, and you’ll need to do it quickly, because if you take too long, Veraaksia will wipe out your entire party! While “God in the Tower” challenges you to climb to the highest levels of Ascension Tower and fight against the armies of Heaven.  Should you be fortunate enough to come across the host of angels, you’ll be able to earn bonus points completing quests which will yield even richer rewards!

In the upcoming months, additional updates to 1.4 will be released in different stages to provide the community with exciting new content to further their gaming experience in the world of Rise of Mythos!

New Guardian’s Tower expansion available for C9

Webzen has just released the fourth expansion for their dungeon-based MORPG, Continent of the Ninth Seal (C9). Starting today, the Guardian’s Tower will increase 20 levels up to the 40th floor. Players will have a chance to battle new monsters who invading the newly-updated floors within the Guardian’s Tower in Raebin , the Sixth Continent of Glenheim.

C9

Among the new monsters appearing on 20th to 40th floor of the Guardian’s Tower will be the boss monsters originating from the First to Fifth Continents, such as Ixion from the Fourth Continent, Orc Kayl from the Third Continent, and more. Moreover, there will be new quests available for each newly added floor.

The evil Nefer and his army have invaded the Guardian’s Tower in Raebin to find Tertis’ Heart, a special power protected by the water dragon, Artesia. To save Glenheim from destruction, C9 players must battle their way through each level of the tower, while fighting off Nefer’s powerful forces.

Fore more info: check out http://c9.webzen.com/ and on the gPotato portals (http://c9.gPotato.com and http://c9.gpotato.eu).

2014 MMO Predictions – The Death and Rebirth of an Industry

By Darren Henderson (DizzyPW), Jaded Gamer

Grumpy MMO Cat 2

When it comes to predictions in the MMO industry, most writers focus only on the individual titles and what their success or failure means as a whole. I’m going to take a step back from the game by game blows and their genre specific implications to make a boarder prediction effecting the industry and community as a whole. A pattern is developing. This pattern is not independent to our industry. It’s the Internet and it’s growing. Hiding information is becoming harder. A small leak blows up into a major story on countless websites. In this realm, how does a game build hype without ruining the surprise? And where does gaming press stand in this new order where everyone with early access to a game thinks they are a journalist?

This isn’t a new issue. Various publishers have tried to address the problem of balancing personal info releases, press exclusives, and community involvement over the years. It’s only becoming a problem recently as the MMORPG community seems to have hit a limit on the number of titles that can be successful and profitable at a single time. Currently it stands at roughly 15% of the titles on the market can continue on indefinitely. That’s narrow. That’s only the best when you consider that this tiny fraction is made up of the best titles of various genres such as shooters, brawlers, Anime stylized, MOBA, sandbox, and science fiction, faction PvP, and fantasy themepark. If your game is aimed at one of the more niche genres, you either need incredibly low production costs (and goals), or the most innovative gameplay yet revealed to stand a chance.

 

Jaded Gamer

The Jaded MMO Generation

Meanwhile gamers have become jaded over the years. Publishers have lied to them for a decade. “The Next WoW.” “Innovative.” “The first.” These same terms have been repeated in nausea from the same PR teams being traded between companies over the past five years and the gamers that have stood by the MMORPG genre since the beginning are done listening to the lies. Sure there is the new breed of gamers coming of age each year. But with the Internet so widely available and so many jaded gamers sitting around bored on it, the time needed to reach “jaded status” becomes faster with each passing year. This means there soon won’t be an audience of uninitiated kids waiting to get sucked into the clan mentality and PvP competitiveness that breeds excessive cash shop spending needed to keep lower quality MMOs afloat. I’m looking at you recent string of browser games from China.

 

NDA Overload

Controlling Information

Jaded gamers are quick to judge. And once their mind is made up, they tend to take some kind of strange symbiotic bond to that opinion. Their e-rep is on the line and if they think a game is going to succeed or fail, they will argue tooth and nail to convince others they are right. Mob mentality grows. And a game crashes and burns before it even has a chance to prove itself. As such MMORPGs launching in 2014 have been playing a dangerous game over the past few years. This involves intensive NDA agreements to keep their testers silenced while the developers pray for valuable feedback. But the Internet is a big place.

And the more testers you let in, the higher the probability of leaks. Err, I mean journalists speaking their minds. On blogs. On larger forums. Hired by less scrupulous websites desperate to make a profit by breaking news on features before it’s unfairly spoon fed to the big press sites in the industry like MMORPG and Massively.

 

Scarlet Blade Desperation

A Struggling Industry Breeds Desperation

It’s no secret the MMO industry has been suffering for quite a few years now. Outside of the MOBA genre, most successful titles are so because they launched prior to the exponential curve of jaded gamers and built a large enough playerbase to fortify their coffers from the storm. Perfect World International, Eden Eternal, Elsword, Alliance of Valiant Arms, Maplestory, the list goes on. Beyond the not so solid barrier, the only games that are fighting on with any success seem to be games destined for subscriptions but reduced to free status to keep a large community intact. Lord of the Rings Online, TERA, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Everquest, and plenty of others stand in one way or another in this group.

This of course hurts sites that cover the industry just as much. Advertising dollars are a luxury to these struggling publishers but a lifeline to the lesser sites covering them. Playing by the rules of NDAs forever spells a slow death for these websites that aren’t getting any exclusive breaks and always covering news as second fiddle to the larger sites. With nothing to lose, one would ask why would you stay loyal?

Combine these websites with the huge boon of players out their bound by NDA and you have a solution. The sites themselves never signed any legal agreement. The games in question probably aren’t funneling any advertising dollars their way. They’ll publish whatever is sent their way regardless of if it carries a positive of negative light of the game. And the people with all the free time on their hands to take part in these secret beta events are typically unemployed or college students struggling with rising tuition rates. What’s to stop these testers from speaking their minds anonymously and getting paid in secret for it by the sites with nothing to lose?

 

Darkfall Launch Live

The Double Edged Sword

I’m sure this isn’t the first time publishers have considered this. As such to keep their proverbial hype trains running up till launch, they have to withhold major elements of their game from the general public, including their testers, until the final moments. Sure it protects their image from possibly negative reviews of the features, but it also means these same features are under tested and may launch buggy. Huh, a buggy feature at launch in the MMORPG industry. Who would have imagined?

 

City Of Heroes Dam Breaks

The Dam Breaks in 2014

It’s clear all hell is going to break lose in the world of MMORPG PR in 2014. Free to play titles on the horizon don’t have the type of anticipation going for them to warrant any kind of major success. The jaded gamers are chomping at the bit to see to that. The games with a chance are ignoring the lessons of the past and going in gung ho with buy to play and subscription models in the hopes of capitalizing on the lack of free competition to snag those early development dollars to keep things running. But that only makes the demand for information on what gamers are getting before dropping their money all the more valuable.

The price for leaked info will grow. The fear of jaded gamers destroying a title’s reputation prior to launch will grow. The quality of beta testing will falter as launch dates are moved up unreasonably to keep up with the shorter lifespans of hype trains these days. The result?

2014 is going to be a shockwave year in the industry no matter which part you play in it. MMORPG already sees the writing on the wall, hedging their bets by gaining a following for the still booming RPG genre outside of the MMO realm. Foreign investors are going to pull out in mass after being burned by their second rate titles no longer returning dividends in the west. They’ll tell their friends and even scare off funding for quality titles as a result.

If this doesn’t scare you, I’m afraid to say the writing is already on the wall. Phantasy Star Online 2’s western launch has been delayed indefinitely. Trion has been almost entirely silent on the Korean developed ArcheAge since E3 2013. After years of hype train, NCSoft decided localization money for Blade & Soul was better spent in China than the west. Even smaller titles like Yulang II are getting pushed in Southeast Asia (fully English translated mind you) as opposed to the expensive and risky western alternative.

Things are bleak indeed for MMORPG fans, but I won’t end my article without a light at the end of the tunnel.

 

MMO Industry Goes Full Circle

The MMORPG Industry Goes Full Cycle

With the Eastern developers rattled and in retreat, and Western investors becoming tired of seeing one AAA MMO after another follow the Warcraft formula and fail, the end of large themepark MMORPGs will be upon us. This is simply a new beginning as the only studios developing MMORPGs going forward will expect the smaller community and plan their resources accordingly. Also realizing at last that the age of Warcraft and Everquest has ended, they will push towards innovation and untested game types to acquire their niche.

Titles like Novus AEterno will push RTS elements into an MMO sphere. Camelot Unchained will marry the success of Minecraft with hardcore realm warfare unlike anything seen since the Dark Age of Camelot. Hex will push the limits of what trading cards can do with true MMORPG elements, utilizing all the strategy of a card game in a faster combat setting. SMITE will hit full launch, showcasing the awesome power of mixing the aim of shooters with the mechanics of a MOBA and the power of modern 3D modeling. Citadel of Sorcery keeps fighting against impossible odds to make an MMORPG with actual dynamic events to bring ultimate immersion. With innovation attacking the status quo from so many angles, it’s only a matter of time before the balance of power will shift from big and bad to small and focused, where titles capable of crafting a universe to their niche’s preference will win out against AAA MMOs claiming to have something for everyone, and inevitably falling short on those claims.

Staying small and hiding under the radar, these games will be impervious to the call of the jaded gamers as their stalwart niche fans will defend their game of choice with fire. The breakdown of a united MMORPG community into countless niche titles will again reignite the need for multiple MMO sites as the industry will be too vast for any single group to efficiently cover. And hopefully somewhere down the line, those gamers that lost hope in our industry over the last decade will find a niche indie title that’s exactly what they had been waiting for all these years.

Happy New Year

Change isn’t easy though. And it can’t happen without support. So find a project you believe in. That you can stick with and follow. And let the developers busting their ass for peanuts know that their work is appreciated. That one day the big pay off is coming. That you will be waiting on launch day with energy drink and Grub Hub at the ready to marathon the hell out of their game. Because if you stay jaded and never fight for change, you’ll still be looking in the mirror at your grumpy frown come 2015.

Lightbringers: Saviors of Raia

Lightbringers: Saviors of Raia is a free-to-play cross-platform hack ‘n slash. Face hundreds of enemies and become a Legend of the Light – Raia depends upon you!

Features:

Multiplayer Co-Op: Battle with friends in real-time co-op for up to four players.

Dozens of Orbs: Over 280 power-granting orbs are available for you to collect, craft, and equip in your pursuit for good.

Custom Builds: Choose your own path as a hero, selecting the skills you love to fight with.

Cross-Platform Play: Available initially for Facebook and Android, Lightbringers supports tablet play and seamlessly connects players from both platforms.