New features for League of Angels in May bring players a new angel, a new mount, and a new costume! Players participating in the Cross-server Team Tournament and the Resource Tycoon Event may work towards acquiring these exciting new additions.
The new angel Alecta is the spirit of divine retribution against wrath, greed, laziness, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony. Players can work together with Alecta to rid the world of the deadly sins! To prove their worth and gain Alecta’s trust, players must first show their might in the Cross-Server Team Tournament. Alecta’s skill, Holy Rage, deals an astonishing amount of magic damage equal to all enemies that lay before her.
Floe Hunter, the precious white tiger, is the holy beast of the northern continent. Players can obtain this stunning but ferocious mount by participating in the Single-server Resource Tycoon event. Floe Hunter’s skill, Song of Faith, gives an incredible 20% chance to increase player attack by 10% and allows players to quickly tear up their opposition!
The new Gold Organza costumes go to show it’s never out of date to wear Gold! These costumes are available to players who compete in the Cross-Server Resource Tycoon event. These exquisite costumes offer players insane bonuses to HP, attack, defense, and agility!
ArenaNet prepares to celebrate a seemingly Asian themed Festival of the Four Winds, with floating paper ships and bright coloration for all in Guild Wars 2.
Released this March, Shikihime Garden has started to draw much attention from players who are interested in Chibi-style web games from Japan. The game may be seen as a RPG Farmville edition made by Japanese combined with traditional card combat gameplay. The game requires players to battle against numerous enemies to collect new cards (called Shikihime, i.e. magic princess) and items which later can be used as decorations in their small but cute gardens.
Till now Appirits has been implementing many features to bring fresh content to their players. For this occasion, Appirits has added some notable updates as below.
Unique Story for specific Shikihime: By giving a certain garden item to specific Shikihime, players can unlock their hidden stories. These items can be obtained via story-related quests. At first, only Basic Shikihime will have their stories added. The notable thing about Shikihime cards is that they are not only cards, but living cute Chibi characters in players’ garden. Once obtaining 4 cards of the same Shikihime, players can unlock 4 actions of Shikihime, such as walking, eating, talking and playing.
New colors for Card attributes: Now each Card attribute (sword/axe, magic/recovery/sprite, bow/spear) has different color to differentiate cards during combat easily. Besides, a graph of rivalry of each attribute will now display at the top right during battle.
Like most Japanese tactic games, Shikihime Garden uses a rivalry system to balance strength and weakness of all Shikihime and monster cards. It works similar to the rock-paper-scissors relation. Keep it in mind will help player win battles more easily.
card attribute
Send Gift function: Now players can send gifts to their friends in Shikihime Garden at the [Gift] tab in [Shop]. At first, the “Send Gift” feature is only available for Power-priced items, i.e. Gold Ticket for now. Gold Ticket is a special item used to obtain powerful Shikihime via God Summon that normally cost players 500 Power.
Guild Effects: Joining a guild in Shikihime Garden will give players more benefits than before. By raising Guild Rank and Guild Effect Level, players can enjoy a significant boost of Attack, Defense, Agility, Item Drop rate, and EXP when battling against Underworld Bosses and in subjugation battles on the world map.
guild effect
Moreover, Appirits is holding a special event only for new players who register for Shikihime Garden from May 13th to May 20th.
Gifts to new players: All new players joining Shikihime since May 13th 00:00 PDT will be given a valuable set to start their adventure. The gift set includes [set of Element Brush x1, AP Recovery Pill x5, Bottle of God Wine x5, Brush of Training x5].
▪ Element Brush: used to increase Atk/Def/Agi/HP/Rec of Shikihime
▪ AP Pill: used to restore Action Point
▪ Bottle of God Wine: used to restore HP of all Shikihime
▪ Brush of Training: used to gain EXP for card
Besides, if new players can reach Player Level 6 during the event will be rewarded 1 Gold Ticket at the regular maintenance next week May 20th.
A new upcoming indie group named Citadel Studios has just annouced their kickstarter campaign for their upcoming customizable sandbox MMORPG called Shards Online. Shards Online is heavily inspired by the great herald of online worlds, Ultima Online, and other popular sandbox games. Citadel is breaking away from the modern MMO conventions of levels, classes and quest grinds. With Shards Online, we are returning to living virtual worlds where stories emerge naturally as players explore the worlds laid out before them.
With a base goal of $320,000, this project aims to provide skill based character development, dynamic and emergent content, multi-verses spanning many genres, unlimited custom rulesets and a living virtual world.
ArenaNet, developer of the acclaimed Guild Wars franchise, today took the stage at a Guild Wars 2 event in Beijing to announce the China launch and reveal that its next release is an in-game festival celebrating China for players around the world. At an event studded with Asia stars, ArenaNet and China-based game publisher KongZhong announced the game officially releases in China on May 15 of this year. Guild Wars 2 is launching there as a one-time purchase packaged or digital game with no subscription fee, the same business model the game uses in the West but a trailblazing approach for the China MMO game market. ArenaNet then used the stage in Beijing to reveal “Festival of the Four Winds,” the next new release coming to Guild Wars 2 players in North America and Europe on May 20. ArenaNet president and co-founder Mike O’Brien previewed a teaser trailer and introduced the release as the game’s first truly global game update.
“We wanted to provide the best possible MMO experience for Chinese players, so we joined forces with KongZhong, an ambitious partner who shared our passion for quality,” O’Brien said. “Together we’ve spent eighteen months preparing – meeting with Chinese players and guild leaders to get their feedback, and working on every little detail of the game. Finally we’re ready to open our arms and join with China as one global community.”
At the event in Beijing, which is still ongoing today during early business hours across the West, ArenaNet and KongZhong are sharing the stage with China super stars, major global brands participating in the game’s launch, and a 30-foot statue of legendary Guild Wars character Rytlock Brimstone. The event’s biggest celebrity performer is singer and songwriter Jike Juan Yi, or Summer, a China super star who KongZhong enlisted to be a prominent Guild Wars 2 spokesperson in launch ads and videos. As a treat for both her fans in China and Guild Wars 2 fans around the world, Summer recorded a music video blending live action and game play to debut a Chinese version of the Guild Wars 2 anthem “Fear Not This Night.” She is to perform the song live at the Beijing event.
In the upcoming release “Festival of the Four Winds,” the Zephyrites have returned to honor the spirit of their trade agreement with Lion’s Arch, a reprieve for the game’s trading hub and cultural center. Lion’s Arch is largely destroyed and still reeling from the devastating attack by Scarlet to end the last series of updates to Guild Wars 2. In “Festival,” players participate in challenges and activities to help raise funds to rebuild the city they helped defend. That includes taking on challengers in the return of Queen Jennah’s Gauntlet, where they can earn rewards by fighting new foes.
ArenaNet and KongZhong are ensuring that players in China share the same Guild Wars 2 experience as their counterparts around the world. Starting with “Festival of the Four Winds,” ArenaNet is synchronizing updates for China to receive new content within days of release in the West. The companies have put painstaking effort towards not just localizing but customizing the game for China, translating millions of words, dubbing tens of thousands of voice over lines, and refitting hundreds of game features and systems. The attention to quality along with Guild Wars 2’s success in the West have been a big part of KongZhong’s campaign, sending the message to players that China is primed for premium MMO games, and watching it resonate among China press who have named Guild Wars 2 as one of the most anticipated games of the year.
Guild Wars 2 officially launches in China on May 15 at 10:18 a.m. Beijing time, drawing on the luck Chinese culture ascribes to the number eight.
WildStar is being heralded as the ‘next big thing’ in the world of pay-to-play, themepark MMORPGs. Its developers have been active in the PR process, and relatively open about their design decisions with their frequent, comical ‘devspeak’ videos that detail everything from user-interface to combat movement, to grouping and targeting. What they haven’t covered in detail yet is the raid content, and as a member of the press, I was fortunate enough to get a sneak peek at the raid devspeak. What follows is my impressions of it, and what I managed to glean from the interview afterwards.
One of WildStar’s claims to fame is its highly mobile, dynamic combat that challenges players to keep moving and avoid danger zones created by enemy attacks. In basic fights, this is not terribly challenging, and even the most amateur of players can manage to sidestep an enemy’s attack to avoid the brunt of the damage. But as player level increases, so do the challenges, until level cap comes, and major boss fights and raids become a big part of the elder game experience. In the words of WildStar’s own developers, this is intentional – while WildStar’s raid mechanics are intentionally punishing, they believe they do a good job of training players to be ‘raid quality’ from the earliest levels.
In previous MMORPGs, the process of raiding has been gathering a huge group of cats (players) together and attempting to herd them into doing synchronized swimming activities. Moving that many people around smoothly is an immense challenge, and that challenge is further compounded by the fact that raid encounters are made to be trial and error by design. WildStar’s developers say that while they want their raids to be difficult and ‘hardcore’, they believe that the inherent design philosophy behind the game’s attack targeting (avoid the big red zone on the ground) will allow raiders to always know what killed them and why, which circumvents a great deal of frustration.
It’s no secret that raiding isn’t for everyone. WildStar’s team hopes to bring in people who aren’t necessarily into raiding by making the challenges less blindly obnoxious or frustrating, but it’s questionable whether or not they’ll be able to address the core problem that turns most players off from raiding; the raiders themselves. It’s confirmed that WildStar is making their best possible PVE gear attainable only through the highest-level raids, which of course means that joining a raiding guild is going to be somewhat mandatory, especially with the confirmation that a ‘raid finder’ will not be included with the game at launch.
Raiding culture is one inherently tied to a need to feel superior to others, and by making the best PVE gear in the game attainable only through raiding, the ancient wishes of the ‘hardcore raider’ crowd are being granted, arguably to the detriment of the game’s potential greater community. Many players are praising WildStar for trying to return to and improve upon the days of “vanilla WoW” and the similarities between the two experiences are striking. WildStar knows what it wants to be and where it’s going. Raiding and serious PVP are going to be a large part of the game’s experience, with immersion and thoughtful storytelling being relegated to smaller-scale encounters. The developers know that the average raider cares little for lore or story, so raids are not going to be a big part of the game’s larger storytelling experience – this is what I was told. However, advertising up to this point has been the exact opposite. I am not entirely sure what to believe.
According to the WildStar devs, melee characters won’t be suffering during these massive ‘don’t touch the lava’ boss encounters, but my view of the video showed otherwise. It seems that strafing ranged DPS will be performing most efficiently during most raids, but that’s pure speculation based on a heavily edited video demonstration. WildStar’s ability system works around limited loadouts selected from a larger pool of skills. According to the developers, it is intended to be the case that raid leaders will micromanage the ability loadouts of their players according to the anticipated encounters. Did you want to have a loadout mainstay that you rarely deviate from? Tough break, if you’re a raider. Prepare to be told what to do.
But that sort of thing has always been par for the course when it comes to raiding and raid guilds and raiders in general. It’s a gameplay feature that appeals to the joys of crushing hierarchy and elitism. While WildStar’s approach includes massive dungeons and impressively long slogs through bosses and minibosses with generous helpings of loot as reward, no amount of good game design (and WildStar is a beautifully designed game for its purposes) can change the inherent nastiness of the average ‘hardcore raider’ in the MMORPG world. Noobs, prepare to cower before the purple-wrapped demigods, who stand in your major cities like glorious statues, basking in the adoration and awe of common folk.
Tagspeech is the alias of author W.B. Wemyss, who was responsible for the bizarre cyberpunk fever dream called Children of Athena.
Webzen unleashes the first half of the 6th continent, Raebin for the dungeon-based Action MORPG, Continent of the Ninth Seal (C9).
Starting May 13, 2014 (Global Server Time), C9 Players will get a level cap increase to 67 and will be able to jump into five new dungeons; Hidden Valley of Wind, Fragment of Kodes, Dying Forest of Eternity, Syutereunen Logging Camp, and Abyssal Underways.
Along with this content update comes the newly revamped skill book system and new unique/normal items for each class of Fighter, Hunter, Shaman, Witchblade, and Mystic.
The newly revamped skill book system will make it much easier for C9 players to acquire skill books from the dungeons in the 4 ~ 6th continents. Players can now combine their skill books with a Cosmos Stone to randomly strengthen their potency for skill book set effects. Also, players can combine two or more books with an Artisan Crystal for a chance to get a different, more powerful skill book.
To celebrate the new update, Webzen invites C9 players to a daily PVP quest to acquire event tokens that can then be exchanged for a random item from a gift box including 5th Continent P-rare Skill book, Bless of Badhbh Cath, many different types of Elemental Gem and more.
Furthermore, last week the C9 team announced a list of C9 Guild Tournament Matches for each server. Teams of 4 guild members, who have characters above level 50, will compete against others for a unique all-guild buff! Full details of the tournament can be found on the C9 official website http://forums.webzen.com/Topic2686532.aspx.
Today InnoGames announced the cross-platform strategy-MMO Rising Generals. The PvP-heavy online game is modern warfare centric, giving players access to numerous tanks, armored vehicles and dozens of deadly planes and other aircraft. Targeted at fast-paced, action-fueled sessions, the game will be playable on iOS- and Android-phones and tablets as well as on browsers.
Users will be able to access the same account on all platforms. On www.risinggenerals.com, players can apply for the upcoming beta, which is scheduled for summer 2014.
Rising Generals focuses on PvP-action across game worlds that house up to 40,000 players each.
Next to strategic and balanced gameplay for single players and large alliances (so-called Battle Groups), creating instant, rewarding gameplay was a key target for the team: “We want the Rising Generals players to experience a feeling of thrill and exhilaration in a short time period. Immediacy, accessibility and sensory feedback are core aspects of the game”, says the game’s producer Christoph Schmidt.
Rising Generals was developed in Adobe Air, allowing the team to build the game for iOS, Android and browsers simultaneously and realize the battles with stunning 3D graphics and effects, especially on mobile devices.
To create Rising Generals, InnoGames was supported by game design legend Bruce Shelley, known for his work on Civilization and the Age of Empires series. Shelley worked several months with the team during development and spent time in InnoGames’ Hamburg offices.
In Rising Generals, players become commander of a military base, which needs to be quickly upgraded and staffed with troops in order to defend against and attack hostile neighbors. Unlockable technologies as well as officers and generals provide helpful bonuses and perks. Aimed at triggering instant action, Rising Generals progresses at a significantly higher speed than other online strategy games. Real-time 3D animations give each battle a unique feeling, and more than 20 units provide players with lots of strategic options.
