Monthly Archives: March 2015

PAX East 2015: 10 Reasons To Be Hyped

By Jason Parker (Ragachak)

 

PAX East is my first time visiting one of these expos as a member of the press, and the level of excitement I am feeling will only be paralleled by the level of exhaustion I will feel by Sunday’s end.  Despite being a reader of Penny Arcade since its inception, I have yet to attend one of these mysterious events.  But what am I excited for?  Lots of booths and an empty wallet of course!  There are personal little things I’m really excited for, but as far as the job goes, there is a nice list of events and previews I’m particularly excited for, in almost no particular order:

Behemoth PAX East
10. Behemoth Breakfast:
I’m a huge fan of Behemoth and the wonderful things they’ve created.  Even though I’ve still never found three people psychotic enough to play a long-term game of Castle Crashers with me (that can meet at the same time), I’m a big fan.  Behemoth plans on showing us their latest title, Game 4, inside of an arcade cabinet.  It’s sure to be a real crowd pleaser, and I imagine it will be filled with raunchy, absurdly violent goodness.

 

 

Grimm Bros Pax East
9. Dragon Fin Soup – Grimm Bros.
I’ve been waiting to have my childhood assaulted by the Grimm Bros. team for quite a while. I will finally get to see something on the potentially subversive title, and it will be playable on a Vita (which I have never been more glad to own!).  Dragon Fin Soup is something I’m very eager to get my hands on, and see how it will transition to a console (hand-held or otherwise).

 

 

Guild Wars 2 Dungeon Demo
8. Guild Wars 2 – ArenaNet:
Though I am not an avid, active player of Guild Wars 2, I do own it, and even occasionally play it!  At the ArenaNet booth we’re going to have the luxury of taking a look at the first dungeon in the Heart of Thorns, and hopefully even more information about what to expect in the first expansion for the MMO. A brief demo of new systems and game modes will be available to see.

 

 

Stella Chuu PAX East 2015Stella Chuu/Jeff M Photography

7.  Cosplay:
There are going to be some pretty famous cosplayers coming as well! I know Stella Chuu will be there, and Lisa Lou Who as well. But one of the most amazing things to come out of any PAX event are the amazing folk who show their pride in their fandoms by dressing up!  I am sure there will be tons of people dressed in the most creative costumes they can put together. It’s going to be quite a sight to see.

 

 

World of Warships Carrier
6.  Wargaming: World of Warships:
No, I don’t mean World of Warcraft.  Wargaming has an absolute boatload of stuff on offer this year! World of Warships, World of Tanks Blitz, World of Tanks on the Xbox 360, and much much more.  Wargaming in general is putting a lot of content out, but I’m most interested in World of Warships. I admit to a bit of trepidation that it might turn out to be clunky and hard to play… you know, boats have never been done well. But if anyone knows combat, it’s them!

 

 

Gigantic PAX East
5. Gigantic: Motiga
Gigantic is really intense.  While five on five action might seem overdone, in this your team also has a giant monster to help you. Conversely, your opponents’ team will also have one! My goal here is to best their team, with my compatriot (and employer) assisting me. No pressure there! It’s an action-packed title that is sure to catch eyes.

 

 

FFXIV Heavensward
4. Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward: Square-Enix:
I have stated often and loudly my love of Final Fantasy XIV.  It’s an MMORPG that’s really on the rise, and Heavensward will show off that it’s not a commercial flop such as the first iteration of the game happened to be. Heavensward will be announcing an absolute slew of features. Hopefully they let me get my hands on Triple Triad! I’m a fan of card games almost to distraction.  And getting to hang out with Yoshida will be a bucket list item checked off!

 

Blizzard Overwatch PAX
3. Blizzard Games Panel:
In general, I’m just interested to see what they’re going to announce. I wonder if it will involve a release date for Overwatch or something more to be seen on that. It’s a little early for more WoW news, unless they spoil the final dungeon or some nonsense. I’m hoping to see more on Heroes of the Storm or maybe another expansion for Diablo 3?

 

SMITE Alienware Ra PAX East 2015
2. SMITE Panel:
I have recently become enamored by SMITE, even if I’m not great at it yet.  I gave it a fair shake, and decided I really enjoyed it. It feels like it’s going to be the big MOBA on offer at PAX East this year, so I’m really interested in seeing what they can announce or discuss. This one promises to be entertaining. Considering they have this own booth this time around, I imagine they might be bringing something big to the table. Japanese pantheon? Big news for the XBox One launch? Medusa? Arena Version 3? Olympus is the limit on this one!

 

SF V Nash
1. Capcom Booth:
Street Fighter V? Please?  Can I please try it?  I promise I won’t gloat too hard.  I’m hoping that Ono of Capcom will be there, and I can get my grubby, greedy paws on Street Fighter V.  Only a handful of characters have been announced in Ryu, Chun-Li, Charlie Nash, and possibly M. Bison.  The PS4/PC exclusive fighter with online crossplay is going to be a huge deal; I cannot possibly overstate how big this will be for the Fighting Game Community.

Daybreak Expands G.I.R.L. Scholarship Program to Two Scholarships

GIRL Logo

Daybreak Game Company LLC has announced that the submission process is now open for its 2015 Gamers In Real Life (G.I.R.L.) Game Design Competition. This year, for the very first time, Daybreak’s G.I.R.L. scholarship program will award two winners. One scholarship will be focused on Art & Design, and the other on Programming & Engineering. Each winner will receive a $5,000 scholarship to be applied toward tuition, room and board, and other educational expenses at their college or university. Additionally, the winners will have the opportunity to participate in a summer internship at Daybreak’s headquarters in San Diego for hands-on experience working on some of the company’s award-winning games.

 

This is the eighth year that the G.I.R.L. scholarship program will help aspiring game developers gain knowledge and skills in the video game design field, and provide valuable assistance for educational expenses. Since 2008, G.I.R.L. winners have gone on to make a valuable impact across the gaming and art industries.

 

“Previous internship contributions from G.I.R.L. winners have been nothing short of excellent, which played a key part in our decision to evolve the scholarship even further,” said Laura Naviaux, Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing, Daybreak Game Company. “We’re thrilled that we can provide two students the opportunity this summer to learn more about creating online games, while helping to shepherd new talent into the industry.”

 

Submissions for the 2015 G.I.R.L. Game Design Competition will close on March 26, 2015. To apply, candidates must register with Scholarship America®, Daybreak’s scholarship administrator, and submit their application for evaluation. Complete details are available here.

 

ArtCraft Entertainment’s Crowfall Reaches $1 Million in Crowdfunding

Crowfall Hero Lineup

Independent game developer, ArtCraft Entertainment, Inc. today announced that the highly anticipated massively multiplayer online game, Crowfall™, reached the one million dollar crowdfunding threshold this morning, just eight days from the start of the campaign. The company launched its Kickstarter drive for Crowfall on February 24 and within three days reached its goal of $800,000. The Kickstarter campaign closes on March 26.

Additionally, the campaign already has more than 10,000 backers. The company’s founders, J. Todd Coleman (creative director, Shadowbane, Wizard101, Pirate101) and Gordon Walton (executive producer, Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Star Wars: The Old Republic) say Crowfall’s vision is clearly resonating with an underserved audience of gamers.

Crowfall_K1Gameplay

“The response has been overwhelming.  It’s the players who made this happen,” explained Coleman, ArtCraft’s creative director. “We just provided the spark. They are the ones fanning the flames.  We hoped that the vision would catch on, obviously, but we didn’t expect the momentum to build so quickly.”

“It’s incredible,” added executive producer Gordon Walton, “because it’s not just validating our vision — it’s also a tremendous vote of confidence in our team. The players believe in us, they believe in this game, and they are willing to support us financially to make it happen.”

Crowfall_CharacterCreate_preview

A new type of online experience, Crowfall is a “Massively Multiplayer Online Throne War Simulator.” Players take the role of kings, queens, mercenaries and assassins in a simulation of a feudal world that includes castle building, siege equipment and territorial conquest system.

As a result of reaching this milestone, ArtCraft announced a new stretch goal: at $1.3 million dollars, they will add a “Mounts and Caravans” system to the game, and will celebrate reaching this goal by adding “bonus rewards” to existing reward tiers.  Backers at the $60 or higher level will receive magical Quarterhorses, Warhorses and even a rare “Nightmare” mount as a bonus reward.

Rise of Incarnates Review: It’s a fighting game?!

By Michael Sagoe (mikedot)

Forged by the efforts between the Soul Caibur and Tekken development teams, Bandai Namco has recently released their newest “fighting game” title called Rise of Incarnates onto Steam’s Early Access program. This offers up a 2 vs. 2 battle system where players form up unique team compositions against their opponents as they dash, fly and bash each other across a war torn battlefield.

Now, the reason why I put the words fighting game in quotations is because from the traditional standpoint, Rise of Incarnates is anything but a traditional fighting game. Rather, if you have ever played mech action games like Virtual-On or Gundam Extreme Vs, then you’ll have a much better idea of how Rise of Incarnates plays out. As a matter of fact: most of the gameplay elements for this title were taken straight from recent Gundam VS. titles that have been available in Japanese arcades from quite some time. While it certainly provides something uncommon to the fighting game genre, there’s still a question of how well it plays and how well it maintains itself as a F2P game while remaining fair for a competition focused game.

Rise of Incarnates

Controls

When starting the game up for the first time, players will be greeted with an opening cinematic video and instantly launched into a tutorial session that will teach players basic and advanced gameplay techniques. While the tutorial may be very clear and easy to understand, getting a hang of the controls is a whole different story. The game offers up two control schemes: one for keyboard & mouse, and one for gamepads. Attempting to play using the mouse and keyboard setup may be a bit uncomfortable at first due to the fast-paced and twitch-based nature of the gameplay. In Rise of Incarnates, timing and quick reactions are everything, so it’s almost necessary to have your fingers on or near every command possible. With this is mind, getting used to the mouse and keyboard setup is possible, but playing the game using a gamepad felt way more responsive and natural.

The commands that are available include normal and special abilities for melee and ranged attacks, dashing and jumping, defensive guards, target switching and awakening abilities. Switching targets is one command that players will have to get used to as soon as possible, as they’ll constantly be switching back and forth between enemies as they dash around the screen and prepare opponents for team tag combos (that can be performed by pressing forward + melee attack button twice), which is very satisfying to pull off in those close quarters situations. The different kinds of combo attacks that can be performed merely amount to holding a directional button and mashing the melee attack button at first, but once players understand dash cancels and attack cancels, they’ll be able to perform various custom combos. However, these custom combos do not allow much room for creativity due to the damage threshold that opponents can take before they plummet towards the ground and become temporary invulnerable to damage.

Rise of Incarnates

Gameplay and Features

Rise of Incarnates features an adequate amount of game modes to choose from, including ranked matches, custom lobbies, bot matches and training. Both ranked matches and bot matches can be played solo or with a friend via Steam’s friend system, and training mode gives very simple on-screen guides on how to play each character individually.  Each mode works the way they should, but the lack of players in custom lobbies and early ranked matches may be disappointing for newcomers. Ranking matches, in particular, will always try to find players of equal skill, which is all fine and good, but when the system doesn’t find active players of equal skill, the game will set players up against bots to make up for them. For many new players, they may have to go through a handful of bot matches in ranking mode before they’ll ever fight against human opponents, which is a bit frustrating to say the least.

There’s also only two stages to play one, however. Between New York and Paris, which both are very nicely designed and contain very noticeable landmarks, these two stages do not offer up much interactivity besides a few destructible objects and will  become dull to play on very quickly.

One interesting aspect for Rise of Incarnates is the stock system: Each team has six respawn stocks that they share among their teammates and each character has a predetermined set of stocks from one to three, so if you were up against a team that has characters with 1 and 2 stocks, it means you would have to defeat each enemy opponent two times in order to win, while a team that has two enemies with three stocks would only have to be defeated once each.

The reason why some characters have multiple stocks while others have one is because some characters have more HP than others and are less fragile in combat, thus getting defeated in a match is more costly. This creates a unique meta between you and your teammate in order to come up with a solid tag team that balances out the risks and rewards of their abilities.

As unique as the stock system is, character imbalances are still noticeable between high and low stock characters. During the time of this review, characters such as Ra had so much HP and so many zoning and ranged tools at his disposal that he was fairly untouchable in 1v1  confrontations.  While characters are continuously being rebalanced every week, it’s still very clear that some characters need to be tweaked more than others.

Rise of Incarnates

Bouts in Rise of Incarnates are an exciting mix between arcade mecha shooter action and fighting game combat, as players will need to attack fast and think even faster when dealing with two opponents at the same time. Players can set opponents up for various tag combos with long ranged attacks and animation locked melee attacks, and they’re both very hard to perform in heated matches, but very satisfying when pulled off. The environments that players battle in can also be used to their advantage, as they contain various structures to hide behind. These structures can also be destroyed, so players can’t abuse them by attacking from a distance and then hiding until their skill meter recharges indefinitely.

Speaking of skill meters: Rise of Incarnates features a skill meter similar to how skills work in certain RPGs: each attack has a set number of uses and, once depleted, players will have to wait a small amount of time for their skills to recharge which keeps the ranged attack spam down to a minimum.

Overall, besides from a few character balance issues as stated above, the core gameplay for Rise of Incarnates is actually pretty enjoyable. However, it’s the customization that comes beforehand that drags the gameplay down from a competitive standpoint, as I’ll explain in this next piece…

Rise of Incarnates

Customization

Rise of Incarnates features several different character customization options, some that are very acceptable and others that are not. Options such as character skins and cosmetic items are available for purchase using IP (Cash purchased currency) in order to give favorite characters an extra special look. But then there’s skill cubes that players can earn either by playing through matches and leveling up their character or by purchasing them from the shop using LP (in-game currency). At first, the skill cube system seems fair enough, allowing all players to access enhancements of sorts. Yet as you get more experience under your belt, players will realize that paying players can gain an upper hand on non-paying players by spending money on IP, including more skill cube grid space, faster enhancements and more. Players may also be able to purchase extra skill grid space using LP, but that will cost players a hefty amount which will take days or even weeks to obtain, depending on a player’s dedication to the game. Having any kind of statistical advantage over players in a competition-focused game already gives a rise for concern, but being able to buy stat advantages faster than players that only pay using in-game currency seems like it could create very huge imbalances in the long run.

Visuals and Presentation

The presentation for Rise of Incarnates gives off a very comic-book feel to it, which works out well considering that the promotion leading up to the game’s release had a very extensive e-comic series tied to it. The character designs are also very stylized, and very reminiscent of recent titles from PlatinumGames such as Anarchy Reigns and Vanquish. The sound design contains very generic rock music and above-average voiceovers for each character, which isn’t nearly as impressive as the character designs, but it gets the job done and makes the tone of the game feel appropriately serious. In terms of raw visuals: Characters and environments are very detailed, but the lack of anti-aliasing built in will make the game look like a very dated PlayStation 3 title.

Rise of Incarnates

Community

Rise of Incarnates also features various community features including rankings and circles. Rankings allow players to see how well they stack up against players all around the world, while circles allow players to start up a clan in order to participate in circle lobby matches. There’s also an option to watch live matches via Twitch streaming so players can watch and learn from experts on how to play. Besides from the option of watching live matches, both rankings and circles serve their purposes well.

The community is generally filled with experienced players that will not hold back against newcomers, so unless you’re confident, prepare to enroll into the school of hard knocks when participating in ranked matches.

Overall: 4/5 (Great)

If it wasn’t for the faster stat advantages that players can purchase using real money, Rise of Incarnates would have gained a very high recommendation from me. The core gameplay is very exciting and has rarely been seen in the PC gaming space, let alone the F2P gaming market. The enhancement system is the only thing I can see holding this game back from gaining more popularity, and I’m really hoping they’ll consider changing it in the future. Still, this game is certainly worth a try and will provide quick bursts of entertainment.

Moonrise Will Be Coming to Steam

Moonrise Combat 3

If you got excited about Moonrise after our PAX South report, good news: it will also be coming to Steam.

The announcement, posted on Undead Labs’ blog, said:

We are bringing our beautiful creature battler and its unique PVP to Steam. We will be handing out beta keys to people who try it at PAX East this weekend, and we’ll move into Early Access after we assimilate the feedback we get from the beta.

Of course, Steam players will be sharing the world and doing battle with our players on mobile devices.