Crusader Kings II: Jade Dragon was revealed at Gamescom, and offers the Empire of China as an off-map resource. A force for good or ill for those who lie in the shadow of the Dragon.
Written by Remko Molenaar (Proxzor)
When I first heard about the new Dark and Light, it was implied it would be a sandbox MMO, and some even compared it to the likes of Black Desert Online. Since the announcement, it was ever so mysterious on what kind of game it would shape up to be. After a bunch of delays the game slowly changed from a sandbox MMO to a survival game with MMO elements. When the word came out about early access releasing at the end of July, I couldn’t wait to try out the game.
I did have concerns about the timing of the release. Since a few other sandbox games have launched recently, including Citadel: Forged with Fire, the timing of Dark and Light felt off, especially after the many delays and concept changes of the game, I never expected the game to come out this soon, and jumping into the game in the first weeks confirmed the fears I had. But before we talk about that, let me give you a brief introduction to the game.
Dark and Light is billed as ‘vast sandbox survival RPG’ that is also tagged as massively multiplayer on Steam. Don’t let this fool you, because when you look under the hood you’ll see that the game is played on a bunch of game servers that have a limit of only 70 players. Unfortunately this gave me flashbacks of the many small game server sandbox games we’ve seen over the last few years. Dark and Light isn’t really very different from that, since the core elements all come down to the same thing. But it still has ‘MMORPG’ type of characteristics, and this can be seen as early as character creation. When making your character you can choose between three different races: Humans, Elves, and Dwarves. The choices aren’t very unique and the races themselves do not have any bonuses as far as I know, but they do have their own story and start in different areas on the map. Speaking of the map, currently only a select area can be played. Called The Sacred Path, by the looks of it, it is only ten percent of the complete size of the map, so the future is looking a lot more interesting. As it stands right now, though, the playable area is already fairly big, at least big enough for 70 players, and I wouldn’t expect to see anyone in game with this player count if the full map were to be released. A server size increase is still uncertain up to this point, but I really hope it will be.
I myself decided to make a trusty old dwarf, and quickly found out that the customization is actually pretty big. You can do almost anything you can with your character, give him pointy ears, get him a purple color, and perhaps make him absolutely huge with absurd proportions just for the heck of it. When jumping into the game where you are just pretty much left for dead, you will quickly find out that this game could’ve been so much more. With a simple ‘tutorial’ you get the basics down, which simply comes down to the following. You have to play whack a mole with the environment, and slowly but surely you get more materials that you can then use to level up your crafting so you can eventually make better gear. Do note that if you die, you will lose all of your items. You can get these items back if you run back to your body and it hasn’t been looted by others, but you are pretty much never safe. Not even in the cities can you find the protection you seek when you want to log out after a full day of grinding. Unfortunately the game wants you to play hide and seek with others, and when you log out your body still stays in the world and can be killed and looted to anyone’s liking, even in the cities.
Logging back in the following morning, having had a 3 hour material grind the previous day, I was surprised to see my character dead when I logged into the city I fell asleep in. I quickly learned that no one was safe in the cities, not even the NPCs. The game is very much a sandbox, and the players can set their own rules. As for any beginner friendly help, you cannot expect a whole lot and are quickly taught that the world is just a cruel and deadly place. Luckily you do keep your abilities and your knowledge, so grinding back up is less of a hassle, but still some work if you had collected a good set of gear. And this is when playing whack a mole already gets annoying: from the first moment you play the game until your last, you’re probably whacking on something in the world just to get materials. Even though you do get a staff to speed the gathering up, it still gets quite tedious after a while. The game itself also doesn’t really give you any fair idea on what you’re supposed to do after the initial starter quests. This is when the resemblence of ARK: Survival Evolved comes into play, and even a game such as Rust. When it all comes down to it, the game is just another survival game that throws you into this fantasy world where you will just have to build a house and hope for the best during your play, but there isn’t actual depth to it.
The game is absolutely gorgeous, one of the better looking games I have seen in the past few years, but unfortunately it doesn’t really help the game become more fun. It runs very poorly on my very high end machine and the game in general just feels really sluggish and slow. The character depth of abilities and building your ‘class’ is very deep, the gathering and crafting reminds of an actual MMORPG, and so does the world in some way. But as it stands right now, the game is just plagued by bugs and issues that are expected from an alpha stage of the game. Even in Early Access the game in my eyes isn’t really worth it as of yet, and this can be seen in the steam reviews. After only just a day the majority of reviews are very negative, and rightly so.
The elements are in place to make Dark and Light a really solid game, but the lackluster result of what I’ve seen in the Early Access so far has shown me that this wasn’t the game I was waiting for. It looks and feels rushed, and to me it just feels like its trying to ride this sandbox hype wave trying to bring in some cash cause they might’ve ran out. If the game actually focused on becoming an actual MMORPG, I could see this potentially being one of the best MMO’s available. As it stands right now, it feels like another ‘Conan Exiles’, a game to be forgotten after a months time, and that’s a real waste of the potential it does have.
The latest let’s play for Total War: Warhammer 2 features my personal favorite race: The Dark Elves! Learn about what makes them a force to be reckoned with.
Sometimes, you have to take a break from constant combat. Tekken 7‘s first DLC update has just what you need: The Return of Tekken Bowl! This and some fantastic new costumes come on Aug. 31st.
Are you ready for the full, official launch of ARK: Survival Evolved? It’s only a few days away, on Aug 29th! The past two years have been long, but it’s been leading to this!
It’s been a while since I’ve seen a fishing RPG hit the market, but now that changes: the Award-winning Rule with an Iron Fish is coming to PC today! It’s a world of ludicrous comedy, grossly inaccurate science, and (probably) most important: A pirate kitty! Even the fishing spots promise comedy, up to and including a volcano! Fish could be hiding anywhere, after all. They are crafty after all. You can acquire it on Steam at this link!
Having won CNET’s Best Mobile Games and Snappzilla’s Games of the Year awards, Rule with an Iron Fish’s Steam debut presents the game in a format fit for PCs, with a perfected UI. This release includes new exclusive fishy content for Steam that introduces new fish, a cat bobber, and more. Grow your farm at home, dredge up pirate spit to upgrade your boat, and fend off attacking Vikings! Fish your way to glory!
Galaxy of Pen and Paper is a very Meta Space RPG about an RPG set in space. You heard me. It’s an RPG where you play as players in a tabletop RPG set in space. Players who are familiar with Knights of Pen and Paper will get that, but for people like me, it was a new and exciting experience. You control the DM and the players [well, the characters they are playing] and pick their destinations and battles. There’s an overarching story, but you decide in what place most of the battles are held, how many enemies the players endure, and what race/class the characters are. One of the criticisms I heard about the series is that it becomes very tedious and very difficult, but I had zero issues leveling and playing in Galaxy of Pen and Paper. Some of the boss fights and character-class quests are incredibly frustrating, but if you come back a bit stronger, no problem. You start off with just two characters, and build a party of four and deal with real-world problems: Internet trolls, hackers, metagaming. You know, the important things in life. You start off with these two characters, built however you’d like, on a desert planet as someone’s slave. Why does that sound so familiar …?
Galaxy of Pen and Paper straddles that line between Chroma Squad and Knights of Pen and Paper. It maintains that clever, wry pop-culture humor, but in a different direction than either of the other games. It’s not too hard, not too easy. In fact, one of the things I really love about it is that you make the difficulty as you play. Are fights getting too easy? Ramp up the challenge with harder/more enemies for a greater payoff. You gain stats, skill points, can equip passive or active abilities as you see fit, to build your characters the way you want. Most of the abilities are built around this status or that status [Poison, Burning, Stun, et al], and give some kind of benefit versus that enemy who is afflicted. One of the things I noticed is that it is very wise to build your team around status effects, as they are incredibly powerful. Guaranteed crits for fiery damage? No brainer. However, one of the things I want to point out as a definite negative is that every boss in the game seems to be immune to Stun. Don’t build your team around Stuns! They’re nice to have around but swap them out before a Boss Battle. You’ll be better for it.
Your party will be four members of characters that you build, so you don’t have to worry about not having something you feel you’ll need in the long run. After you get your fourth party member, you’ll eventually unlock a Cryogenic Freezer in the bowels of your starship. What this means is you can freeze a character, make a new one, and have whatever you need for any situation. Got bored of a character or didn’t like how it played? Put them in cold storage and tell them to chill out! There are only a small handful of races [Human, Simian, Green], and each has their own unique passive/base stats. Each character must also represent a standard Tabletop Player Trope: Achiever [Gonna be the MVP!], Buddy [I brought the chips and drinks!], Showoff [Badass in the making!], Slayer [I’ll hack the machine … with my fists!], Socializer [Sure, I’ll be the healer!], Thinker [AKA: Rules Lawyer], Romantic [Shipping those two bosses together! <3]. After that, you pick Race, and then the Character Class: Bounty Hunter, Engineer, Gadgeteer, Heavy, Trooper. It’s important to note that you can only have one of each of these.
You can’t run a squad of four Slayer Troopers and just mow things down with its powerful Heal Passive and tons of damage. But you want a balanced party, and each character class/race/trope has its own benefits, such as the Slayer’s +2 Power/Heal after getting a killing blow, and Humans starting with +2 in all stats, starts with 3 SP [Skill Points] and can equip an extra gadget. Each class has a style of skill it uses, from Bounty Hunter using Traps and Tricks to the Trooper using lots [and lots] of Heavy Guns to bullet things into submission. As far as skills go, you have Neutral Skills [skills that pretty much everyone has access to] and Class Skills. There are actives and passives, but passives have to be equipped in order to be used, just like active abilities. You can have four abilities on your bar at once, ranging from attacks [Piercing Attack, Charged Attack, Multi-Shot], to passives [Mind Master: Your attacks do not remove ‘Confusion’, Burning Sense: Your attacks on burning targets are automatically critical hits].
Each level your stats will go up and you will gain a few skill points in order to learn new abilities. I found myself with a wealth of SP and nothing to use them on after a while because I found the major way I wanted to approach the game. The positive side to this is that if you decide you need something else, it’s a very simple matter to get another ability to equip. You also start with a few “strategy” abilities in the neutral kit, where you can swap to the back row, etc, but I didn’t find myself using them all that much. This game holds true to standard tabletop/MMO ideas as well: you have Threat/Aggro, which is reduced in the back row. You also have a shield which regenerates over time [unless a status effect that nullifies shield regen hits you].
You can taunt, use items, and there is an Initiative System [which you can increase with items/abilities]. When it’s your character’s turn, you can attack [which ends their turn], or use an item. Items don’t end your turn, so if you need to spam them to heal/resurrect someone, feel free. You aren’t being penalized. You also have battles in space! Your spaceship will have to fight occasionally, but they have a different pattern, akin to the Giant Robot battles in Chroma Squad. You roll a die [which is basically your ship’s PC, it grows in power as the game goes on, more on that in a bit] which gives you AP towards abilities. The enemy gets one too so beware! Theirs might be better than yours as well. Your attack/heal cost AP and you can upgrade your attack for some AP later down the line. There are also items for the ship like a “Re-Roll” to redo your AP roll, and a Battery to add AP. You can choose to do nothing and stock AP for a big hit later in the battle.
Before most of the battles, you set the parameters for the fight, which is handy. It lets you control how easy/hard it is. Boss fights are different, but most quest battles the game tells you “Kill X of these enemies,” and you can fight them in the amount you desire. The downside to this it can feel incredibly repetitive and grindy because most of the quest missions will be the same. However in the nature of this game is that you can also create quests! If you’re in need of reputation and XP or move the story along, you create Missions. If you don’t know what to do in the game, it’s likely that you have to “Create” the next story mission. You can do Hunting Missions [Kill these bad guys], Escort Missions [Escort a jerk from planet A to planet B, you pick both], Salvage/Item Missions [get some items from a planet] and more. There are also Class Quests/Supplemental Quests. At some point in the game, the GM will ask if you want to try a new Quest/Mission, sort of like an expansion pack. Completing it will give you a new character type to play as.
However, this leads me to a bug, which was pretty useful for me. If you start one of those missions you unlock a character that’s a part of said mission. If you abandon the mission, they don’t despawn, and they will continue to fight with you. You can’t target them with items/heals, and they do whatever they want, but they are another body that hit incredibly hard and there are fights that are ruthlessly hard and another body is handy. The positive side of this system is that if you’re in need of exp, you can get it this way. You also gain exp from successfully rolling skill checks, like for searching for materials. You get generic-named resources from various planets if you go searching for them. If you sell them on other planets, like other star systems far far away, you can make more money off of them, as that’s their only real purpose. Oh, or trading them to shady traders for potential useful items. The downside to these created missions is that they feel like they have no real purpose other than to grind. The dialogue for them is funny, but they don’t really tie into the game and are kind of boring to do over and over.
There are also Random Events! As you travel across a planet, from point to point, a d20 is rolled. There’s a chance on every roll that an event will happen, from meeting someone that gives you an item, to an ambush (random encounter), or a host of other things. There’s no telling how or when they’ll happen though. You see the number that comes up on the die, but the game does not adequately explain this system at all. You will never know what’s going to come, or if one even will. They seem pretty rare to me though.This is a very frustrating system though because they in no way tell you how it works. I landed a 20, 19, 20, 18, and nothing happened. And then on a 16, I got ambushed. In most of these, you have a choice on how you want to react. Each type of character has a different response, from giving them money to go away, or to leap boldly into combat. It’s all down to how you want to approach it. In fact, most situations in this game change due to how the player characters respond to it. Each time you stop on a zone on a planet you can enter it to search for materials, or try and talk to people, get an item, etc. There are also Docking Bays to get back to space [where the Med Station is also], and typically a town to buy equipment for your character, items, or starship items.
A Long, Long Time Ago . . . 4/5
Galaxy of Pen and Paper is incredibly enjoyable if you just look at it from a story perspective. It’s incredibly well-written, funny, dramatic, and overall tells a very entertaining, engaging story. It’s really just excellently done. However, the encounters become very tedious and annoying. I love the game and the combat is good, but it becomes very annoying. At least you can fight as often or rarely as you’d like in most cases. It’s broken up into chapters that neatly progress the story, but I do feel like there’s not enough variety in combat. Most of the game isn’t explained very well, so if you aren’t paying attention/not familiar with this style of game, it can become vexing to try and learn on your own.
The presentation of this game is magical though from both music, story and the jokes. It has tons of story to go through and is put forth in such a way that you might be annoyed with the combat after a while, the story is so wonderful that it will definitely make up for that. And it’s not that combat’s bad, it just gets tedious when things have high HP and you do so little damage that you must rely on status ailments to make fights go faster. Behold Studios are masters of their craft for making clever, snarky RPGs that parody the genre they are working with and it shows. Every subtle pun or joke is well-delivered, far better than Knights of Pen & Paper. The skill system and the various items offer a lot of strategy choices, and there are so many ways to play the game. With the custom battle/mission system, the choices are infinite. There is no wrong way to play Galaxy of Pen and Paper, much to its credit.
This holiday season, Rocket League is coming to Nintendo Switch! In addition to this news, exclusive Mario, Luigi, and Samus Gunship cars will be added to the Switch version! Not to mention they’ll be free at launch!
Hot on the heels of “Fighter Pack 1” for Injustice 2, Fighter Pack 2 is revealed! Raiden, Black Manta, and Hellboy are coming to the latest DC Comics fighter!
Senko no Ronde 2 is a reboot of 2010’s Japan-exclusive DUO, a fast-paced one-on-one action game offering a mix of shooting and fighting genres in a mech-filled bullet ballet in space!