Yearly Archives: 2018

Paladins Strike

Paladins Strike is a 5v5 multiplayer online battle arena utilizing 15 of the gun toting champions from the popular source material. Shoot enemies, cast powerful abilities, and call upon the power of a juggernaut to defeat your enemies in intensive battles designed for easy of play on mobile devices. Available for IOS and Android.

Features:

Pushing the Goaline: Cooperate with your mates and push the payload to victory.

Make it Yours: Customize your hero with a variety of costume changing skins.

Hitting the Mark: Experience the fresh reimagining of a top tier MOBA.

MU Ignition

MU Ignition is a F2P hack’n’slash fantasy MMORPG taking players on a new adventure across the MU continent. Lead your fearless warrior to unfathomable riches and renown by completing a variety of quests and felling great beasts! Available in browser.

Features:

Role Play: Take your pick from the dignified sword wielding dark knight, lone wolf elf archer, or spell slinging Dark Mage renegade.

Beast Hunter: Blaze a trail through the world engaging in fast and rewarding real-time combat.

I’ll Do it My Way: Customize and level up your character to your heart’s delight.

Conqueror’s Blade

Conqueror’s Blade is a sandbox warfare simulator where you will shoulder the heavy responsibility of leading a nation to wealth and comfort or unimaginable disaster based on your ability to command troops and manage a kingdom. Fight for a place among the ruling elite by conquering the world! Available for Windows.

Features:

Boots on the Ground: Utilize a variety of units like crescent bladed warriors, pike-men, bow wielders, and trusty sword n’ shield knights.

Plains for the Capture: Travel across 20 varied regions chalk full of diverse landscapes and unique history.

Trained Fighters: Upgrade your army with boostable skills and powerful new professions.

Spellsworn Early Access Key Giveaway

We’ve partnered with Frogsong Studios to offer early access to Spellsworn on Steam!

Spellsworn is a PvP arena brawler, featuring fast-paced spellcasting matches set on a continuously shrinking arena, encroached by destructive, arcane-powered surroundings. Players battle it out in teams or free-for-all over intense five-round matches for up to eight players. Between each round the magic arsenal can be customized by buying, selling or upgrading spells to switch up the play style and mess with the minds of rival wizards. The magic mayhem reaches another level once the hazardous environment begins wreaking havoc on the playable field, causing damage over time to each player pushed off of the arena. With an ever-changing environment that poses as much of a threat as the enemy, only the skilled and quick-witted will be victorious!


Spellsworn will go Free-to-Play when it leaves early access – but with this Steam key, you can get in the game now for free!

To Redeem your Key:

  • Launch the Steam client software and log into your Steam account.
  • Click the Games Menu.
  • Choose Activate a Product on Steam…
  • Follow the onscreen instructions to complete the process.

Note: Unfortunately ad blockers may interfere with our site. If you have any issues claiming a key, please disable them and try again.

 

3D Replay: Interview with Minkonet

Recently, PUBG introduced new anti-cheating measures through the use of 3D replays and death cams, technology provided by the company Minkonet. We talked with Ken Park, VP of Service/Marketing, to learn more about Minkonet and its services.

Minkonet Logo

OnRPG: Most gamers are unfamiliar with the name Minkonet. Can you describe briefly what the company’s goals and services are?

Ken: Our mission is to change the way we watch and play video games. We develop 3D replay solutions for Unreal, Unity and in the near future other engines in the Gaming ecosystem. We hope that our all-encompassing robust 360-degree data capture technology can provide high definition gaming video content experiences and enhanced social media interaction to unleash new content capabilities previously unseen in gaming.

OnRPG: Minkonet has leaders from other video game companies. What experience do they, and Minkoket, bring to gaming technology?

Ken: Minkonet’s CEO was the first mobile-game publisher in Korea and our President & COO is credited for being a pioneer in Korea’s Mobile, Internet and Video Gaming markets. He has founded several startups including a mobile game company that was sold to Electronic Arts (EA). They knew what was lacking in the gaming industry back then and that’s we are doing right now.

OnRPG: Minkonet’s recently come into the spotlight through its partnership with PUBG Corp. to provide a new 3D Replay and Death Cam. What inspired the creation of this technology, and how does it benefit PUBG players?

Ken: It was 2014. We were thinking of some kind of service that gamers can share their gameplay moment easily. First, video format was too big in size for mobile environment at that time and we came up with data capturing and replay idea for universal game engines.

We think 3D Replay could be easy but powerful content creation tool for every gamer. Beyond the in-game environment, players are leveraging the intuitive replay camera system to create and share video highlights and high-quality cinematic shorts across social platforms including Twitch and YouTube.

OnRPG: The new replay cam is also now being used as an anti-cheat measure, allowing players to report activity from the 3D Death Cam – a first of its kind in competitive gaming. How hard was it to implement a report feature?

Ken: Implementing a report feature is not the hard part. The real hard part was implementing 3D Replay for PUBG, a battle royale genre with massive data points spread out over large areas. We experienced a lot of challenges to guarantee reproducibility of replay and also not to harm the game’s performance.

OnRPG: What other features does the 3D replay offer?

Ken: We have a plan on meshing A.I. with 3D Replay to make anti-cheating solutions powered by anti-cheating artificial intelligence (A.I.) algorithms.

There are some scenes from a sci-fi movie or comic that show detective or policeman reassemble the crime scene in form of hologram based on the data they gathered from the actual crime scene and investigate the scene over and over with all possible way like searching abnormal points, changing perspective, and zooming in & out to find out the truth.

The idea is pretty similar to this. The ability for us to capture 3D data (unlike other standard video capture technologies in the market), allows us to expand into analytical capabilities such as big data and artificial intelligence, using algorithms based on game events and player behaviors. We can filter out suspicious players by searching out cheating behavior patterns stored in replay file using the algorithm automatically. We expect this can provide reasonable evidence banning cheaters and reduce complain of banned cheaters. Not like other anti-cheating solutions, this solution does not have to run with the game in real-time risking game performance drop or unexpected error. And this can reduce game developer’s pressure to investigate all the cheating reports pouring out every day.

Other than Anti-cheating, 3D data capture enables us to manipulate cameras freely during playback. Editing of a replay file basically involves two things: to cut scenes around actions and to set up camera paths (dolly track) to capture the scene in best angles.

And also, we plan on configuring the cinematic camera paths and cutting scenes automatically through AI to generate 1~2 minutes of intense and attractive highlight of gameplay. 3D data capture enables us to detect major event moments like combat engagement, car chase, stun move that are good enough to be cinematized by filtering out event pattern from the replay. “Every gamer is a creator.” Under this slogan, we hope this will enhance social media interaction to unleash new content capabilities previously unseen in gaming and to help make their games go viral for game developers.

Player behavior and statistical data captured can be used to group players with similar players through matchmaking and configure opponent difficulty levels. Prediction of tactics can also be used to make games more challenging and engaging to the player.

OnRPG: How easy or difficult is it for developers to implement in their games?

Ken: Unlike other internal replay engines, our 3D replay works with game engines such as Unreal and Unity and various genres of games. We are continuously improving our system to minimize integration work. In the near future, our goal is to make it as easy as a plug-in feature.

OnRPG: Will the 3D replay technology be available directly to gamers sometime in the future?

Ken: Definitely, we hope so.

OnRPG: What other technology is Minkonet looking to develop in the near future?

Ken: Minkonet’s mission is to redefine the way people watch and play video games. We want to help game developers strengthen user engagement through our replay technology. And help users unleash new content from their gameplay. We are also working on building tools to help eSports become a better viewing experience for the massive number of fans growing around the world.

 

Project CARS 2 Celebrates the 70th Anniversary of the Porsche

Project Cars 2 - Porsche

Bandai Namco is proud to announce the celebration of the 70th Anniversary of the Porsche with the ‘Porsche Legends Pack’ for Project CARS 2. It will be available across all platforms in early March. In 1948, the first Porsche hit the road (Porsche 356), and this celebration is one that should not be missed. The ‘Porsche Legends Pack’ will come with: nine legendary cars hand-picked from the storied history of Porsche, one FIA-certified track intimately associated with Porsche―a first in any simulated racing game, 20 liveries, nine community events, and five new career events; all carefully crafted to integrate into the Porsche experience. The nine iconic Porsche cars include their current GT-runner, the 2017 Porsche 911 RSR that will add this elite brand into Project CARS 2’s already stacked lineup of GT racers. The 911 RSR will join eight more historically significant Porsches hand-picked from the last 70 years, such as the 1972 Porsche 917/10―the car dubbed the “Can-Am Killer”―an analogue monster whose 5-litre flat-12 boxer was mated to two massive big-box turbos to create what many consider the most brutal car (1,200bhp!) in sportscar history.

Ahead of this, Update 4 is live on PC, and on the way for consoles. It will add numerous performance and stability improvements, gameplay tweaks, UI and render enhancements and more. The patch notes can be found here.

Any ‘Port’ In A Storm: Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age (PC-Steam)

by Jason Parker (Ragachak)

Any Port in a Storm: FFXII

Killing rats is a tough job, but someone has to do it.

This is a title I’ve actually reviewed fairly recently, so there isn’t a lot I can tell you now that you didn’t already know. But, let’s give it a go! Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age on PC/Steam is a port of the PS4 Remaster, which on its own, was already gorgeous. You play as a cast of characters ranging from “Riff Raff, Street Rat” in Vaan/Penelo, to “I’m actually the main character” in Balthier. There are exiled knights, princesses, evil corrupt judges, and a gorgeous world the likes we won’t see again until Final Fantasy XV. This version of the game does take it a step further though in several ways. First, you can set it to play at 60 fps. 60 lovely frames per second. I saw no tearing, no slowdown, no weird crap as a result of that (but I’m using a GeForce 1080 and an i7 7700k so take from that what you will), and cranking all the settings up did not slow me down in the least.

Any Port in a Storm: FFXII

So. Many. Helpful. Options. I understand few of them.

It was still a vision of loveliness. This is different because the PS4 release is hard-locked at 30 fps. Sure, that 30 fps is just fine, but 60 is better. Let’s be honest. The graphics settings are vast, and to be frank, I don’t even understand all of them. But they are plentiful and make an already visually appealing game more so. There are three options for your soundtrack too, Original, Extra Tasty Crispy, and BBQ. I mean. Original, Remastered, and OST. The remastered/OST are clearly the superior choices, and one thing I do not recall if I noticed in previous playthroughs, but the music has a very Final Fantasy Tactics feel to it. Yes, I know this takes place in Ivalice, home of said Tactics game, but still. The OST option is a very lovely sound, and I think has a lot of appeal. Again, not a necessity, but it’s there if you want it. However, this version has one giant glaring flaw that I have to bring to light. If I chose not to, what kind of journalist would I be? A bad one, that’s what.

FINAL FANTASY XII THE ZODIAC AGE PC Edition Launch Trailer - YouTube

You have Full Screen, Borderless, and Windowed options for your screen. That’s wonderful, because I tab out a lot, and want the full-screen experience, so I go with Borderless in most of my games. Any time you tab out of the game, no matter which you’re using (even in Windowed!) it pauses the game. This is a real-time battle game, so in that aspect, it’s certainly useful, but you know, there’s a pause feature! You can pause yourself if you need to! Nobody is stopping you! When I stream, I tab around a lot on my screen, checking the giveaway screen, pulling up walkthroughs if I need to, or answering work requests if they happen to come up/emails show up in the middle of the stream. That way I can see how important they are. I don’t understand why this decision was made, and it drives me absolutely damn batty. It’s the worst part about the game, and at least the other problem I had (before the game went officially live half the time it wouldn’t recognize my controller. For whatever reason, that’s fixed. For reference, PS4 wireless). It also has the “cheat” features seen in Final Fantasy X. It offers max Gil and unlimited license points, but that’s not a deal breaker one way or another. The speed-up buff that was in the PS4 version also made it over (hit L1 to 2x/4x speed, great for grinding/wandering huge maps, little else).

Who Is This For: 4/5

Final Fantasy XII Video Thumbnail

No, this game isn’t on the list. Sadly.

That’s the big question I should be asking in these port reviews, and moving forward, I shall. Who is this aimed at? Who is this for? If you had an Xbox One and love Final Fantasy, or have a Switch and simply missed the original launch, this is for you. I cannot imagine someone who already has it on PS4 wanting to get it, except to play in 60fps, or are a hardcore fan of Final Fantasy XII. All the other features, looks, and mechanics are the same on console, but if that pause function were not in the game, I’d say this is the “definitive” version of Final Fantasy XII. If for some reason you missed out, this is the best time to get the remake, in my opinion. It’s gorgeous, it has tons of gameplay and secrets (especially if you didn’t play the original), and the chests from the Zodiac Spear in the original were changed in both of these versions. In the original FFXII, there are five chests you are not supposed to open. You have no idea if you haven’t looked it up. If you open up even one of those before it’s time, you miss out on the most powerful spear in the game, the Zodiac Spear. It also has the superior License Board (Zodiac Job System) in that it’s more compact and less cluttered plus it also thematically fits into the FFT world. I love this version of the game, far more than I did the original for a whole host of reasons. If you’d like to read my more detailed review of the title, from the PS4 version, please click this link.

Ed Note: A key was provided for this review.