GameArt Studio, developer of the future racer Quantum Rush: Champions today released a video on a brand new racing track.
This track is the second set in space playing on a gigantic comet covered with ice and snow. It will be available both in Quantum Rush Online and in Quantum Rush: Champions.
The ice comet track will be raceable only by higher tiers. For which ones exactly will be detailed as soon as the ice comet will be available to racing.
My.com today has released details for the new location named the Lanber Forest in their upcoming sci-fi MMORPG, Skyforge.
“The Lanber Forest is a picturesque, bright corner of Aelion. An oasis of pristine nature, hidden away from the frenzied rhythm of the Capital city and the hum of factories. It seems quiet and peaceful here, but that peace is an illusion.
The farms are empty, as though the farmers simply walked away from their fields. The town of Kyris is also quiet. Once a popular, bustling place, for trade and festivities, it’s no longer filled with the carefree laughter of fairgoers or the rhythmic thud of forging hammers. You will not meet a single traveler in the town, or on a forest trail. Clear skies and the pastoral landscape is only a mask for the evil that lurks in the Lanber Forest.
The illusory tranquillity does not fool the immortal warriors who defend this world. In the heart of the capital, in the Divine Observatory, the Aelion projection is flashing with pleas for help from the mortals of the Lanber Forest. The pleas bring dark news about the reappearance of the Mantide army. This evil, defeated by heroes of a past age, has been awakened from centuries of sleep and seeks to spread throughout the planet, destroying the unwanted and dominating the weak. War has begun.
And where there is war, there are vultures. The Lanber Forest has been swept by opportunists: looters, smugglers, evil men, who have decided to cash in on the grief of others.”
After passing 300 million downloads in July 2013, leading mobile games publisher GAMEVIL has now surpassed 400 million mobile game downloads. Popular titles such as Monster Warlord and Spirit Stones have contributed to GAMEVIL’s growing fan base and continue to drive up the number of GAMEVIL games on smartphones across the globe.
This milestone comes just before today’s launch of Kritika: Chaos Unleashed. Known widely for its mobile Action RPG titles, GAMEVIL expects Kritika’s crisp graphics, dynamic characters, and cathartic hack-and-slash motions to appeal highly to gamers across all markets.
In Kritika, players can annihilate enemies and bosses with a variety of strike and attack abilities, including a special EX skill which provides maximum impact. They can further immerse themselves in the fast-paced fighting world of Kritika by raging against endless Monster Waves or competing to become the ultimate champion in a Rival Match. Current characters consist of the aggressive Berserker and agile Cat Acrobat, but future updates promise to add more characters with their own intense fighting abilities.
Kritika is just the beginning of a series of highly-anticipated titles and updates being released this year. From new content in MLB Perfect Inning to a return to the Zenonia series with Zenonia Online, GAMEVIL will continue to set and meet higher standards in mobile gaming.
By Darren Henderson (DizzyPW), Omnidyne Biotech Lobbyist
It’s been a long time coming. We’ve been promised the moon by Red 5 Studios and sat by idly (or quite actively for some of the diehard fans) waiting for delivery of what we envisioned as a true MMOFPS/TPS delivering all the content we love in MMORPGs with the crisp visceral feel of a shooter. Yet year after year, I looked into FireFall and found the same old Thumper Simulator Online waiting for me. Go out, gather resources, build towards progression that didn’t matter as it would be deleted and reworked a few patches later in a game that showed no signs of stepping out from the eternal abyss of the melding that trapped its own game world.
And then all at once, there was nothing. Rumors of a CEO change. Radio silence on updates. If you weren’t willing to dig into their forum for side comments from a developer, you might have worried that FireFall was finally fizzling out. Yet within the cocoon, the Tribe was busy at work building out the launch ready version. To make one last and loud surprise marketing push to bet the bank on. Suddenly the invite to visit Red 5 Studios arrived in my inbox after an almost unnoticed Youtube teaser series of major updates to come. I went expecting to see what a team of disheartened tired developers would look like, and instead found enthusiasm on levels rarely seen in the MMO industry.
Does this guy seem broken and jaded to you? That’s passion in dem eyes!
So what did I see behind those closed doors? It’s time to break down the 4x world size expansion and 15x content expansion that’s set to finally push this rocket into orbit.
New Player Experience
If there’s one thing everyone in gaming today can agree on about Red 5 Studios, it’s that they have a knack for cinematic flair. Finally FireFall’s new player experience reflects that flair with a new simulation tutorial that throws you straight into the heat of a new public instance called Wages of Sin. Expect the high quality chatter of fully voice acted NPCs shouting in your ear as the signature city of FireFall, Copacabana, burns to the ground from a Chosen invasion. It’s in essence a brilliant reformation of an old dynamic public quest rescripted into an awesome and informative tutorial instance that keeps all the glory of being an MMO intact. I saw HP bars dropping fast even with the devs playing as well, so new players should be jarred into realizing that this isn’t an auto-combat MMO they just dropped into.
While it’s not technically part of the newly added new player experience, those that have touched the game in the past but haven’t in a few months or years, will notice the stark improvements in graphics. While the game still carries its distinct art style that has persisted since day 1, the textures, draw distance quality, battleframes, and explosions have all received ample amounts of love. We’ll see how optimized it is for the masses in our launch review but on the high-end machines on hand at Red 5 Studios, maximum graphics saw no slowdowns whatsoever.
Perhaps the best part of the new player experience though is the dynamic feeling of picking your first battleframe. Like meeting Professor Oak in the middle of the warzone, this time you will go in prepared with information that you didn’t need to glean off outside websites beforehand. All five base battlesets are available from the start to, so you can custom craft your tutorial experience by matching it with your chosen playstyle from the start.
Going Beyond Thumping
Once through the tutorial, you will find the Ares initiative to have grown beyond most MMO’s questing offers. No longer will you feel lost in a world of endless thumping for random resources as beginner quests with Ares will lead you to new zones and challenges, whether alone or with friends. All the RPG elements are present now from proper and simplified advancement systems that make each time you level a battleframe feel rewarding, to fleshed out reputation systems that at times may make you face the tough choices in who you really side with in the final days of humanity.
Of course these are just the rails set out before you to guide you towards action. Once you’re outside the (relative) safety of towns, you will find a constant array of randomly spawned events tickling your ADD into straying off the beaten path. But the FireFall team seems to despise the idea of scripting randomness. W + X + Y = Z seems to be a more apt description.
Say the random event is a drop pod flying out of the melding and crash landing in a zone. Suddenly monsters swarm around it and start feeding off its fuel, distorting into monstrosities that need to be dealt with. Only problem is if you want to take out the drop pod, you’ll have to deal with the Chosen patrolling the landing site trying to keep their foothold down long enough to cause some real havoc. The drop pod is W. It happens at a set interval. The location is lands is X, and terrain changes can be a serious matter in a game involving line-of-sight shooter mechanics and plenty of rocket powered jump questing. The actual monsters that spawn is Y, as the dynamic event will evaluate where said event happens, and spawn creatures (out of sight to feel realistic) to match the difficulty level and type of creatures in the area, making Z overall feel quite refreshing and not at all immersion breaking.
This method of design applies to even the Ares quests as well, as locations and order of events can change each time you play the same quest on a different battleframe. Ideally this prevents sites from offering perfect guides that let you sleep through the content, as new tweaks in the challenge will be present each time to make you think dynamically. And the game is not forgiving, so be sure to pay attention to context clues. If your superiors feel seismic activity beneath your feet, you best move if you don’t want to be part of an epic landslide. If your foes are taunting about a bomb, it’s time to go. Don’t be a standard MMORPG plebian and wait till there’s a timer ticking or you will find yourself very dead. This merging of skill-based combat, hardcore design challenges, and smart dialogue come together to provide a themepark I don’t mind buying a speed pass for.
Campaigning with Meaning
While this feels meaningful and fun as a method of progression, Red 5 Studios takes the formula and turns it up to 11 with the introduction of story driving Campaigns. In a nutshell, they’re story-driven MMORPG style epic dungeons that are there more to explain the world around you than existing to progress you to end-game. But to be clear, we’re talking about pistachios, not peanuts. From start to finish its clear that everything from the lore to the mechanics were well put together as this is a key feature meant to sell new and old time players on the launch.
To my surprise, version 1.0 is packing a full 8 part campaign that will take players straight into the melding to discover the dark side of not only the Chosen, but of people in a post-apocalyptic world. If you love settings like Walking Dead more for the human interaction than the gore, this game is going to appeal to you. And of course if you just want to show you’re the hottest shooter west of the melding curtain, you’ll have your chance as campaigns are going to push you to the limits. Well maybe not as hard as the upcoming raid content will, but it’s certainly a training ground for the horrors to come at end-game.
Though the key difference here versus the raids I’ll get to in a moment is the choices offered. Even in this scripted world, you will have a few challenges available to you to impact the outcome of levels. If you’re pugging on Mission 6: Power Grab for instance, you might just rush straight into the enemy’s base as quickly as possible. But if you have a coordinated group that can handle a 50/50 split, you can showcase your small group skills to disable some of the enemy’s defensive technology, to ensure an easier final fight. And when you see Chronus at the end of Mission 8, you’ll be glad to have pushed your limits as that monster won’t be going down easy.
Raiding – It’s not done right if you’re not sweating
Now lately I have been a little bored with so-called raiding. Why? Well in a word, WildStar introduced the challenge and complexity that raids should be. So imagine my surprise when Red 5 Studios brought us six members of the press into a room on the fifth floor to team up with the developers on a 20 man raid, and half an hour later my heart was pounding out of my chest like it hasn’t in months! The giant lava worm Kanaloa is no joke, and it will take some skill and well-crafted gear to bring the beast down.
So what’s the deal? Well you’re in a volcano with a floor made of lava. No the lava doesn’t instantly kill you, but it’s certainly something you don’t want to spend more than six seconds in. The surrounding walls of the arena are filled with jagged, sloped, and otherwise inconvenient rock sculptures put together by a designer huddled in a dark room somewhere that enjoys the taste of tears. Oh and as if it wasn’t hard enough to stay on solid ground as things are, the lava rises as the fight progresses.
Too simple you say? Ok how about playing a team-based game of Asteroids while you hop and skip out of range of the ever rising lava? Yup Kanaloa spits giant lava rocks all over the place. Now shooting them can slightly change their direction, but eventually they explode into more rocks just like in Asteroids. And if any of those rocks manages to strike the side wall of the room, they go off like a bob-omb in Smash Bros, decimating your health and likely sending you into a tricky momentum filled struggle as you burn every last ounce of your energy trying to rocket back to solid ground.
Final piece of the puzzle to singe your hair is of course Kanaloa’s fire spray. See you need distractors to take agro on this beast, but if the worm faces you it means you have roughly five seconds to jet away before he sprays a solid stream of fire across roughly 1/6th of the room. I enjoyed watching a quarter of our raid group go down in flames in the first thirty seconds of both attempts against Kanaloa from this attack alone. Granted agro will constantly flip around as his only weak spots are on his back, so expect to play a hot and heavy game of musical rock sculptures the whole way through the fight.
Broken Peninsula – The PvP Realm
Now perhaps the most controversial, but in my opinion most awesome, piece of version 1.0 is the PvP realm known as Broken Peninsula. Although we didn’t get a chance to personally test it, the concept is simple enough that it has to work as intended. Players simply hop on a drop ship and get assigned to a major faction fighting in the area. From there it’s only a matter of spotting a nice material deposit, gliding out of the drop pod, and thumping up some of the best resources in the game to make your crafter friends grin.
The difference is you won’t only be defending yourself from the dynamic horrors of FireFall such as melding tornadoes and Chosen assaults, but from rival corporations as well. If another group happens upon your thumping operation, you’re fair game to kill and rob. Players will not only have to carry their loot back to their team’s base of operations for storage, but will have to ensure the resources are intact for a period of fifteen minutes when cargo evacs arrive to finally take your precious resources to safety. At this point, resources are split between all members of that team, meaning supporting your fellow group members earns big dividends.
This tug of war consists of three sanctioned teams, but as server population and demand to enter rises, FireFall may smartly create additional teams to keep Broken Peninsula manageable. Also small groups wanting to go full rogue can queue together as a group and wreak havoc where they please, perhaps even taking over an enemy base if they are a legit enough force.
Bases themselves have quite a bit of interesting choices within them for each team to decide to spend resources on. These benefits are distributed by key buildings that (as makes sense) are lost when said buildings are destroyed by attacking forces. Barracks can be constructed to supply NPC guards to bolster defenses and give you a bit more leeway to send soldiers out to gather new resources. The Power Station offers shields to protect you from ranged fire as well as power to keep your other buildings operational. The Armory allows you to repair damaged pieces of your base. And finally the Command Center is a base’s heart, and whoever occupies the center controls all functions of the base.
If a rival group manages to infiltrate the Command Center, a hacking minigame begins. Those familiar with Goldeneye 007 will appreciate the thrill of defending your hacker while the streams of enemy soldiers flood into the Command Center attempting to prevent this hostile takeover. A single team can own and operate multiple bases, meaning if your forces can handle fighting on multiple fronts, your band of mercenaries can make a pretty penny fighting long battles in the Peninsula. I can’t wait to see how this all plays out on the live servers soon!
Closing Thoughts
This is not the FireFall I knew. The FireFall I had written off as a dead franchise. Somehow Red 5 Studios got their act together and have finally produced the game they always wanted to. All the months of balancing changes and reworks to progression are now showing fruit. My only disclaimer is I haven’t had enough time to test everything for myself to confirm just how real this fruit is.
But now we won’t have to wait long. Version 1.0 hits beta servers tomorrow and fully launches to the world on July 29th. If this is real life, no one will have to wait long to confirm it. JamesBl0nde will be in-game in the coming weeks to see for himself and share his experience, so be sure to subscribe to our sister site, MMOHuts, youtube channel for an upcoming Refresher on the launch state of the game.
FIFA World is a F2P soccer game developed by EA Canda. Featuring the EA SPORTS FIFA HD console gameplay, FIFA Ultimate Team, and a host of new features, the game delivers a fun and immersive football experience that is synonymous with the FIFA franchise.
Features:
FIFA World Ultimate Team: Build your own unique club that plays your style of football and hit the pitch to compete in online and offline modes. Play the 24/7 transfer market and strategically outwit other gamers in buying, selling and trading the world’s greatest superstars to create your Ultimate Team.
League Mode: Lead your favorite real-world club to victory in Online Seasons and experience the drama of promotions and relegation as you battle against other community players to climb the league tables and reach the top flight.
Featured Tournaments: Every week new featured tournaments put your Ultimate Team in the spotlight, challenging you to beat some of the world’s best clubs to earn even bigger rewards for your Ultimate Team including coins and packs!
EAS FC Social Hub: Capture and share spectacular goals and beautiful moments you create on the pitch and instantly post them to the in-game social feed. Keep up with your friends’ in-game activity and debate and discuss the latest results and highlights with the community.
If you are a football fan but never had the money to buy one of the many FIFA games then you are in luck, EA has made one that is completely free to play and it is available right now. Even if you are in doubt, FIFA World is a game worth trying for every FIFA fan, it is currently in beta and I took my time to find out what exactly makes this game different from the other FIFA titles that launch each year.
If you are familiar with the FIFA games and have played any in the last couple of years you must be familiar with the ‘Ultimate Team’ concept. In this game modus you will be able to manage your own team with your own star players. In this game where chemistry takes a huge role, you have to find the perfect eleven players that fit well together and know how to play well together. While typically the buy to play FIFA games offer more, FIFA World drills into this special game mode, giving it all its love. Now when I say this mode is special, I mean it’s the most successful game mode that a game franchise has ever launched. The forthcoming of this mode has greatly improved the FIFA series and it has brought in more players than ever before, and to me it is not a real surprise that they are trying to make a free to play online variant of this. Let me explain how you get to work in this Ultimate Team mode.
When you start out with your dream team for the first time you are given players that are on the bottom of the ladder. The lowest of professionals, and there are only a few names you might’ve heard of, as even a hardcore football fan like myself has yet to find a familiar bronze player. On the bright side, your starter players typically have moderate chemistry, proving you a lick of teamwork to overcome their skill shortcomings. You will have to upgrade this team step by step, and upgrade to silver players and afterwards to golden players, turning your team into a collection of starters from around the world. But before you start throwing around money you should be taught the basics of FIFA Ultimate Team.
When you are making a team you should know the few limitations that require your team to work well together. When you make a team you should always have players that have a link together, basically chemistry works in a rather interesting way. If the linked players are in the same league that they originally play in, they will have a good link together and their chemistry will rise. If they are from the same country you will notice the same chemistry boost, and between the two sources, you’re able to max out your chemistry link rating at 10. A team capped at 10 rating with work together at their fullest potential, helping each other out in significant ways. If your chemistry rating drops below 9, you will start to notice a lack of dedication from your players, and need to put some serious effort in to win. Besides this you also want the players to have the right manager by their side, one that gives them that extra motivation to try their hardest. Having strong chemistry and a well-liked manager will help speed your rise to upgrading to a golden team.
When I had finally found the most optimal formation and players, I went straight away to find a match against another player. Since I started playing when most players were new, I was still playing against other bronze players. To alleviate power creep hampering the new player experience though, matches between teams of greatly differentiated skill will offer handicaps to lower the golden team down to your level. At times I felt like my lesser players even outperformed the golden players, but I haven’t experimented enough to truly comment on how balanced this handicap feature is. When I got into the game both the graphics and player movement gave me a bit of a nostalgic feeling. The game feels exactly like last year’s FIFA game, the one where I honestly had the most fun in. Despite the normal FIFA franchise improving and changing each year, FIFA 13 and now FIFA World were in my eyes perhaps the best FIFA ever. Despite the few annoying bugs that can be found back in FIFA World as well, the player movement and dribbling were truly the best in the series, but it does feel like the graphics are a bit lower than they originally were. Not that I’m complaining since the game is both free and designed to accommodate any level of PC from toaster to super computer.
When you are done with each match, you are given coins that you can spend on a few things. Unfortunately the coins have always been the most important factor in FIFA Ultimate Team. You will always need coins, even if you already have the best possible team. All the players will have contracts. When a contract ends, you have to negotiate a new agreement to keep them on the team. Each card or object in this game is also divided in bronze to gold cards, so you will be able to buy contracts for each type on the market. On the market that is fully player driven, you will be able to sell and buy almost everything. Here you will find players that people got out of player packs, contracts, formation cards and healing cards. And the latter is really important for when one of your players has an injury and you do not have a temporary replacement for him.
Conclusion: Excellent
I am a huge fan of the FIFA series and to see EA make the leap from console to full-fledged PC MMO was truly surprising as well as impressive. I think it was one of their best moves that they have made in the past few years and since it is only a version behind their current top selling FIFA, they can really bring in a wide range of players that haven’t joined the FIFA craze. When you are planning to play FIFA I would definitely recommend you to try this with a gamepad, but a keyboard is also a workable solution. FIFA World is all about the Ultimate Team feature that we have seen in the last three to four FIFA’s, and it is the most promising feature of the series. Since the game is still in beta I am sure we will see great improvements over the next few months. Here’s hoping they continue to follow in the footsteps of the yearly FIFA titles, trickling down the best features to the free version.