Monthly Archives: May 2014

Nexon to Publish Human Element

Human Element

NEXON Co., Ltd. (“Nexon”) (3659.TO), a worldwide leader in free-to-play online games, today announced that it has secured worldwide publishing rights for Human Element, an open-world first-person survival title developed by Nexon’s strategic partner Robotoki Inc. Robotoki is a Los Angeles-based game development studio led by Robert Bowling, former Lead and Creative Strategist of the Call of Duty franchise.

Set 35 years after a zombie apocalypse, Human Element combines action, strategy and resource management to offer players the ability to create multiple human survival scenarios. The game features a cinematic, immersive, first-person experience using the latest CryEngine technology, and combines innovative new Streaming and Segmented World massively multiplayer online (MMO) game technologies to achieve a large open-world MMO experience while maintaining the high visual fidelity of a first-person shooter (FPS).

“We are excited to work with Robotoki to bring this exciting game to consumers in North America and around the world,” said Owen Mahoney, President and CEO of Nexon. “This announcement marks an important milestone in the strategic partnership we formed with Robotoki in February 2013 and furthers our goal of developing groundbreaking, AAA quality free-to-play games.”

“Partnering with Nexon has allowed us to achieve our ambitious vision for Human Element,” said Robert Bowling, President and Creative Director of Robotoki. “Combining the fast paced, cinematic, visceral gameplay that our team is known for with the exciting MMO social experience and expertise of Nexon, we are redefining the genre of survival games with an unprecedented level of detail within an open-world experience.”

Human Element is scheduled for global release on PC in the fourth quarter of 2015. Find out more at http://www.humanelementgame.com/

Magicka: Wizard Wars to Begin Open Beta on May 27

Magicka Wizard Wars

Paradox Interactive and Paradox North today announced that Magicka: Wizard Wars, the online competitive multiplayer game of misdirected magic, is going to begin an Open Beta phase on May 27. Currently available via Steam Early Access, Magicka: Wizard Wars will be playable for free by those who demonstrate a lack of self-preservation instinct when the title enters its Open Beta phase. Robe enthusiasts everywhere still have the chance to experience the friendly-firing frenzy of Magicka: Wizard Wars as it draws nearer to launch and test whether their friendships can withstand repeated spellcasting “incidents” by purchasing the title on Early Access and, in the process, nabbing exclusive goodies.

Eager spellcasters can get into Magicka: Wizard Wars straightaway here: http://access.wizardwars.com/

WildStar Prepares to Unleash the Carbine Developers

Can you feel it? The electricity in the air? It’s game time. Carbine Studios is taking the censorship off and sending their development team out to all branches of social media today including Youtube, Twitter, Twitch, Facebook, Reddit and probably plenty of other venues for an 11am to 5pm WildStar blow-out today. And if you thought they weren’t cocky about their title, here’s some quotes from yesterday’s preview stream:

WildStar OB Event

·         “We have the best damn MMO that’s you’re going to play this year. Period. End.” – Mike Donatelli

·         “If you are going to sell an MMO for the box price with a $15 subscription you got to give them the value. Month after month we will release more content for every play style.” – Mike Donatelli

·         “We have an entire expansion worth of content that we plan to launch over the next 12 months,” Mike Donatelli

·         “We have a whole zone that’s coming in the very first patch post-launch,” Mike Donatelli

·         “Best Housing of any MMO, ever,” Matt Mocarski

·         “We are the first ever MMO to do mount customizations (we have hoverboards in the game if you didn’t know),” Matt Mocarski

·          “The 40 man Raid is bat s$@# insane,” Mike Donatelli

·         “We definitely have the best Raids of any MMO,” Stephan Frost

Catch the full recap of yesterday’s preview stream now on Youtube and keep your eyes open, because the Devs will be listening far more today than ever before.

Grand Chase’s Biggest Content Update Ever; Season 5 Begins Its Rollout

gc season 5

Leading game developer and publisher of popular free-to-play  MMORPGs, KOG Games announced today that the original, online action-brawler MMO, Grand Chase announces that the biggest content update in the history of the game is upon us!

Starting today, KOG Games kicks off the first phase of the multi-part Grand Chase Season 5 update with the Character Separation patch. This first update introduces the Grand Chase players to Character Separation. The basis of Character Separation prepares the actual game framework for all of the features to come with the awesome Season 5 update.

What is Character Separation? Grand Chase typically hosts all of a player’s characters in a combined UI environment. This means that a player can navigate through all of their characters in the same location; regardless of whether they’re in a Dungeon or PvP. As well, all of the character specific gear that has been accumulated would be stored in the same, resource intensive, single UI inventory environment. Basically, if a player unlocked all of the 19 characters, and leveled them all up to max level, you’d have to accumulate and keep 70+ levels of gear for 19 different characters. If you’re not a diehard GC player… mass hysteria would typically ensue.  Character Separation will allow players to fully utilize a completely separate UI and interactive environment for each character. As well, you’ll be able to keep a separate inventory for each character as well as a joint warehouse inventory. Speaking of which, during the Character Separation Event, players will have their inventories permanently boosted to 120 slots for each character! You’ll also get Individual quest logs, a streamlined UI design and more.

Character Seperation

When Grand Chase was conceived, the game was initially designed to accommodate a starting roster of 3 characters, trail-blazing as the first MMORPG side-scrolling action RPG brawler and offer some wicked PvP. To watch that same roster expand to 19 characters, the game world itself developed into an epic RPG storyline that pits the ultimate heroes vs. the most diabolical of evils, and years’ worth of great adventures and award winning content, it’s more than any small game developer can hope for. That’s until you realize that the game has become bigger than what it was initially designed to be.

“Even as a small developer, we’ve always done our absolute best to bring fun, new content to the players of Grand Chase,” Eugene Kim, CEO of KOG Games states “Now the time has come to let Grand Chase truly show its potential.”

With this awesome prelude complete, Grand Chase players will be prepared to experience Season 5! Grand Chase gets a completely new User Interface, a dungeon experience like you’ve never seen before, bigger-faster- smarter AI, brand new active combat dodge and combo systems, player-characters will be revisited and revamped and the GC epic will unfold revealing a side none of us expected! Stay tuned Chasers ~ Season 5 is coming!

Chrono Tales: PK Skill Rings and More Now Available

Chrono

Recently, the operation team for Chrono Tales has released new Skill Rings to increase Player Killing and the challenges that came with them. These rare rings help players to master skills of other classes. The players may obtain these new rings from world Bosses or Fortune Wheel.
The operation team of Chrono Tales slows down the opening up of new servers in response to its players’ request, and during the past several months, more exciting features are in development. Below are the game new features we received from the official.

  1. New Super Leap System which can enhance players’ combat flexibility as well as attributes.
  2. New skill level is available for each class to allow player enhance their character during the end-game phase.
  3. To enhance Warrior class, Sword Sweeping skill is redesigned.
  4. New world Boss Deathwing the Destroyer has descent, waiting for the most powerful adventures to challenge.

For more info, visit http://ct.gamedp.com/index/

Endless Fury: New Action MMO from NGames Available Today

Endless Fury

Available now on the burgeoning Game321.com games portal, Endless Fury is a breathtaking side-scrolling arcade-style action MMORPG that gives players the freedom to design and unleash their very own devastating combos.

Players take on the role of a proud young warrior fighting a shady secret organization trying to overthrow justice. On their journey of self discovery through Endless Fury’s world of many layers, players will encounter a plethora of bizarre monsters, face-off against epic bosses, tackle unique quests and enjoy a variety of fun, fast-paced PVP features. Endless Fury lets players customise their own warriors AND powerful combos from scratch with complete freedom. Want to play as a three-headed wooden robot that’s proficient with nunchucks? No problem. How about a jet-pack wearing gorilla capable of launching a 500-hit attack? Go bananas.

Players build their unique combos by combining a range of moves and skills together, which can then be unleashed in real-time during skill-based combat. Whether challenging opponents in the main storyline or heading to the Elite Stage to showcase their abilities, plucky warriors can endlessly tweak their moves and watch them come to life in a flurry of dazzling special effects.

Combat is entirely skill-based too, levelling the battlefield between normal and paying members. Create the right moves for your character and you can defeat anybody…and anything.

For more info, visit http://go.game321.com/pr_ef.htm

Dragon’s Wrath: New Action MMORPG by NGames Coming This June

Dragon's Wrath

Scheduled to launch this June, Dragon’s Wrath is a horizontal, combat-based MMORPG that casts players as daring heroes during a time of great magic and mysterious creatures in the West. Presented with stunning, cutting-edge browser gaming graphics, engaging characters and fluid combat systems, Dragon’s Wrath players will tussle with epic bosses, explore unique instances, and form key alliances as they fight to save the land.

Dragon’s Wrath not only features PVE with World Bosses, but also plenty of PVP with Guild Battles, Camp Battles, Siege Wars and a host of PVP arena options. To celebrate the announcement, publisher NGames has today revealed Dragon’s Wrath’s player classes.

Players begin their adventure by choosing one of three elite factions; the Empire Guards, the Lionheart Knights or the Inquisition. Once a faction is joined, the quest to explore the mysterious world and fight powerful dragons and devils begins.

Dragon’s Wrath is a free-to-play MMORPG scheduled to launch this June on the Game321.com portal. For more information, visit http://go.game321.com/pr_dw.htm

Heroes of the Storm: Technical Alpha First Look

By Jason Parker (Ragachak)

 

There-is-only-one-King

Stay A While, And Listen

Heroes of the Storm is Blizzard’s answer to the variety of MOBAs in the works or already out. Dawngate, DOTA2, League of Legends, and Infinite Crisis – these are all examples of games in the niche field of the MOBA, which stands for Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. In this type of game, your goal is to defeat the other team’s base, and complete a variety of objectives to assist your team. However, each MOBA tries to do something a little different to stand out from the growing crowd. SMITE uses a different perspective and requires skillshots to do virtually anything.  Infinite Crisis uses the DC Comics Universe, and a variety of maps that can be battled upon.

Dudes-in-tanks-win-games

Heroes of the Storm also uses different maps, unlike League of Legends, which has one primary map and a few other sub maps.  Heroes of the Storm seeks to make its mark in two crucial ways.  The first is in its array of differing maps. The second would be the addition of bonus objectives such as the Mercenary camps; stronger minions inhabit these, but defeating them adds a temporary boost of attack power to your side of the field.  However, caution should be exercised:  after defeating the mercenary camp, you have to capture the actual camp, and an opponent can kill you and take credit for all of your hard work. Another unique element of Heroes of the Storm is the cast of famous characters from the Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft franchises. It’s definitely a plus for a Blizzard fan. And turns out there’s quite a few of them out there.

 

Lookin-kinda-grim-imo

This is No Time to Construct Additional Pylons

In Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard worlds collide via a Nexus, and their powerful heroes and villains come to unite and battle to prove their might.  You pick a character from this varied roster and join a team, with the ultimate goal of defeating your opponents’ altar hidden at the end of their fortress.  To get there, you must fight through towers and walls, past waves of enemy minions, and against the team’s own champions.  As of this writing there are four maps, and it is imperative to know them in and out, including their mercenary camps and bonus objectives. These objectives are crucial, and ignoring them means your team is almost certain to lose.  Each map also has its own set of lanes. Traditionally there are three lanes and a jungle in a MOBA map; these change significantly in Heroes. The loading screen offers the important parts of the map, as shown below.  The maps however are as follows:

 

Dat-booty

Blackheart’s Bay:  Blackheart the Pirate’s ship sits in the middle of a series of planks and boardwalks, and your goal is to pay off the Blackheart pirates to bombard your enemies’ fortifications. Each time you succeed in paying them, the price goes up; greedy pirates . .  . Defeating mercenaries and breaking gold chests gives you the coins, and if you can kill a player holding them (indicated near their health bar), you can steal theirs!

 

Cursed Hollow:  My second favorite map.  The Raven Lord of this forest demands tribute, which periodically spawn during the match.  You must try to acquire these, and if your team gains three, the Raven Lord will curse the other faction:  minions will have 1 health, towers and walls have lowered health, and the towers will not shoot you for the duration of the curse. This is the time to attack! Press the advantage with the blessing of the Raven Lord!

 

Dragon Shire: This is easily my favorite map.  There is a lot to be said for taking control of the Dragon Knight and punting an enemy hero across the map, away from the teamfight. There are two shrines located at the north and south of the map, the Shrines of the Sun and Moon. Controlling both when they activate will allow your team to grab the Dragon Knight and use him until his health drops to zero.  A great deal of coordination is needed, as the enemy will undoubtedly try to snatch a shrine so you cannot gain the edge you need.

 

Haunted Mines: The Haunted Mines is the first multilayered map that exists in the game; I have a feeling more will follow. Periodically, the Haunted Mines will open, and you and your enemies will rush down into them to kill undead and collect skulls. The skulls will form a golem, which will accost the enemy team; the more skulls you collect, the stronger the golem becomes. I had a bot match where somehow, the bots had 90 skulls to our 20.  It was incredibly disheartening.  This map requires more strategy and communication than the others, from what I have seen.

 

En-taru-adun,-Executor

Even Frostmourne Has A Price

Heroes of the Storm is a free-to-play game, like most MOBAs.  Blizzard is already raking in money off their other IPOs.  Does that mean they won’t find a way to make money? Of course not. You can pay real money for champions, for skins, and for custom mounts for your characters.  However, this is not the only way to acquire characters. There are, of course, a regular rotation of free to play characters, which always contains a variety of archetypes so you can play something you’d like.  Winning player vs. player matches gives gold, which is the currency used in game. As you continue playing through the ranks, you’ll eventually unlock Daily Quests, much like Hearthstone, to earn bonus XP and Gold. It might be a little slower than one would like, but patience is a virtue!  Or if you are like me and decide to buy anyway, take heart.  Even if the champion you wish to purchase is not on the free-to-play list, you have the opportunity to take them into a test match and see if you enjoy the play style and abilities they bring to the table.  This is something I have yet to see, and it is thrilling to be able to try the champion first, in the event you do not want to waste money.

Run-to-the-hiiiiiillls

Players on the American server can use real money to purchase heroes, skins and mounts in the Alpha, and those who do are given a mount when the game goes live. They will also be reimbursed with in-game currency for what they spent.  So while you do not get cash back, you can repurchase things you spent money on to begin with.  There are several things to buy, none of which affect the actual game balance: champions, skins for that champion, and different color palettes for the skins themselves are up for grabs. Even the mounts themselves have purchasable skins, letting you decide between a cybernetic wolf and unicorn to further accentuate your MOBA individuality.

 

Alamo-got-it-right

Inn-ovation

This is a game that challenges convention, with many differences between it and its sister-MOBA titles.  Mounts are one obvious feature that do so.  Hitting the “Z” key will mount you and give you more movement speed to get into the game.  Some characters cannot use them, however.  Sgt. Hammer the Siege Tank obviously cannot, nor can the Fairy Dragon Brightwing.  The other mounts are purely cosmetic; all of them provide 40% movement speed, and cannot be used in combat. Taking damage will dismount you immediately.  So far the only mounts I have seen are purchased in the shop, but there is nothing to say that will not change.

Mo-money-mo-problems

The biggest difference in Heroes as opposed to other MOBAs is the lack of item builds.  You heard me: no Bloodthirster, no rushing Blade of the Ruined King, no Aganihm’s Scepter to buy.  Traditionally you kill creeps, get gold, and buy items in the hopes of bumping your power levels up faster than your enemies to give your team a little sway should a fight not go exactly as you planned. However, killing minions in Heroes only gives exp, and all players on your team level at the same time. This is unique and, in many ways, terrific. You cannot fall behind your team, but the enemy team can still outlevel you.  At certain levels your character is given choices of skills: active skills, passive traits, extra skills (such as a poison attack or a storm shield for all nearby allies), and ultimate attacks. You get two of those to choose from on each character for different situations. Your skills also get different options as the game progresses, such as Malfurion getting an option for increased area of effect on Moonfire, or choosing to lower the cooldown on multiple casts.

UNLIMITED-POWER

I have to say, the team leveling system is probably one of the greatest changes to me. The notion of not being outlevelled by my own team is terrific. When I play MOBAs, I tend to pick the support role, which typically suffers from gold and exp starvation in other MOBAs. No longer!  The real strategy comes from picking the appropriate traits and powers to match the situation you are in. The entire game could revolve around picking or not picking a trait.  Mercenary camps are also new and interesting. Instead of jungle camps, which just provide exp, these provide more attack power for your side of the game. These control points have a visible respawn time when used though, so be aware of when you need (or someone on your team) to be ready to reacquire these packs of monsters.

 

LEEEEEROOOOOYYYYY’s Game Status Report:  Steady Progress!

JENKINS

 

Come on. Did you really not see that coming somewhere?  Heroes of the Storm, for a game in Technical Alpha, is a fantastic piece of work. There is a great deal of good going on here, with some new and exciting things.  It is my sincere hope that it sees competitive play, something different and fun from the stagnant MOBA play we are seeing at this particular moment. It’s not all sunshine and lollipops, I fear.

There are a few terrible things that I would like to see fixed; luckily there is a great deal of time, and I hope other players point it out to Blizzard. The in-game chat is terrible, absolutely terrible. There is scarcely a chat box, and it fades off the screen rather fast.  If there is a way to scroll back, I have yet to find it. This is not conducive to teamwork, since without voice chat, typed chat and map pinging are necessary.  A MOBA without teamwork and communication is Bronze V on League of Legends.

In addition, you have no idea what will be on your team in random matches.  This is good and bad; mostly bad, though.  A large part of this style of game is strategy, team-building, and communication. If I cannot see what my team wants to play, how am I going to pick something to complement them?  With this in mind, your opposing team might be better equipped for combat and victory, and you might get multiples of a type of character that you simply only need one of.  I imagine this will be something that changes, but for the interim, it could make gameplay unpleasant to say the least.  I feared Heroes of the Storm would simply be a fanservice money-sink by Blizzard, but there is a great deal of quality work to experience. While there is more to come, I am positive in thinking that this will be a big mover and shaker in the MOBA community.

HOTS-First-Look-620x348

Need more Heroes of the Storm coverage? Catch JamesBl0nde’s fresh First Look on our sister site, MMOHuts!