The Crowfall development team tackles important topics in their monthly community Q&A, including grave digging.
Monthly Archives: January 2017
Overwatch: New Control Map “Oasis”
Defend 3 control points on Overwatch’s newest map: Oasis!
Wayward Beyond
Wayward Beyond is a space sandbox featuring limitless freedom to create, destroy, explore, and fight your way to whatever you want. Experience galaxy simulation at its most unrestrained with procedurally generated locations, weapons, a suite of ship customization, and even the option to become a minister of peace, or a tyrant of destruction, available for Microsoft Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Features:
Engi: Enhance your spaceship with the likes of shields, radar, jammers, FTL travel, targeting systems, and more.
Build It: Craft the vehicle or home of your dreams from scratch with an assortment of building blocks.
Second Life: Follow and enforce the law by protecting the people or turn against them for personal gain.
Raceline CC
Raceline CC is an adrenaline pumping motorcycle racer where the player will challenge rivals in a near future urban environment and collect a variety of beautiful vehicles. Take to the streets and become one of the biking elite, available for IOS and Android.
Features:
Technology Ahoy: Raceline CC takes full advantage of Apple’s Metal Graphic Tech for gorgeous visuals.
2-Wheeled Connoisseur: Gather, enhance, and manage a garage of breathtakingly amazing motorcycles.
Career Racer: Challenge rivals and negotiate with sponsors to get money to fuel a deadly addiction.
AlphaCat
AlphaCat is a puzzle adventure where the player must sail across the galaxy exploring dozens of evolving dungeons and matching tiles to take down baddies, available for IOS and Android.
Features:
AlphaCat: Save the kittens from alien invaders as Captain Furball, defender of Planet Whiskar.
Matchmaker: Rack up crazy chains of similar tiles to deal loads of damage.
Oh Captain My Captain: Command a crew of over 60 brave cats.
Elemental Wings
Elemental Wings is a free to play shoot’em’up with a few key RPG aspects. Weave through curtains of bullets while taking down hordes of enemies and stylish bosses collecting new characters along the way, available for IOS and Android.
Features:
Danmaku: Progressively get better at avoiding damage and dishing out your own.
Squad Goals: Discover and level up a plethora of playable elementals.
Team Up: Find a friend and take down special co-op Raid Bosses.
Elemental Wings ‘Marie’ Trailer
Combine the very best of the Bullet Hell and RPG genres to get Elemental Wings!
Wayward Beyond Steam Greenlight Trailer
Create and explore in an ambitious space sim!
Raceline CC Launch Trailer
Get your adrenaline pumping in Raceline CC, a dedicated mobile game featuring fast races on beautiful motorcycles.
Wild Terra Preview – Keeping an Eye on a Promising Title
By Jordan Hall (ApocaRUFF)
Introduction
Wild Terra is an up-and-coming sandbox MMO that features in-depth sandbox features and free-for-all PVP. It’s created in a similar vein as Ultima Online and Wurm Online; there are a ton of things for you to craft, important resources to fight over, and villages to construct with friends. If you enjoy the premises of games such as Ultima, Albion, Wurm, Mortal, etc… you’ll probably find some enjoyment from Wild Terra. I’ve been keeping an eye on the game for quite some time, and today I’ll give you a sort of Current State of Affairs on it.
Graphics
The game still looks just about the same as it did several months ago. It has a realistic style, which is something hard to pull off in 2D games. When a 2D game tries to go for realistic, all too often everything feels cluttered. The artists of Wild Terra have managed to get past this, though, and the game has a nice open feel. This is in no small part to the UI artist. The game is still in what could be considered an alpha state and there may be changes, but so far the UI feels quite nice.
Beautiful for a 2D game. I’ve found myself more partial to cartoony 2D graphics lately, so it’s nice to find a 2D game with a realistic style that I can find impressive.
Crafting
Crafting is the most important feature in this game. That’s right, not the open PVP, not the village system, not the fighting. The crafting. Everything in this game requires it. If you want to create a village or just a small hut in the woods to call your own, you’ll have to craft for it. If you want to fight, you’ll have to get your armor and weapons by crafting, or do some kind of crafting in exchange for them by someone else.
I love games that emphasize crafting.
Gathering plays a huge part in the game. Early on, a lot of the materials you need can be gathered from simple resource piles that can be found all over the map. Piles of rocks or sticks, for example. Later on, you’ll have to craft tools to begin getting to the more difficult resources that require mining or chopping trees. It’s continuous like that, gathering resources to craft better tools so you can gather more important and rare resources so you can make even better tools. It’s all a means to an end, which is to create better weapons and armor so you can better protect yourself while ensuring the other guy can’t do the same.
And this brings me to my two major worries about the game. First and foremost, the game is currently buy-to-play, and I’m not sure which way the game will go at full release. However, right now the buy-to-play means that the game population is quite small. I’m lucky to find more than twenty on a server whenever I play (Admittedly the game doesn’t have much of a North American population yet… but I often play at 3-5AM CST North American time). I’m afraid it will stay this way if they keep the pay barrier, but I also feel that the nature of the game requires it or there will be too many trolls and griefers for the actual players to handle.
Sad, as the game is incredible.
The second major worry is the cash shop. Right now it’s not too bad. It’s a mixture of cosmetics and convenience. It’s the convenience portion that worries me. You can buy crafting recipes, which you normally have to work hard in the game to unlock. The current iteration doesn’t offer a real advantage to anyone who purchases from the cash shop, but I’m afraid that in the future the temptation will be too great for the devs, and because players will be used to the cash shop offering recipes, they won’t make much of an outcry if they (the devs) do take it too far.
Notice that most say “Can be found in-game.” Unfortunately, some say “Cannot be found in-game.”
Community
Which reminds me, this game promotes similar communities to what can be found in Wurm Online, where you are close-knit and share just about everything (sometimes even accounts). I love it when a game can produce this sort of communities. This is largely due to an absence in an actual monetary system in the game. In comparison, a sandbox game like Mortal, which has a currency and NPC vendors, has a largely ‘selfish’ community. Even within the same guild, it can often times be like pulling teeth to get someone to give you something for free in that game. And to contrast that, Wurm also has a monetary system, but it isn’t as important (for most players) as the one in Mortal Online and most communities in that game are very open and giving.
Build Your Own Village
Despite the focus on crafting, probably the most interesting feature is the ability to claim land and build within it. You can build without claiming land, but that will essentially result in your home and belongings being available to anyone that pleases to take them. At least with a land claim, you can enjoy some semblance of safety for your things. And if you eventually find like-minded people to join with you, you can expand your land claim through effort and turn it into a village.
Notice the red corner markers. The stone in the middle is the claim token. Claims are known as Dominium.
Progressing through the various sizes of land claims can take a lot of effort, but the results are fairly stunning. I’m continually impressed by the massive palisade walls and intricate villages I come across in my travels across the map. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to commit to feel comfortable joining with one of these villages, so I’ve only ever been able to look in from the outside. Each building in these protected villages serve a purpose, allow for greater storage and safety for your things, offer the ability to craft more advanced recipes, and are a place to respawn when you die (most likely from PvP).
Here players have gotten creative and instead of one large claim, they placed many smaller ones around a lake.
PVP
Which brings me to PVP. Wild Terra has open-PVP, which means that if you’re caught in the open you can (and probably will be) killed. Even if you’re careful and pick the perfect spot for your land claim, you’re going to have to leave it eventually. Be it to trade with a nearby friendly settlement or to gather a resource that is outside your walls. What this means is that you’re going to end up, eventually, running into another player that wants to do you harm.
I couldn’t find a player for a PVP screenshot, so I found a bear to punch.
Combat in Wild Terra is fairly simple. It’s not like some other 2D Sandbox MMOs with tons of spells and abilities to make use of. At least not yet, and I’m not sure about the devs plans for the future in regards to this portion of the game. Personally, I like this. Part of the reason I enjoy Wurm Online’s combat system is that, while it’s slow and requires a lot of thinking and planning, it’s relatively simple and straightforward. The same exists within Wild Terra, where the preparation and planning that happens before the fight begins is often what results in a victory.
Conclusion: Impressive Potential
My conclusion is much the same as it was several months ago: Wild Terra is a sandbox game with a ton of potential, and it’s already more than playable. Personally, I feel it is worth the price tag (hence the reason why I paid it… I bought the game even before it was made available on Steam), and I’m saddened that more players don’t. It’s already got a ton of features and several hundreds of hours worth of enjoyable play time. The only restraining factor is the small population, which puts it in a Catch 22. The game isn’t as enjoyable as it could be because of the small population, yet part of the reason that not many players come into the game is due to the (you guessed it) small population. If you’re on the fence, I implore you to go through with the buy.







