Yearly Archives: 2016

Grow Up

Grow Up puts exploration and discovery at the forefront of its gameplay experience. When a galactic travel goes awry, BUD must search far and wide on a mysterious planet to find what it is he has lost, available for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows.

Harmony: Become one with the environment itself – ride the waves, drift upon the breeze, and soak in the atmosphere.

Reconstruction: Find the missing parts of your spaceship scattered across the beautiful foreign planet.

Exploratory: Feel free to explore the vast open world at your own pace.

SMITE: Patch Notes: 3.14 Force of Nature

 

The Summer of Smite rolls on! Now we have another Guardian, some cool skins, item adjustments and much more! Things were fixed, Gods were adjusted, items were tinkered with!  We get achievements for Serqet, Isis, and Tyr! I think my favorite thing was the Floaticorn icon, but I’d rather it be a Ward skin. And potions! We get some fun potions again! Only at level 7+, but the buff potions will not go amiss. Smite moves forward and by paying attention to these, you too will be armed with the appropriate knowledge come patch time! First, let’s look at Terra! Terra’s a Guardian in the Roman Pantheon, Grandmother to Jupiter. She’s built around the “Standing Stones” on her passive, and through interacting with them, she can make foes in any lane feel intensely sad. Her name Terra takes on a whole new meaning, as she can globally affect affairs, buffing her friends no matter how far they are.

Terra [Guardian, Roman]:

Terra_Default_Card

Passive – Standing Stones

Terra’s abilities create Standing Stones. As long as any Standing Stones are on the battleground Terra becomes Knockup immune and her Basic Attacks will Slow enemies. If Terra Shatters her stones, This Buff will remain active for 3s afterward.

Force Of Nature

Terra gains momentum, causing her to dash forward and deal damage to enemies she passes through. Terra may dash through her own Standing Stones to Shatter them. If she does she may dash one more time within the next 3s.

Crushing Earth

Terra raises up two Standing Stone walls on either side of a target location, Slowing enemies in between by 20%. As long as both stones stand, Terra may activate this ability again to slam the stones together, damaging and Stunning enemies in between for 1.5s. These stones can be Shattered into a cone of shrapnel with Force of Nature, damaging enemies in the area.

Monolith

Terra summons a Standing Stone monolith surging with natural energy. The monolith heals nearby allied gods every .5s. Terra can Shatter this stone with Force of Nature to Root enemies in the area for 1.5s and create a damaging area that lasts 5s.

Terra’s Blessing

Terra channels her strength into the entire world, buffing all of her allies for 10s. While active, Terra and her allies gain increased Movement Speed, reduction of Mana costs for abilities, and increased Cooldown Reduction. Also if Terra or any allied gods are take damage 4 times during the duration they will be healed. Each god has his or her own hit count.

Skins! We get: Disney Princess Chang’e [Enchanted Chang’e], Pool Party Jing Wei, and a Tier 2 skin for Osiris [Lord of Silence]. They’re very pretty, and Jing Wei having a supersoaker is just the best.

A few of the Miscellaneous Changes:

Change_Enchanted_Card

  • Adjusted the positioning of Global Emotes to explode from where they were fired.
  • Fixed the Summer of Smite loading frame animation, which was previously not playing.
  • Fixed an issue where Vulcap’n Redbeard Vulcan was playing the same voice line for two different lines.
  • Fixed Briar Queen Artemis’ right arm to give it more dimension.
  • Fixed an issue where Nu Wa Challenger and Ace skins were not showing their CC Immunity Glow.
  • Fixed an issue where Sylvanus’ ability “Wrath of Terra” was showing error text.

Item Changes:

Death’s Toll, Spiked Gauntlet, Cursed Gauntlet

God Changes:

Osiris_T2_Card

UI/Fixes:

Aprhodite

Fafnir

Ne Zha

Skadi

Buffs:

Artemis

Bacchus

Ra

Mercury

Jing Wei

Hercules

Nerfs:

Erlang Shen

 

Ratatoskr

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Do you need more than what I’ve given you? Of course, I’m only tempting you with knowledge! If you want to know more, as always, we’ve got you covered. Be sure to stay tuned for all the latest information on Smite! For now, click here for the latest in news!

Battleborn Might Go Free-to-Play

Battleborn Alani Skills Overview

This isn’t something that’s coming out of thin air. Digital Analytics team Superdata has been crunching the numbers, and doing all the math. Long and the short of it is that Battleborn has been bodied by Overwatch in every aspect. It’s not “top five” in any of the categories they listed in their data. Evolve, published by 2k and distributed by Take-Two has this in common, as they recently went F2P. There’s no shame in a title being free to play. Many of the best, or most lucrative PC titles are on that route and doing just fine. The highest digital revenues in their categories were:

  • CoD: Black Ops III [Console]
  • Overwatch [PC]
  • League of Legends [F2P MMO]
  • WoW [P2P MMO]
  • Monster Strike [Mobile]
  • Slotomania [Social]

Overwatch Ana

What’s the reason though? It’s not a bad game. Gearbox is known for tremendous, creative storytelling. And their story is, for the most part amazing. It gets a little repetitious with all the characters being snarky, but it’s definitely going the right way. But the big mistake? Dropping the same day as Overwatch. No, they aren’t the same type of game, but they dropped on the same day. Overwatch crushed everything that came out in the same month as it, because everyone wanted it! It’s Blizzard, it’s an FPS, and it’s catchy. It doesn’t have a story mode, it’s just non stop, easy to get into action. And again, Blizzard. It’s not rocket science. There are a few franchises/companies you don’t battle.

  • Don’t battle FF7. The month that comes out? Seriously, don’t drop any games then. No big content. Let it wait.
  • Blizzard. They’re the HNIC of PC content practically. Not always the best content, but definitely solid work. Give them berth for their shit to drop.

The list could go on, but I’ll spare you.  Companies really need to be more aware of the competition and what’s releasing when. If you know something’s popular and you aren’t 100% your product is going to win out? Wait. I bet if Battleborn had come out a little bit earlier/later, it could have stood a better chance. This is all speculation, but it’s certainly a possibility.

Ghost in the Shell: SAC – First Assault Online Open Beta Preview

By Michael Sagoe (mikedot)

Get your cybernetic augments ready and prepare to dive into the world of Ghost in the Shell once more, as Nexon America and Neople are set to go full steam ahead with the open beta release for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex – First Assault Online. For those that can’t already tell from that incredibly long winded title, this is a competitive multiplayer FPS title based on the popular anime series by the same name, which features an elite cybernetic law enforcement team simply known as Section 9, who investigates and fights against cyber-crime and terrorist activity.

While taking a ton of liberties with the animated series, GitS Online includes every feature it can to resonate with the show, such as cybernetic equipment changes and upgrades for your character, tons of augmented skills that can be used in battle, and several different operatives that players can unlock straight from the show, including Togusa, Batou and Major Motoko Kusangi. This game pulls absolutely no punches when it comes to delivering the GitS fan service.

GiTS

But I’m not quite here to sing the game’s praises, but rather to give you guys a peek into one of the new game modes and features that will be included in the open beta version of the game.

The main attraction showcased in the new version is the Ghost Assault game mode where operative players have to use stealth augments, as well as quick wits and cunning, in order to avoid being chased and caught by cyborg enemy players, resulting in a quick and deadly game of cat and invisible mouse. At first, when I gave this mode a try with a few fellow members, I honestly didn’t have much of a clue what was going on, as I was playing on the robotic terrorist side, just running around looking for enemy players. Not realizing how I was supposed to track the enemy players down, it took me and my team a few lost rounds to finally figure things out: In this mode while playing as the robots, you’ll have a small sonar that tracks the closest stealth enemies nearby. As you follow the sonar, once an enemy player is in range, an afterimage of the enemy will flash red for a brief moment. That will mean that you’re in killing range of the enemy, which you can make short work of using your arm knife weapon. Of course, the enemy isn’t going to let you take them out so easily, so the enemy player can either shoot at you with a pistol a couple of times to either kill you or just slow you down. Each enemy ghost player only has a pistol with a single clip, magazine or revolver speedloader loaded into it, but it’s still enough to take down at least one robot, provided that they don’t miss most of their shots.

GiTS

Playing as a cyborg, you and your team are going to have to work together in order to trap enemy ghost players into a corner and eliminate them one by one, because once an enemy ghost has been taken out, their cybernetic brain will be exposed within a few seconds, and hacking this brain will disable the cloaking devices for all other enemy players for a short amount of time. With two and a half minutes on the clock, ghost players will have to survive until the time hits zero, and if even one ghost player manages to survive when the time is up, the ghosts players win, so when playing as a cyborg, no enemy can be spared.

Now, when playing as the ghosts, it feels very much a different kind of game, as using your cloak to your advantage is a lot harder than it sounds. Because the robots have a sonar system that can track an enemy’s general direction every few seconds, it means that there’s no generally safe place to hide and just wait out the match. You’ll have to keep moving and be wary of your own teammates’ position, because if they manage to take out just one player on your team, it could easily spell out the beginning of the end for you and your team.

Two major opportunities that the enemy robot team doesn’t have over the ghost team, however, is the ability to hack the cyber-brains of their killed allies in order to respawn all of them back into the game. Of course, that same cyber-brain can be used by the enemy robot to disable your stealth camo, and a good team of enemy robots will more than likely be hovering around the body to their use as bait, so you can’t just walk right up to it and start hacking away. However, if you time and coordinate everything just right with your teammates, you can go ahead and hack the brain up, giving your team a huge advantage.

There’s also the advantage of being able to find primary weapons on the map and use it against the robots. While these primary weapons are not customized for any specific firing style and only have a single clip or magazine loaded into them, it obviously gives a lot more firepower for the ghost players to use in order to defend themselves.

With the several rounds I played in Ghost Assault, I honestly started to get into it more and more. While playing on the Robot side felt like a breeze most of the time once we all knew what we were doing, there was handful of tense, aggravating moments when me and my team just couldn’t track down the last few enemy players that kept eluding us at every corner, as well as the fun, but frustrating moment when an enemy player managed to hack a cyber-brain in time, causing our robot murder fun time killing spree to be undone in a moment’s notice.

And while I was playing on the ghost side, there was so many nail biting moments when I did everything I could to hold on and survive, like backtracking around corners when I felt an enemy was on my trail, juking their movements in between sonar blips to confuse them and throw them off from my general direction and generally just trying to run away like a frightened Japanese school girl.

Still, there’s going to be a lot more to the open beta release besides just a new game mode. Two new maps are going to be included in the game called Headquarters and The Underground Base, along with a brand new operative called “Kuro”, who was designed specifically for the game, but will also be used a link between the game and the actual Stand Alone Complex storyline. Like I said before: they’re not holding back when it comes to pleasing their fans.

Perhaps one of the biggest changes to the game based on user feedback is the Permanent Chipset System. No longer will players only be able to rent chipsets which give a light boost to some stats such as increased running speed or decreased reload time, and not only that, but they’ll also be able to stack chipsets to increase their effects and defects.

GiTS

All in all, the new changes for Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex – First Assault Online (Geez, that’s still a mouthful) really help to bring the game up to par with only a handful of quality F2P shooters out there. And if nothing else, it’s easily being made as a game by GitS fans, for GitS fans.

For more info on the game and the open beta, visit our profile page!