MMO News |
- PAX East 2015 Preview – What to Expect!
- WarpPortal Launches Requiem: Rise of the Reaver on Steam
- Super Evil Megacorp’s Vainglory Launching Android Closed Beta
- PAX East 2015: 10 Reasons To Be Hyped
- Marvel Heroes 2015: Iceman Reveal
- Space Engineers: Update 01.072 Overview
- World of Tanks: AMX CDC Guide
- Daybreak Expands G.I.R.L. Scholarship Program to Two Scholarships
- ArtCraft Entertainment’s Crowfall Reaches $1 Million in Crowdfunding
- Rise of Incarnates Review
| PAX East 2015 Preview – What to Expect! Posted: 05 Mar 2015 05:59 PM PST PAX East 2015 Preview – What to Expect! PAX East 2015 starts March 6th -8th at the Boston Convention Center!!! Here’s what to expect… us to cover… and more! Here’s what we’re excited for and hopefully get to cover! World of Warships – Alpha build plus some! Echo of Soul – Recording gameplay footage. Trove – New class + big March update! Defiance – Pre-Alcatraz update content. Rift – Details about update 3.2! ArcheAge – New info on the Secrets of Ayanad update! Guild Wars 2 – First live demo of Heart of Thorns! Gigantic – Just like PAX South but more! Dreadnaught – Hopefully gameplay capture. SMITE – XBox One build, giveaways & maybe news about Medusa and Arena rework! Final Fantasy XIV – Heavensword ….hopefull bonuses… Street Fighter V, Wolfenstein expansion, Doom, Battlecry, Camelot Unchained & Warframe! Check out our “PAX East 2015: 10 Reasons To Be Hyped” article HERE!
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| WarpPortal Launches Requiem: Rise of the Reaver on Steam Posted: 05 Mar 2015 05:45 PM PST Warpportal's Requiem is now on Steam! Requiem is a free to play M-Rated horror themed MMORPG where players explore the world of Ethergia. After a terrible tragedy fused living flesh with creatures and their surroundings, players are tasked as a biological weapon known as a Temperion to stop the horrors from reaching the last strands of civilization. With hundreds of quests and 8 unique and distinct classes to choose from, players will be able to test themselves as they survive Ethergia. "The Requiem Team is very excited to open up Requiem to a whole new audience. As avid Steam users ourselves, we know that this platform can bring great potential to our game not only in obtaining a whole new audience, but also in that we get to hear more feedback to make our game even better!" says Denny Kwon, Lead Designer of Requiem. |
| Super Evil Megacorp’s Vainglory Launching Android Closed Beta Posted: 05 Mar 2015 05:29 PM PST The developers of Vainglory, the MOBA perfected for touch that is revolutionizing the genre for mobile devices, today are launching an Android closed beta program. Players interested in jumping into the battle arena early may apply for the closed beta beginning March 5 here, which will be then followed by an open beta program. Vainglory has been praised by fans and critics alike with GamesBeat calling it "gorgeous" and TechCrunch adding that it's “…a top-notch MOBA.” The game currently boast over 18 thousand five-star reviews on the App Store with players averaging over 75 minutes in the app per day. The beta program makes Vainglory initially available for a limited number of high end NVIDIA, Samsung Galaxy and Google Nexus devices for a small amount of external testers.
"Super Evil Megacorp is bringing stunning visuals and exciting gameplay to Android with Vainglory," said Keita Iida, Senior Director, Global Content Management at NVIDIA. "SHIELD tablet is the ultimate tablet for gaming and Vainglory is a great example of how amazing games are coming to mobile devices."
For players interested in checking out Vainglory for Android, Super Evil Megacorp will be hosting demos at the Twitch booth throughout PAX East in Boston from March 6-8. |
| PAX East 2015: 10 Reasons To Be Hyped Posted: 05 Mar 2015 05:17 PM PST By Jason Parker (Ragachak)
PAX East is my first time visiting one of these expos as a member of the press, and the level of excitement I am feeling will only be paralleled by the level of exhaustion I will feel by Sunday’s end. Despite being a reader of Penny Arcade since its inception, I have yet to attend one of these mysterious events. But what am I excited for? Lots of booths and an empty wallet of course! There are personal little things I’m really excited for, but as far as the job goes, there is a nice list of events and previews I’m particularly excited for, in almost no particular order:
7. Cosplay:
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| Marvel Heroes 2015: Iceman Reveal Posted: 05 Mar 2015 05:12 PM PST In this double feature, Marvel Heroes 2015 reveals Iceman and takes a look at his voice actor.
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| Space Engineers: Update 01.072 Overview Posted: 05 Mar 2015 04:59 PM PST Today, engineers get laser antennas and more modding/API support.
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| Posted: 05 Mar 2015 04:44 PM PST World of Tanks reveals information about the French AMX CDC, one of the fastest tanks in the game.
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| Daybreak Expands G.I.R.L. Scholarship Program to Two Scholarships Posted: 05 Mar 2015 04:16 PM PST Daybreak Game Company LLC has announced that the submission process is now open for its 2015 Gamers In Real Life (G.I.R.L.) Game Design Competition. This year, for the very first time, Daybreak’s G.I.R.L. scholarship program will award two winners. One scholarship will be focused on Art & Design, and the other on Programming & Engineering. Each winner will receive a $5,000 scholarship to be applied toward tuition, room and board, and other educational expenses at their college or university. Additionally, the winners will have the opportunity to participate in a summer internship at Daybreak’s headquarters in San Diego for hands-on experience working on some of the company’s award-winning games.
This is the eighth year that the G.I.R.L. scholarship program will help aspiring game developers gain knowledge and skills in the video game design field, and provide valuable assistance for educational expenses. Since 2008, G.I.R.L. winners have gone on to make a valuable impact across the gaming and art industries.
“Previous internship contributions from G.I.R.L. winners have been nothing short of excellent, which played a key part in our decision to evolve the scholarship even further,” said Laura Naviaux, Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing, Daybreak Game Company. “We’re thrilled that we can provide two students the opportunity this summer to learn more about creating online games, while helping to shepherd new talent into the industry.”
Submissions for the 2015 G.I.R.L. Game Design Competition will close on March 26, 2015. To apply, candidates must register with Scholarship America®, Daybreak’s scholarship administrator, and submit their application for evaluation. Complete details are available here.
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| ArtCraft Entertainment’s Crowfall Reaches $1 Million in Crowdfunding Posted: 05 Mar 2015 04:06 PM PST Independent game developer, ArtCraft Entertainment, Inc. today announced that the highly anticipated massively multiplayer online game, Crowfall™, reached the one million dollar crowdfunding threshold this morning, just eight days from the start of the campaign. The company launched its Kickstarter drive for Crowfall on February 24 and within three days reached its goal of $800,000. The Kickstarter campaign closes on March 26. Additionally, the campaign already has more than 10,000 backers. The company's founders, J. Todd Coleman (creative director, Shadowbane, Wizard101, Pirate101) and Gordon Walton (executive producer, Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Star Wars: The Old Republic) say Crowfall's vision is clearly resonating with an underserved audience of gamers. “The response has been overwhelming. It’s the players who made this happen," explained Coleman, ArtCraft's creative director. “We just provided the spark. They are the ones fanning the flames. We hoped that the vision would catch on, obviously, but we didn’t expect the momentum to build so quickly." “It’s incredible,” added executive producer Gordon Walton, “because it’s not just validating our vision — it’s also a tremendous vote of confidence in our team. The players believe in us, they believe in this game, and they are willing to support us financially to make it happen.” A new type of online experience, Crowfall is a "Massively Multiplayer Online Throne War Simulator." Players take the role of kings, queens, mercenaries and assassins in a simulation of a feudal world that includes castle building, siege equipment and territorial conquest system. As a result of reaching this milestone, ArtCraft announced a new stretch goal: at $1.3 million dollars, they will add a "Mounts and Caravans" system to the game, and will celebrate reaching this goal by adding "bonus rewards" to existing reward tiers. Backers at the $60 or higher level will receive magical Quarterhorses, Warhorses and even a rare "Nightmare" mount as a bonus reward. |
| Posted: 05 Mar 2015 03:22 PM PST By Michael Sagoe (mikedot) Forged by the efforts between the Soul Caibur and Tekken development teams, Bandai Namco has recently released their newest "fighting game" title called Rise of Incarnates onto Steam's Early Access program. This offers up a 2 vs. 2 battle system where players form up unique team compositions against their opponents as they dash, fly and bash each other across a war torn battlefield. Now, the reason why I put the words fighting game in quotations is because from the traditional standpoint, Rise of Incarnates is anything but a traditional fighting game. Rather, if you have ever played mech action games like Virtual-On or Gundam Extreme Vs, then you'll have a much better idea of how Rise of Incarnates plays out. As a matter of fact: most of the gameplay elements for this title were taken straight from recent Gundam VS. titles that have been available in Japanese arcades from quite some time. While it certainly provides something uncommon to the fighting game genre, there's still a question of how well it plays and how well it maintains itself as a F2P game while remaining fair for a competition focused game. Controls When starting the game up for the first time, players will be greeted with an opening cinematic video and instantly launched into a tutorial session that will teach players basic and advanced gameplay techniques. While the tutorial may be very clear and easy to understand, getting a hang of the controls is a whole different story. The game offers up two control schemes: one for keyboard & mouse, and one for gamepads. Attempting to play using the mouse and keyboard setup may be a bit uncomfortable at first due to the fast-paced and twitch-based nature of the gameplay. In Rise of Incarnates, timing and quick reactions are everything, so it's almost necessary to have your fingers on or near every command possible. With this is mind, getting used to the mouse and keyboard setup is possible, but playing the game using a gamepad felt way more responsive and natural. The commands that are available include normal and special abilities for melee and ranged attacks, dashing and jumping, defensive guards, target switching and awakening abilities. Switching targets is one command that players will have to get used to as soon as possible, as they'll constantly be switching back and forth between enemies as they dash around the screen and prepare opponents for team tag combos (that can be performed by pressing forward + melee attack button twice), which is very satisfying to pull off in those close quarters situations. The different kinds of combo attacks that can be performed merely amount to holding a directional button and mashing the melee attack button at first, but once players understand dash cancels and attack cancels, they'll be able to perform various custom combos. However, these custom combos do not allow much room for creativity due to the damage threshold that opponents can take before they plummet towards the ground and become temporary invulnerable to damage. Gameplay and Features Rise of Incarnates features an adequate amount of game modes to choose from, including ranked matches, custom lobbies, bot matches and training. Both ranked matches and bot matches can be played solo or with a friend via Steam's friend system, and training mode gives very simple on-screen guides on how to play each character individually. Each mode works the way they should, but the lack of players in custom lobbies and early ranked matches may be disappointing for newcomers. Ranking matches, in particular, will always try to find players of equal skill, which is all fine and good, but when the system doesn't find active players of equal skill, the game will set players up against bots to make up for them. For many new players, they may have to go through a handful of bot matches in ranking mode before they'll ever fight against human opponents, which is a bit frustrating to say the least. There’s also only two stages to play one, however. Between New York and Paris, which both are very nicely designed and contain very noticeable landmarks, these two stages do not offer up much interactivity besides a few destructible objects and will become dull to play on very quickly. One interesting aspect for Rise of Incarnates is the stock system: Each team has six respawn stocks that they share among their teammates and each character has a predetermined set of stocks from one to three, so if you were up against a team that has characters with 1 and 2 stocks, it means you would have to defeat each enemy opponent two times in order to win, while a team that has two enemies with three stocks would only have to be defeated once each. The reason why some characters have multiple stocks while others have one is because some characters have more HP than others and are less fragile in combat, thus getting defeated in a match is more costly. This creates a unique meta between you and your teammate in order to come up with a solid tag team that balances out the risks and rewards of their abilities. As unique as the stock system is, character imbalances are still noticeable between high and low stock characters. During the time of this review, characters such as Ra had so much HP and so many zoning and ranged tools at his disposal that he was fairly untouchable in 1v1 confrontations. While characters are continuously being rebalanced every week, it's still very clear that some characters need to be tweaked more than others. Bouts in Rise of Incarnates are an exciting mix between arcade mecha shooter action and fighting game combat, as players will need to attack fast and think even faster when dealing with two opponents at the same time. Players can set opponents up for various tag combos with long ranged attacks and animation locked melee attacks, and they're both very hard to perform in heated matches, but very satisfying when pulled off. The environments that players battle in can also be used to their advantage, as they contain various structures to hide behind. These structures can also be destroyed, so players can't abuse them by attacking from a distance and then hiding until their skill meter recharges indefinitely. Speaking of skill meters: Rise of Incarnates features a skill meter similar to how skills work in certain RPGs: each attack has a set number of uses and, once depleted, players will have to wait a small amount of time for their skills to recharge which keeps the ranged attack spam down to a minimum. Overall, besides from a few character balance issues as stated above, the core gameplay for Rise of Incarnates is actually pretty enjoyable. However, it's the customization that comes beforehand that drags the gameplay down from a competitive standpoint, as I'll explain in this next piece… Customization Rise of Incarnates features several different character customization options, some that are very acceptable and others that are not. Options such as character skins and cosmetic items are available for purchase using IP (Cash purchased currency) in order to give favorite characters an extra special look. But then there's skill cubes that players can earn either by playing through matches and leveling up their character or by purchasing them from the shop using LP (in-game currency). At first, the skill cube system seems fair enough, allowing all players to access enhancements of sorts. Yet as you get more experience under your belt, players will realize that paying players can gain an upper hand on non-paying players by spending money on IP, including more skill cube grid space, faster enhancements and more. Players may also be able to purchase extra skill grid space using LP, but that will cost players a hefty amount which will take days or even weeks to obtain, depending on a player's dedication to the game. Having any kind of statistical advantage over players in a competition-focused game already gives a rise for concern, but being able to buy stat advantages faster than players that only pay using in-game currency seems like it could create very huge imbalances in the long run. Visuals and Presentation The presentation for Rise of Incarnates gives off a very comic-book feel to it, which works out well considering that the promotion leading up to the game's release had a very extensive e-comic series tied to it. The character designs are also very stylized, and very reminiscent of recent titles from PlatinumGames such as Anarchy Reigns and Vanquish. The sound design contains very generic rock music and above-average voiceovers for each character, which isn't nearly as impressive as the character designs, but it gets the job done and makes the tone of the game feel appropriately serious. In terms of raw visuals: Characters and environments are very detailed, but the lack of anti-aliasing built in will make the game look like a very dated PlayStation 3 title. Community Rise of Incarnates also features various community features including rankings and circles. Rankings allow players to see how well they stack up against players all around the world, while circles allow players to start up a clan in order to participate in circle lobby matches. There's also an option to watch live matches via Twitch streaming so players can watch and learn from experts on how to play. Besides from the option of watching live matches, both rankings and circles serve their purposes well. The community is generally filled with experienced players that will not hold back against newcomers, so unless you're confident, prepare to enroll into the school of hard knocks when participating in ranked matches. Overall: 4/5 (Great) If it wasn't for the faster stat advantages that players can purchase using real money, Rise of Incarnates would have gained a very high recommendation from me. The core gameplay is very exciting and has rarely been seen in the PC gaming space, let alone the F2P gaming market. The enhancement system is the only thing I can see holding this game back from gaining more popularity, and I'm really hoping they'll consider changing it in the future. Still, this game is certainly worth a try and will provide quick bursts of entertainment. |
Stella Chuu/
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