Yearly Archives: 2014

Rush War: LeKool Games Announces Exclusive Launch

Rush War

Rushwar is empire-building MMORTS based on and set in the Medieval times. Players start with a small town and must gradually build it up into a thriving city-state.

Rushwar is a great city building game that puts you in control of your own ancient city with a medieval style theme. The basic goals are to build structures for your citizens and other buildings that enable you to develop an army. Rushwar features real time construction and military simulation. The game features various different buildings, heroes, and items to play with. Build your own unique city suited to your needs, make alliances with other players in the league and expand your kingdom. Animated battle reports, NPC and PVP battle system, Guild system.

There are wilds like, Basins, Quarry, Plains & Precipices waiting for you to conquer them. A detailed quest guide system, which helps players grow and guides them on how to proceed in the game. Map glide, is a unique system which helps the players scroll the map by pulling on the map page. The game has easy to understand interface and the game graphics are top notch. For all those that think they can keep up and win the way: Now’s your chance as Rush War is currently available to all.

For more info, visit http://rushwar.lekoolgames.com/

Summoners Con League of Legends Fest Set for Nov 1

Summoners Con 2014

Summoners Con, an organization that specializes in bringing together the community and pro players for the ultimate League of Legends experience, announced its first annual Summoners Con was scheduled to take place November 1, 2014 at the Marriott Burbank Airport Hotel & Convention Center, 2500 North Hollywood Way, Burbank CA 91505.

The event, scheduled to start at 9 a.m. and wraps up at midnight, will feature a special host, Spazie, one of the top personalities in the League of Legends space.

On the list of special guests are Greg “Sky” Williams, the most popular comedian in LoL, and Instalok, the biggest League band known for their parody songs and music videos about the popular MOBA. They will be joined by several LCS teams, including Cloud9, currently the top-ranked team in North America, Team Curse, Dignitas & CLG.

Aimed at the 100 million monthly League of Legend’s players and fans, Summoners Con is being designed to bring community and pro players together.

The co-founders behind the event are Cat Valdes, a long-time league player, industry influencer and veteran YouTube creator and entrepreneur Kevin Khandjian, co-founder of the popular YouTube convention, Playlist Live.

“We are providing the ideal meeting place for League of Legends players and fans to connect with LCS pro players, community figures, musicians and cosplayers,” said Khandjian. “We’re curating the best from the community through meet and greets, one-of-a-kind stage shows from performers and personalities,community art showcase, cosplay and much more.”

Warlord Saga

Warlord Saga is a 2D eastern MMORPG with cartoonish graphics, stylish art, regular activities, and a simple gameplay. It takes place in a cartoon version of the Three Kingdoms setting.

Features:

Regular Activities: Like most eastern MMORPGs, Warlord Saga features regular activities and events. These vents include in-game rewards, premium currency, and can be anything from minigames, to solo quests, to group activities and daily missions.

Vibrant Art: Warlord Saga uses colorful 2D art and strong character design. Avatars are rendered in classic eastern pop art, which will please fans of that style. The gameplay blends into the artwork seamlessly and works well with the action.

Angel Alliance

Angel Alliance is a free-to-play browser-based MMORPG. You are one of the few to stand up against the evil forces of Suurde, while seeking to restore the once-powerful allies known as the Angels to their former glory. Saving these Angels unlocks special attacks and buffs for your party – are you ready to fight?

Features:

New Battle System: Aside from simply managing a party of heroes, each player has their own guardian angel, which buffs the party, and launches special rage attacks.

Dungeons Galore: The game features all kinds of dungeon, including: single player, cross server PVP, arena mode, rouge-like dungeons, and even co-op.

Mini Games: Aside from its core gameplay, Angel Alliance has copious mini games which reward aplayers with items to strengthen their party, and angel.

Hand-Drawn Art: Filled with beautiful hand drawn artwork, setting it apart from other generic browser games.

 

Blade & Soul: New reports suggest NA/EU release early 2015

B&S

For those that have been waiting patiently for any details regarding the NA/EU release of Blade & Soul, your waiting may soon be coming to an end, as several users from the unofficial Blade & Soul Dojo website have discovered new findings, as well as a personal interview with one of the content producers for English B&S over at this year’s Gamescom 2014.

A forum user by the name of Aari has had the chance to speak with this producer with questions regarding the current status of the game. The responses received included:

  • *Release date is aimed for early to mid 2015
  • Client will be based on the Chinese version of the game.
  • The fatigue system from the Chinese version may not be included
  • The recently uncovered Warlock class will not be available at launch.
  • The NA/EU version will most likely have PvP and PvE servers.
  • Current plans for PvP servers suggests that players will still choose a faction to side with, but there won’t be a need to equip PvP dobok in order to attack players.
  • Players will most likely not be able to change factions on PvP servers.
  • Promotions and audience marketing for the NA/EU version will be more focused on open-world PvP, tournaments, competitions and eSports.
  • Business model is still unconfirmed, but the publisher is leaning towards F2P.

While many of these details could be taken with a grain of salt, it was recently noted by user Ayame of the B&S Dojo fansite that several days ago, several job listings from NCSoft West have been posted on Linkedin, including positions for community managers, product managers, business intelligence managers, corperate controllers and product managers, further suggesting that employees are now being looked into in order to prepare for B&S’ launch.

For more information on B&S, visit http://us.bladeandsoul.com/en/

http://www.bladeandsouldojo.com/topic/94205-bns-euna-product-manager/
http://www.bladeandsouldojo.com/topic/94247-ncsoft-hiring-assorted-managers-via-linkedin/

Summoners War: Sky Arena Review – Diamond in the Sky

A Little Extra with Summoners War: Sky Arena

By: Ojogo

 

Summoners War Review

Monster collecting games these days are a dime-a-dozen. You see them all the time in all the app stores, ranging from trading card game formats to fandom tie-ins to blatant Pokémon clones.

Point is, the genre is pretty much saturated, and there really isn’t that much variety to pick from. In the world of free-mium games, you can only really count on them being so-and-so decent time-wasters with not much individuality (if they did, then whoever made them would be charging for it). The only real difference is how the package looks.

Summoners War awake2

So then it goes that when you throw a stone into the app store it, whatever you hit comes out roughly the same as the next, right? Well, every now and then, you chance upon a game that’s actually really crazy good (at least compared to everything else in its field). Despite all the usual things similar in all things free-mium and monster collecting, Summoners War: Sky Arena gives something a little extra.

 

Summoners War not Summoner Wars

Not to be confused with the card game Summoner Wars, Sky Arena features considerably superior graphics and production value, and tight core mechanics to go along with the staple unit collection mechanics and online arena warfare – all while remaining free-to-play, with in-game purchases.

 

Gameplay

It has much in common with another popular battle collection app, Brave Frontier, which puts the player in the role of a summoner who calls forth various creatures from the game’s library to perform tasks.

Summoners War summon

Single player gaming follows a mediocre and linear storyline to give the notion of progress and development as it takes the player from one map to the next, presenting the game’s wide variety of monsters in continuous combat. There are also optional dungeons available for the purposes of grinding, levelling and increasing your summon collection.

 

Battle System

Battle is reminiscent of classic console RPG styles wherein each unit, your team and the enemy’s, follow a turn-based system ruled by their respective speed stats. Each unit has at least two available commands to use during their turn – one is the basic attack (which sometimes have additional effects, depending on the monster) and their special skills (which have recovery time, adding the element of strategic planning)

Summoners War arena

The ever popular elemental advantage system is also present. So far, there are five elemental types available in game: Fire, Water, Wind, Light and Dark. The first three follow the rock-paper-scissors rule, while the latter trump each other up. Certain attacks can cause status effects – some of which are unique, or at least, rare in the RPG genre, like making units unable to be healed, or dealing damage proportionate to one’s health (think gravity magic from the FF series).

Summoners War skillzoom2

In a turn-based game where skills have recovery time and must be rationed and timed strategically, all these features mesh perfectly to give players tactical challenges. There’s also the lazy boy option of auto-battling for those non-tactical level grinding battles. It also comes with a fast forward option that speeds up battle sequences up to three times.

 

The game’s something something

One unique thing about Summoners War is that the monster compendium isn’t really that expansive. Instead of the usual scheme of having hundreds of different unique units that evolve into pallet swaps of themselves.

Summoners War wish

Sky Arena has a small selection of monsters, each available in five different flavors – one for each elemental type. Each variant has its own special skills and stats and each awakens into a highly specialized unique unit.

skillzoom

A Fire-type Fairy, for example, does not just have a different elemental alignment than a Water-Type Fairy, even if they do share similar base stats. A Fire-type specializes in multi-target stunting attacks, while the Water-one concentrates on being a healing tank, and awakening (or special evolving) either creates a higher form of the said monster that specializes in different roles.

Summoners War victory

Some elemental variants may seem more popular or superior than the others but it all really depends on your party formation and what you need to pull off as a team. Rarity also comes into play here as monsters are available from 1 to 6 stars – the more stars they have, the more powerful they are. 1-2 stars are basically just fodder for evolution, but if you like a monster well enough, any 3-star or higher can be evolved and awakened to a full 6-star monster.

 

Monster Classes

Monsters fall into different roles as well, such as attackers, tankers, supporters, and defense. This is determined by the monster’s skills and stats, and in order to build a formidable squad, you’ll want to use power-up and evolve your monsters, or use the newly-introduced Monster Fusion feature. Finding and collecting new bases upon which you can build new, more powerful brawlers is undoubtedly one of the game’s most apparent charms.

Summoners War dungeon

The one thing I really like about this game though is the presence of the player feedback page for each monster. For each type and variant, there is a comment thread wherein players leave tips and comments for the monsters in question, like which rune combinations are optimal and if it’s worth it to invest in maxing the monster at all. Sure there are a number of useless troll posts, but it’s a good sign that the community is very much alive, supportive and thriving.

Summoners War awake

Almost all actions in the game raises player experience, which is needed to unlock further features in hometown (such as resource fusion and arena defense), but the main grind of the game is maxing out each of your monsters’ levels.

 

Summoners War boss-cinematic

Runes

Optimizing your units follows a rune system. Runes are embeddable resources that increase your monsters’ stats. There are six slots for each monster to fill and each rune may be leveled and maxed as well. Certain sets of runes give bonus stats as well. There are a number of rune configurations available to the player for each monster and it’s totally up to him or her on how he or she optimizes them for strategic play.

Summoners War rune

Finding runes is easy. For each rune slot and rune type, there is a corresponding map where you can farm those runes. This also increases the replay value of all maps, unlike most games where you are bound by practicality to grind in level-appropriate maps.

 

Critique

The look and feel of it though, I have to say, is top-notch – especially for a free-to-play app. The town and the dungeons are fully 3D. They have depth as the camera often moves around in battle.  You can zoom and rotate the world, and you would see the amount of detail put into rendering each object – from the buildings to the trees and rocks and to the creatures themselves.

Summoners War info

Each type of monster has their own set of unique animations in battle, in victory and in idle states. It also doesn’t hurt that every so often, you get dynamic camera movement when your unit performs a critical hit. It may give off a Dragon Nest-y vibe, especially the pre-boss fight cinematics, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, right? Heck, this thing is free, and it’s all shiny and pretty.  And it’s not just the aesthetics. Even with the usual action per energy system, there’s still a lot to do in this gem.

Summoners War info2

It’s very easy to boost energy recovery and the time you spend grinding in a dungeon is almost equal to your energy recovery time in the first place. So it’s quite easy to actually play this game nonstop.

Summoners War map

The system also gives out a lot of freebies every now and then. Aside from the usual free-mium promos, there’s an abundance of events wherein it’s easy to farm, or at least acquire, rare monsters, resources and extra exp. And the good thing about bonus exp is that you don’t have to worry about exceeding your energy limit. Even if you receive bonus +30 exp (which they often give) while on a full tank, your bonus will go over the quota, often giving you a legitimate improper fraction, just so the player won’t feel cheated out on a bonus.

Summoners War field-(2)

They also have the service of asking you to reconnect and resend battle results, which is quite rare for most online games. For some, the moment you lose connection, it’s an automatic loss, so it’s quite a nice touch in terms of service.

 

Summoners War field

Conclusion: Excellent

All in all, Summoners War: Sky Arena is a total win for me. What you have here is a class S time waster and more. I’d even be happy to spend real cash on it to enhance my experience, but in its freemium state, the game is already addictive and good enough to satisfy.

It’s well-polished and the system mechanics are tight, new and fun to figure out. So if you’ve got patience, a little bit of a tactician’s itch, and a strong desire to keep up with the grind, you’ll find that this title is worth downloading for keeps.

Neverwinter: Tyranny of Dragons Launches Today

Neverwinter

Today, Perfect World Entertainment Inc., a leading publisher of widely-acclaimed free-to-play MMORPGs, announced that Neverwinter’s newest content update – Tyranny of Dragons – has officially launched in North America and Europe. Neverwinter: Tyranny of Dragons brings forth one of the largest content updates for the Dungeon & Dragons MMORPG, including a new playable class, a new playable race, new heroic encounters and a new dungeon and skirmish for adventurers to explore.

Starting today, players can play as the Scourge Warlock class. Offered as part of the free update, the Scourge Warlock focuses on ranged damage and curse mechanics, making it an excellent support role for parties. The new Scourge Warlock adds unique options for teams of players as they battle through regions overrun with the Cult of the Dragon, culminating in new heroic encounters with several dragons from Dungeons & Dragons lore.

Neverwinter: Tyranny of Dragons also brings a new skirmish and dungeon that puts the teamwork skills of Neverwinter players to the test. These new instances take players on a journey through unfamiliar environments including Lostmouth and Tuern as they uncover storylines from Dungeons & Dragons fiction. Also available is the new Dragonborn premium race, allowing players to step into the role of the dangerous and powerful Dragonborn.

“As fans of the series, we are constantly looking at ways to build on our players’ Neverwinter experiences, and ensuring that they live up to the lore of Dungeons & Dragons and the core D&D experience we all love,” says Rob Overmeyer, Executive Producer of Neverwinter. “It’s not possible to have too many dragons in Neverwinter and our team has heard the calls from our community. We work tirelessly to continue to bring great gameplay, good times and epic moments to our game. We look forward to watching our players take on the onslaught of dragons in Neverwinter: Tyranny of Dragons.”

For more info, visit www.PlayNeverwinter.com