Monthly Archives: September 2016

World of Warcraft: Legion Launch Impressions

Cowritten by Jason Parker (Ragachak) and Remko Molenaar (Proxzor)

Ragachak writes. . .

Okay, I’ll admit it: I thought Legion was going to be absolute trash. Sure, everything’s not perfect [RE: Retribution Paladins]. I was 100% certain it was just going to be demons and green fire as far as the eye could see, in a bland but bright portrait of destruction on this beautiful land of Azeroth.  I was worried I’d have to do the stupid intro quests on every character, but that’s not the case. You need only do the introduction once, and then it’ll just kick you ahead, give you the fancy new Hearthstone and send you forward into the world to find the Pillars of Creation. We have another “undiscovered” and humongous new area, the Broken Isles. Dalaran floats overhead as it has before, a beacon of higher learning where both factions can gather without trying to murder each other.

WoW Legion Impressions - Artifact Obtained

That’s the other big worry I’ve had. Since the end of Burning Crusade I’ve been on PVP servers and ever since, the beginnings of expansions are just rife with overcrowding and ganking. People just struggling to get a quest monster or item to move forward die dozens of times. It’s really fucking disheartening to have to deal with if you’re on the receiving end.  However. . . that’s not happening now. I’ve worked on four characters and have a pile of Artifacts to show for it, and each character is in a different area. How is that even possible though?

Blizzard learned from past mistakes! It may have taken a few years, but they did it. Once you’ve completed your Artifact mission, which varies by spec/class, you get to your Class Hall from which you’ll plan your next step.

WoW Legion Impressions - Broken Isles MapDon’t let the small space of this map fool you – the Broken Isles are huge.

Here are your choices:

Highmountain: We have another type of damn Tauren! This time they’re Moose Tauren, because the Buffalo Tauren weren’t odd enough. It’s a mountainous zone that’s very picturesque, though there’s plenty there ready to kill you. It’s what I always pictured rural mountainous Canada or the northern United States to look like. You know, before people got there and mucked it all up. Nesingwary also makes his return in this zone, though you won’t feel quite as bad slaughtering the wildlife as you have in past expansions.

Stormheim: Another rocky area, but this one isn’t covered in snow. The Vrykul who left Northrend behind are here, and the quests will pit you against the God-King of the Vrykul. It all ties up nice and neat at the foot of the dungeons, but you don’t have to do the quest chain to unlock them [thank God]. This area features probably my favorite item so far, the Stormpowered Grappling Hook! Yes, those treasure puzzles are back, with lots to be found by launching from hook to hook.

Val’sharah: Malfurion first became a Druid here! If you want to explore the gorgeous nature lore that consists of Cenarius, Ysera, Druids, and the Night Elves, this is the area you want to make a stop in. I hear there is an enormous army of Satyr here, but I haven’t gotten there yet. It’s not high on my priorities. My lore interests lie elsewhere.

WoW Legion Impressions - Hatecoil EncampmentAzsuna: Azsuna is the home of the old cultural center of the former Broken Isles. Well, it sort of is. It’s a pile of ruins, occupied by ghosts of Night Elves, the Blue Dragonflight, and the Nightfallen. There’s an incredible amount of lore in this area as all of them are, but in this zone we actively race against the clock versus a very annoyed Queen Azshara to get to the Pillars of Creation .

Suramar: This is the area you can only get to when you hit 110. There’s another race of Night Elves here though, and they are cattle to the Burning Legion because why not?  Abuse of magic is dangerous, just ask the Blood Elves. What Gul’dan seeks is here, so what is our answer? To brutally murder as many Elves as we can! #logic

There’s an elephant in the room though and I’ve waited long enough to address it: Artifacts. This was one of the big things I thought was going to be absolutely fucking awful. HAY YOU CAN HAZ AN ARTIFACT, BETTER THAN A LEGENDARY!!!11 And while yes, that’s true, and it grows in strength as you put work into it, the more I thought about it, the more I like it! One of the hardest parts of raiding for me [and doing dungeons] was getting a new, cool, powerful weapon. I’ve seen people go most of an expansion without a serious upgrade to what they got when they hit level cap, and that’s wrong. Personally my favorite one right now is Apocalypse [Unholy Death Knight].

WoW Legion Impressions - Lights Wrath Artifact

I’m very disappointed in you though, Blizzard. This was your chance to make up Vanilla to me. I wanted a staff like Atiesh, but nooooo. We had to get goofy looking swords and staves that really don’t cut the mustard to me. Most of the Artifacts are cool looking, and the quests for them make sense. The idea behind the Mission you undertake is that it will require you to know how your class functions. If you’re a healer, you’ll probably be keeping things alive/intact. It all comes together nicely. It promotes exploring, since the Treasure Boxes tend to have items that increase your Artifact power. As you complete quests in zones you’ll also unlock abilities for your Artifact, though they will ultimately become obsolete as you get deeper and deeper into the world. So if you go into a dungeon and see the healer isn’t packing their 750+ weapon? That means they haven’t bothered to do the mission, likely don’t get their class, and you should bail, quick-fast-and-in-a-hurry.

WoW Legion Impressions - The Runewood

Speaking of which though, that brings me to the next thing I love. Zones are not restricted to level. Zones are not restricted to level. I cannot say this enough times! As you level, the areas grow with you so that you don’t have to feel rushed in and out of areas, missing the climax of the stories in order to keep experience maximized. I feel like the story takes the front seat finally too. Each Class HQ has its own goals and plots. The Death Knight area is trying to resurrect the Four Horsemen, and you learn more about each of them as you go.  And speaking of Class HQs, I’m so glad we have these instead of Garrisons. That’s not even realistic! There are millions of people playing! So you have millions, more thanks to alts, of Garrisons for all the Special Snowflakes that are the heroes of this story. It’s absolutely damned absurd. But at least in Class Headquarters, everyone of that class can go there and work together. You can’t talk to the opposing faction, but you can be in the same place peacefully.

The long and short of it is, I’ve never been this happy with an expansion of World of Warcraft. Never. That’s with BC/Lich King on the table. It’s story-driven, it promotes unity towards a greater cause, and people seem to actually be buying into it! I’ve only been ganked once so far. But there are always going to be jerks, and world PVP’s gonna happen. But so far it has gone off without a hitch. I’m interested, I’m intrigued. I am captivated by the gorgeous landscape, the story has me curious to learn more about the Warcraft lore than I ever did before. This is what could have been, if they had learned some of these lessons years and years before hand. Were they worried that this could be their swan song, their Final Fantasy, if sales weren’t great? Possibly. All I know is that a lot of love and heart went into Legion, and I have yet to be disappointed.

 

WoW Legion Impressions - A Beautiful Moment

Proxzor writes. . .

Endgame! Although we still have to wait a couple of weeks until we can try and have our go in the new raids, we still have to prepare for them and get our gear up to par for the difficulties we will face. When you hit the max level of 110 you get to go to the last zone in the Broken Isles, Suramar. Here you will find the Nightfallen, a group of exiles that were once part of the Nightborne in Suramar City. Expelled from the city, the Nightfallen need Arcwine to survive. Like a bunch of drug addicts they cannot live without this drug, or else they will go crazy and turn into the withered. The withered are members of the Nightfallen that have gone too long without any arcane substance. They are past recovery and you will see them plenty walking through Suramar.

WoW Legion Impressions - Suramar

Instead of daily quests, you will help the Nightfallen get a new base of operations and get them back on their feet. Even though you do have to follow a questline, after a week you will run out and have to farm the remaining reputation through the world quests and the withered army training. The world quests are also important to do daily. Instead of going back to the same zone every single day, talking with the same people so you can do the same daily quest, you now travel all over the Broken Isles, doing random quests for the different factions, and you will gain both reputation and items for your character. The world quests are a nice change of pace instead of the previous dailies, and its great having to kill different bosses all around the Broken Isles, or repeating some of the fun quests you encountered leveling up.

WoW Legion Impressions - Haunted

Training the withered is also a fun thing you can do a few times per week. Once every few days, or every day if you’re lucky, you get the option to train an army of withered. Here you will delve into a dungeon with an army of withered equal to the amount of mana you give them, and slowly have to work your way towards the end. In this dungeon styled area you will encounter mini bosses and other challenges that will test you and your army in a few ways. The trick here is that you need as many withered you can find, and even though you do encounter random withered that you can take with you, if you find a strong monster they might also run away or die. Scattered in this dungeon (which I personally haven’t seen the end of yet) you will also find chests. The bigger chest can be brought back to the entrance, but you do have to ‘offer’ some of your withered to bring it back – at the cost of losing progress and a chance to get further in the dungeon. It’s a really fun challenge to do, that will also earn you a lot of reputation with the Nightfallen. But why exactly do you need the reputation with the Nightfallen? Well, once you’ve gained enough reputation you also unlock two more mythic dungeons that will definitely help you prepare for the upcoming raids.

When you get to level 110, you have to gear yourself to eventually tackle the heroic versions of the dungeons. And even though you can do gear up by playing in the normal dungeons, you can do so better by following the different questlines and world quests. In the heroic dungeons you will be able to prepare yourself for the mythic dungeons, and the mythic dungeons drop the right gear so you can eventually get the right gear for the raids. This will keep us busy until the 20th of September when the raids and the rest of the content will arrive.

WoW Legion Impressions - Naga Fight

I personally liked the leveling, and although there are a lot of different storylines in each zones that confused me with what the goal was overall, one thing is obvious: we’re not doing a good job, and we’re still losing people all over the place, both dragons and other important characters that can turn the tide. Once you get to max level, the reputation grind and gearing can feel a little tedious, but its always been like this, except its done in a different style in Legion. While I do enjoy the expansion so far, I am already ready for the raids with the luck I’ve had this week, and I personally cannot wait until the 20th of September. Legion looks like it has brought the justified charm back into World of Warcraft, and although a lot of people said the same during Warlords of Draenor, I feel like there is still enough content and lore waiting for us in the next few days. Lets hope they don’t ruin Illidan’s character and story though, for that will ruin the last chance that World of Warcraft has found in Legion.

 

Super Mario Run: Stop Whining.

super-mario-run-640x360

Okay, so Super Mario Run is an officially licensed game coming to Apple.  It’s a beautiful idea, it’s Mario, running across stages, getting coins, but on a mobile device that is not a Nintendo device. This is a different situation than Pokémon Go, because that is not a Nintendo game. It’s a Niantic game, with Game Freak/The Pokémon Company’s blessing/support. Something like that. Super Mario Run is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish. I’m so glad to see Nintendo branching out. I mean, they started as a card game company, and a hundred or so years later they became a video game company. It didn’t take quite as long to move out of their own devices, but it’s a fantastic idea. But people are raging that it “won’t be on Android” because it’s not coming out at the same time. But it will most likely be on Android too. Sorry Windows phones. Besides. . . It’s not coming out until goddamn DECEMBER! If it comes out on Android hopefully it’ll be early 2017. It would be a terrible move to isolate such a large part of the mobile gaming market by not developing for Android too, so I simply assume it will happen. It would be foolish on its face not to.

mariorun-1401x788-8a64fb50-804e-4301-b072-73e7304181f0

Some people simply don’t understand. When developing for an Apple device, you develop for pretty much all of them. They’re the same device all around and easier to develop for. But for Android? I actually brought this up at HiRez/Smite Worlds this year with a few of their higher ups. They explained to me something I should have known but did not quite realize. I use an Android phone. But almost every damn Android phone is different: Different specs, OS, screen size, et cetera. So you have to spend a lot of time figuring out exactly how that’s going to work. And they want to get the game out there so everyone can see it. It’s going to take a while for it to come to Android, but it will. Much like Jetpack Fighter by Hirez [go play it, seriously. Go do it.] was amazing and took a while to hit my poor ‘droid. But it will, and I am patient. You can be too. Don’t push any cars over or start fires.

Nameste.

Dual Universe PAX Prime 2016 Deep Dive

By Darren Henderson (DizzyPW)

 

Dual Universe PAX Prime 2016

Imagine a hypothetical MMORPG where the developers just pushed every element of emergent gameplay to the limits. Beyond anything you imagined could realistically be included in a game. Let’s go Sci-Fi setting so the sky isn’t the limit. Dynamic skill use based progression that lets players train a set skill amongst a myriad of skills on a single character whether offline or online. A world with sandbox elements and fully constructible cities and heck, cities in space while we’re at it. Cities you could literally fly, like the Death Star. And on scales comparable to the Death Star, with hundreds of players working together to operate its endless weapons and systems. Ooo action combat is a must too. Oh sure why not throw in some politics for good measure, with safety zones and open world PvP built off of player created factions. Let’s see… are we missing anything? Ah yes, draw distances that let you literally see planets beyond your planet’s hemisphere that actually exist in the universe and can be flown to. Ah wait one more idea. What if when you get to that planet there is alien lifeforms you can discover.

That’s some real fantasy concepts piled together, don’t you think? I’m pretty skeptical we’d see anything like this in the next decade with how MMORPGs are going. Oh but I’m a doubter. Clearly Novaquark and the 1300 backers and growing on Kickstarter are ready to make this fantastical super game a reality. You know what’s really wild though? I’ve seen this game in action already. It’s Dual Universe. Let me show you.

 

Dual Universe PAX Prime 2016

But… How?

It wasn’t five minutes into the demo that I felt I was being bamboozled by some sort of pre-rendered tech demo. But there was just enough glitches and unchoreographed moments to make it all believable. Too much seemed unreal. The planet was believable enough… until he flew into space and turned around. The world I saw before me was large enough to be one of the largest MMORPGs of all time. But that was all it was. Just one world! As he turned into space, countless other dots stood vigilant amidst the stars. I challenged him to show me these dots weren’t just a pretty wallpaper of a solar system. So he did.

Dual Universe PAX Prime 2016

With the help of GM powers (as the distances were quite vast) we rocketed through space at blazing speed to a dark toxic world. Then a world filled with massive Redwood-esque trees. Then a rogue moon work in progress with some rough but still great by placeholder standards textures demonstrating it had been pummeled by asteroids due to a lack of atmosphere. Even the moon was huge, but every world was a fully believable to scale planet. Each seemed entirely different, and my mind immediately went to work imagining the interplanetary player driven economics that could result from various guilds running mining operations between them. But two thoughts limited the realism for me there.

 

Dual Universe PAX Prime 2016

You and what army?

With worlds this large, and this many planets, I had to wonder how a player driven economy could even work. Even with a ridiculous estimate of the inventory carry capacity a player might have, given the populations expected in the major cities it just didn’t seem like a feasible business model for a player driven economy. At least… not without properly functional mega cruisers to transport players and trading goods between worlds. But at such a size, they would be huge targets for PvP players looking to make a quick buck in this open world PvP environment. Finally, could a game already responsible for running such a massive player edited solar system even handle the stress of processing all this? Again, nothing seemed possible given my knowledge of game design and existing tech.

17_control_unit_screen_version

My first concern was answered all right, with a resounding metaphorical exclamation mark in-fact, as Mr. Baillie flew us into sub-orbit of the starting planet to approach a space station that nearly rivaled the rogue moon in size. Clearly by some of the wonky design points, this was a player created construction of epic scale. But I imagined it was nothing more than a pretty space monument given its size. After some fiddling around and GM code marking, at least Baillie found one of the exterior doors to enter the craft. Utilizing pre-rendered parts used to make crafting in the game not a complete living hell for the less Minecraft obsessed players out there, the beautiful hallway stretched on for what I’d compare to at least the length of a football field. Side routes branched out in all directions, leading to gunner positions, storage holds, ports for smaller gunships and supply ships to dock, and finally a command deck room.

Dual Universe PAX Prime 2016

The command deck room was explained to be the central controlling seat for piloting this gargantuan structure around the universe. Though it wasn’t clearly explained how, it was implied from the commander seat you could send instructions to crewmembers throughout the ship to ensure everyone was on the same page, given pirates or rival factions show up and push goes to shove. Still I was baffled. Could the game process the seemingly hundreds of players required to operate a ship like this in such a tiny location of the game world without becoming a slideshow of stutter frames?

Dual Universe PAX Prime 2016

While I’ll spare you the incredibly detailed answer to this question, as it’s a technical marvel that will likely be lectured about in the gaming industry for some time to come, here’s the short of it. Dual Universe operates on a smart system of servers that rapidly identifies player movement and diverts processing power to locations of heavy player population while slacking on the regions of the server without population. Sure we’ve seen systems like this, especially with the rise of on-demand server tech like Amazon offers. But on the scale Dual Universe is attempting? Not even close! Now I will take a wait and see stance on if it’s going to work because naturally there weren’t hundreds of players actively running around on this ship. But it’s not all fluff. I’ve seen the tech demos with bots replicating players, and they’re doing things at least on par with the marvels in Camelot Unchained, a game touting 300+ player siege battles with almost no noticeable frame rate drop. So there is clearly some backing behind their claims.

 

Dual Universe PAX Prime 2016

But for what?

As a simple tech demo sandbox world, what Dual Universe is offering would be monumental. Here’s where I get excited and a bit concerned though. They want to push a massively open skill building system as well, fully customizable ships that are a mix of functional parts and player crafted connecting parts, a massive political system connecting guilds and player economy together, and cram all these moving parts onto one super server where all players are united.

Ambitious doesn’t even come close to describing this project. If not for the over the top mind-blowing tech demo I sat through at PAX, I’d call them mad. Perhaps they are. But that touch of madness and extreme dedication to a dream might be just what the scifi MMORPG scene needs right now. Nearly 2,000 backers on Kickstarter seem to think so after the first day of the campaign. Perhaps you think so to?

Dual Universe PAX Prime 2016

One thing that isn’t mad is that Baillie recognizes this monumental project is not something some 2 man indie group is going to accomplish. He has one hell of a team lined up and is pushing for at least $558k in funding on Kickstarter to deliver on the full promise of his dream. If you want to believe in this dream to, here’s the link. Best of luck to the team at Novaquark. A project like this succeeding is just what Kickstarter and the MMORPG genre need right now.