Thursday, February 4, 2016

MMO News

MMO News

Eternal CCG – PAX South 2016

Posted: 04 Feb 2016 04:58 PM PST


 

One of the games that caught my eye early on the PAX South floor was Eternal, a new card game from Dire Wolf that was making its public debut. If the developer sounds familiar, you might be remembering them as the developers for the upcoming The Elder Scrolls: Legends. No Molag Bal was to be seen or heard, but the artwork and polished graphics I spotted on screen pulled me in to try a match.

Let’s not beat around the bush, though: the first impression the main gameplay screen of Eternal gives is a visual imitation of Hearthstone. Unfortunately, the team member that kept offering commentary as I played the demo match also kept comparing the game to Hearthstone (I heard “unlike Hearthstone” at least three times in five minutes). It left me feeling like Dire Wolf was trying too hard to mix the popularity of Hearthstone with its own design. That’s a disappointment, because Eternal can, and should, stand on its own.

Eternal pits two players (or a player and AI opponent) against each other in a turn-based card duel. Players have both regular cards and faction cards. There are five factions in the game that work as a resource system akin to Magic The Gathering. Each turn, one faction card can be played, and that earns one point of reputation with that faction which lasts permanently (during the match). Each game card requires a minimum reputation with one (or more) factions in order to play on the field. As reputation is not “used up” during the match, players can continue to play more powerful cards without having to pool resources.

There are a lot of interesting mechanics at play. Here’s a few I got to see during the demo:

Warcry: This unit special ability grants +1 attack and health to the top unit card in the deck each time it attacks, no matter where that next unit is. This can be incredibly powerful depending on what unit it lands on.

Ambush: Units with ambush can be played during an opponent’s turn as a defensive or offensive measure. There’s no “tell” that an opponent has this card, so the ability name is appropriate.

Echo: Units with Echo will create a second copy of themselves when played.

Flying: Flying units can only be defended against by other flying units.

The Choice of Defense: Each turn, the player has the choice of defending against attacks. By default, attacking units will go straight for the hero to bring their health down for a win, skipping over any units in the field. If a player chooses to defend, all of their units on the field will go into a defensive mode, forcing all attacking units to attack them (a la taunt) first. This means that you can “protect” units by not having them defend, or force a defense to pummel your opponent’s units.

The match demo I played was fun and fast-paced, though certainly felt easy as I decimated the AI opponent even while I was learning mechanics as I played. The game feels promising, if it can get past its comparisons to Hearthstone. Eternal will feature a single-player story campaign alongside the competitive card duels against both AI and other players. It’s heading into closed beta soon, and sign-ups are available.

The post Eternal CCG – PAX South 2016 appeared first on MMOHuts.

Death Stair – PAX South 2016

Posted: 04 Feb 2016 04:33 PM PST

In the drowning noise of video games with complex control schemes and features lists that put some car manufacturers to shame, it’s important to take a quiet moment to step away and remember that simple games are good too. A game doesn’t need much to have you grinning from ear to ear, just a straight forward mechanic that lets you do something you couldn’t (or shouldn’t) otherwise do. Like knocking people down stairs.

That’s the general premise behind Death Stair from RnD Labs, described to me as a “competitive stair climbing game.” Thankfully this game has nothing to do with actual stair climbers, though if it did, you’d be pretty bruised and exhausted at the end of a round. In each round, one player (randomly selected) takes the role of the gunner, and the remaining players play as runners. Runners must head up a narrow, long staircase and try to reach the top before the timer expires. Gunners are out to stop them.

Death Stair

It looks something like this.

As a runner, your mainly reliant on your ability to dodge and keep moving, though some perks are promised to make your life just a tad bit easier. You’ve got to keep an eye on what’s incoming down the stairs, and be ready to not only dodge and jump, but rush back to your feet after you get knocked down – because you will get knocked down. Along the way, you might even find a little spot of refuge, though you’ll still want to keep moving upward.

The gunner, on the other hand, looks down on the stairs and does everything they can do to prevent runners from making it. Gunners have a loadout of three weapons, each with a different recharge timer. In the demo I played, I had a fast-firing beachball that practically never expired, a small but hard-hitting dodgeball with a moderate recharge, and mines which had a slow timer. Uses of your weapons can be accumulated and used in bursts, but once you’re out, you have to wait for the recharge. While it’s tempting to spam everything down the stairs at once, winning requires some thoughtful aiming – as I proved with my last dodgeball shot that sent my opponent clear down the stairs just seconds before they claimed victory.

That’s it, really: simple stair-climbing mayhem with wacky characters and intense moments of skill. Death Stair is planning for full release later this year on PC, PlayStation 4, and XBox One.

And to whoever the grumpy guy was that I played against: sorry. No one told me knocking people down stairs would be so satisfying.

The post Death Stair – PAX South 2016 appeared first on MMOHuts.

Time of Dragons

Posted: 04 Feb 2016 02:42 PM PST

The post Time of Dragons appeared first on MMOHuts.

Eternal

Posted: 04 Feb 2016 02:34 PM PST

The post Eternal appeared first on MMOHuts.

Atari Vault

Posted: 04 Feb 2016 02:28 PM PST

Atari Vault is an arcade complication title by Code Mystics. With original Atari titles from the 70’s and 80’s, gamers can now relive the golden days of gaming once more, now with online multiplayer.

Features:

Over 100 Atar 2600 titles: Play seminal Atari titles including Asteroids, Centipede, Missile Command, Tempest, Warlords, and so much more.

Online Support: For the first time ever, battle for arcade supremacy online or at home and compare your high scores with players from around the world.

Steam Controller Support: Experience a new level of control playing your favorite games with the multi-functional Steam Controller.

New UI:

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SMITE Berserker Ullr Skin Reveal

Posted: 04 Feb 2016 12:56 PM PST

Ullr goes all out in his season 2 reward skin for SMITE, Berserker.

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Deckbound Heroes – PAX South 2016

Posted: 04 Feb 2016 12:08 PM PST

At its core, Deckbound is another digital trading card game, aligned more toward a classic deck dueling system than the modern Hearthstone variants. You have cards and hero health, and your task is to bring your opponent to zero before they do the same to you in a turn-based arena. But the way Deckbound is built makes the game so distinctly different; it can’t be compared easily to anything. In fact, rather than starting from gameplay and working down to the details, the best way to explain Deckbound is to start from its very foundations and work up. Thankfully, I was able to meet with Gareth Jenkins, Lead Developer of Deckbound, at PAX South to make this task a little easier.

The short summary: Deckbound is a free-to-play card battling game with unique cards formed using Bitcoin technology. If you understood that sentence, this’ll be a breeze. Otherwise, get comfortable – this is going to be a long one.

First: the cards. In just about any TCG or CCG you’ll play, cards are static pre-made objects. They’re crafted individually by the developers, and exist in theoretically infinite amounts, meaning that every player has access to the same cards across the entirety of the game. While limited edition cards exist, and players might be limited in how long or in which manners they can obtain cards, no trading card actually has a unique identity. Except in Deckbound.

Deckbound Heroes - PAX South 2016

Card Concept Art.

Deckbound’s cards are all completely unique, created by a unique genesis system that leverages Bitcoin technology. No, this has nothing to do with Bitcoins themselves, so don’t worry about starting a Bitcoin farm in your basement. Instead it uses bitbind.io, a service that simply leverages the whole system to create unique identities for cards. It looks something like this:

Deckbound-Bitbindio-Creation

For those of you who feel that just went all over your head, think of it this way: each card is procedurally generated and has a unique identifier which lets Deckbound do some awesome things that I’ll be touching on later.

Each Deckbound card is named and is generated with a selection of abilities. There are 1200 abilities in the pool to be chosen from, and this process, too, is an awesome little bit of technology. Abilities are seeded onto a “Genesis Block,” essentially a three dimensional star-map of abilities, and clustered together using a special algorithm that links abilities together based on common themes (like healing or direct damage). Each card begins at a location within this ability cube, and then reaches out to grab abilities from this origin point. While generating, cards typically grab abilities close to their origin point, thus resulting in cards with cohesively themed abilities. However on rare occasions they may reach out randomly further into the map to pull an unrelated ability. You can see an example of this system in action here.

To balance this, there’s another complex function at work that weighs the strength of abilities and the rarity of certain ability combinations to contain cards within reasonable parameters. Gareth admitted to me that these unique identities makes it challenging to balance cards on a universal scale outside of the weighting system. However, due to the highly unique nature of each cards, any card that does manage to be created “overpowered” will not be widely distributed and can be addressed by the team on an individual basis. Rare, powerful cards will still make it into the system as part of the intentional design, but nothing should be so grossly powerful it becomes an “I win” card.

Putting all of that together, what happens is this: each Deckbound card is created randomly with a unique identifier and a collection of skills (the range is pretty wide here, upward to about twenty in the current build). Now this is where the really awesome parts come in, because this unique identity allows for each card to be owned by a specific player and to have its own experience points.

Let’s look at the life of a card put in the game’s Nomad system, first. Deckbound has what’s called a “Nomad” pool, which is an open group of cards available for all players to borrow cards from. A new card generated into the Nomad Pool will wait until a player draws it from the pool to borrow, with no experience and most skills still locked from use. As that player enters matches, the card will gain experience, level up, and begin to unlock its skills. Should the card be returned to the Nomad Pool, it will keep that experience as it’s passed to another player. If a player likes the card, they can also purchase it from the pool to keep as their own.

It’s not just newly generated cards in the Nomad Pool, though. Players can also loan their cards into the pool, allowing them to gain experience as the card’s used by borrowers, and reclaim the card when they’re ready to use it again. Borrowers, meanwhile, can still look to purchase the card in offering a trade with its current owner. This makes the nomad pool an attractive place to put cards not only to gain experience while you’re offline, but to drop cards in hopes for a buyer.

Cards can either be borrowed from the Nomad Pool or purchased in packs. As a free-to-play game, Deckbound has no starter fee. However, players not wanting to purchase cards will be limited to borrowing from the Nomad Pool unless they get their hands on a pack through limited promotions. There is no “in game” currency that can be saved up to use to buy cards or packs; these will still have to be purchased with real money. This doesn’t technically limit gameplay, but it does mean that free players will not have any cards permanently at their disposal. Gareth indicated that currently the team plans on selling packs of five cards at about $1-$2 each.

Deckbound Heroes - PAX South 2016

World view in Heroes.

Cards can also be used across multiple Deckbound games. Currently, only Deckbound Heroes, the card dueling game, is in testing, but Deckbound Quest, a single player RPG, is also in development.

Deckbound Heroes pits players on one of multiple maps against each other. Players have a base with health and between them are multiple conquerable outposts, each with their own health, durability, and skill power. Each outpost may have different abilities; on the river map I played, outposts had direct damage skills. Rather than playing your cards, you play the abilities on your cards, and both your abilities and your opponent’s abilities are available to see from the start. Each turn you can choose what abilities to use, in a total goal of knocking out your opponent’s health. Matches are a best two out of three.

Still in alpha, Deckbound Heroes will require plenty of testing to see a polished product come to light. But the systems behind Deckbound are ingenious, and make it worth getting in now. Early access is available with multiple starter packs, or you can sign up for the mailing list for a chance to get an invite.

The post Deckbound Heroes – PAX South 2016 appeared first on MMOHuts.

Planar Conquest iOS Trailer

Posted: 04 Feb 2016 11:21 AM PST

Planar Conquest brings the full 4x experience combined with awesome gameplay from last year’s PC Kickstarted Worlds of Magic to your iOS mobile device.

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Game of Dice Pirate Event Reveal

Posted: 04 Feb 2016 10:22 AM PST

Game of Dice introduces a new event board and new unlockable pirate class in their latest limited time event.

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Colopl Rune Story – Take the Vanguard Challenge

Posted: 04 Feb 2016 10:13 AM PST

Colopl Rune Story introduces the new Vanguard Challenge.

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