Editorials – Page 76

[Not Massive] Titanfall 2 Trial Coming Soon

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Titanfall 2 is a fantastic shooter whose success has been hampered thanks to the poorly timed launch between Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. To bring more eyes to the game, Electronic Arts will be releasing a trial for PC and Xbox EA Origin/Access players on November 30th with the trial rolled out to non-subscribers on PC, Xbox, and Playstation on December 2nd.

Following the release of Titanfall 2, all post-launch maps, modes, and weapons will be absolutely free to all players, and that all starts on November 30^th with the release of Angel City’s Most Wanted. Featuring the fully remastered fan favorite Angel City map from the original Titanfall, Angel City’s Most Wanted introduces additional free content including the Wingman Elite Pistol, six new Titan kits, and a brand new Pilot execution.

If you have some free time, check out Titanfall 2 on your platform of choice, providing you choose a platform that the game is available on.

(Source: EA Press Release)

RuneScape Reveals 2017 Premiere Club Benefits

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We are nearing the end of November and that means it’s time to top up for next year’s Premiere Club membership in RuneScape. Available in three monnth, six month, and annual packages (prices above), Premiere membership offers a number of exclusive items and perks.

The main draw, as usual, is the aura. Included in this year’s package is the Desert Pantheon Aura, which gives daily bonuses to experience as well as other rewards. The gold package includes the whole kit and caboodle, from a Menaphite Ancient Outfit, an extra desert treasure key every day, 150,000 loyalty points, 50% discount on Rune Metrics, VIP world access, VIP forum access, a forum badge, chat badge, exclusive Q&A’s, old school members content, and access to pre-paid card promotion items.

You can read the FAQ here.

Doctor Strange is The Latest Update For Marvel Heroes

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Marvel Heroes tends to excel even among some of the bigger MMOs out there thanks to its tendency to constantly update and upgrade itself. This September we wrote about its biggest system update ever, which effectively constituted a total overhaul of the game. As with other branches of the Marvel entertainment empire, the folks behind Marvel Heroes appear to be fully aware that by recycling and/or revamping content based on the same basic heroes and settings they can continue keep their fans interested.

The game also has something of a built-in advantage in that it’s still the largest and most sophisticated ensemble video game to have come out since the dawn of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Gamers are interested in seeing crowds of Marvel characters in the same place, and there are only a few ways to do so across a huge spectrum of gaming. One of the first opportunities in this regard is a game some may not even know about! Casino Source lists a plethora of games and features offered by several online gaming sites, and includes mention of an Avengers slot machine. Further research shows this is a clever little arcade, and one of many to utilize a Marvel license to make slot reels more interesting. It’s entirely film-based, featuring all the main characters from the 2012 movie and giving gamers a nice chance to enjoy them all in one place.

That’s one of the smaller examples. And between that and Marvel Heroes, there are a few mobile apps with large casts of characters, as well as the LEGO-based video games where plenty of Marvel heroes and villains are present. But even among these titles nothing comes close to the amount of characters offered in Marvel Heroes. This is what keeps it out in front as probably the best Marvel video game you can find these days—and what separates it from other strong MMO options with less recognizable content.

And part of maintaining this reputation and status as the primary game for exploring lots of beloved comic characters is keeping those characters updated and interesting. For instance, if the creators of Marvel Heroes had simply plopped Iron Man into the MMO years ago and never touched him again, he’d have gotten old for players by now, even as one of the most important characters. Instead, the Marvel Heroes team regularly changes not only the game itself but the characters within it by providing new costumes, new abilities, and more.

They’ve recently done it again with a new update celebrating the release of Doctor Strange in theaters. Entertainment Weekly explained the update in detail, discussing new costume options for Strange (including his outfits from the film as well as a special comic book costume for those who logged in at a particular time). But this time, Marvel Heroes went a step beyond the ordinary image update and also built in some new gameplay options in the spirit of the film. For instance, the character of Mordo is now available as a team-up ally, not just for players controlling Strange but for any of the 59 playable characters in the game.

All in all it’s a pretty exciting update given how beloved the Doctor Strange movie already seems to be among fans. But it’s also just the latest example of what has helped to keep Marvel Heroes out in front of the competition for the best Marvel video game on the market.

Holiday Buyer’s Guide Part 1: 2016 Games For Retro Gamers

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2016 feels like it was all about nostalgia, be it in film, in life, and even in video games. With that in mind, I’ve compiled a list of games that retro gamers should enjoy. The NES Classic goes without saying, but since you have better chances of being struck by lightning than finding one in stores, we’ll leave that out of the list.

screenshot10 1. Carmageddon: Max Damage

Carmageddon brings back the days of your mother telling how worried she is of these TV computer games you’re playing and how she read online that they’ll turn you into a Satan-worshiping baby killer, only now it’s other members of the press telling you how problematic they find your taste in entertainment. The premise of Carmageddon is simple: Destroy the other racers, run over pedestrians, and rack up points. Also, don’t let your car get destroyed.

Play single player or online in one of several modes, one thing that takes getting used to in Carmageddon are the controls. This is definitely not the tight, smooth controls you may be used to in other racers. Cars are bulky, they get caught on scenery, and generally spin out pretty easily. Matches are a blast, since you can opt to actually finish the race (if you’re into that) or just destroy your opponents.

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2. Resident Evil 1/0 Remakes

Almost the entire Resident Evil main series has been remade for modern consoles, with Resident Evil 2 on its way at some point in the future and Resident Evil 3 a hopeful glimmer, but any gamer worth their retro salt should be picking up the remakes of the original game and its prequel. Going back to where the virus began, both titles have the player taking the role of S.T.A.R.S Special Forces as they uncover a string of murders in the forests near Raccoon City.

This series is renown for its grim atmosphere, puzzling…puzzles, tank controls, and survival aspects. Don’t shoot everything, you don’t have enough bullets. The story telling isn’t great, but it sets the stage for the series to come and is widely considered to be where Resident Evil was its most sane.

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3. A Boy and His Blob

A Boy and His Blob is a game that goes back to the NES, although you can’t find it on the NES Classic, and the classic is back on modern consoles and PC. A side scrolling game, the goal is to pass by various obstacles and puzzles by feeding your blog a number of jelly beans to transform him into new objects.

Overall this is a simplistic game with hand drawn graphics inspired by anime.

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4. Worms WMD

Another game from your childhood, the Worms series never seems to be willing to die and comes back every generation. WMD has everything that made the Worms series great, plus a ridiculous number of cameos from other titles. Kit your worm to look like characters from Rocket League, Payday 2, Saints Row IV, and more.

For those unfamiliar with the series, Worms is a turn-based game where you line up shots and blow your enemies off of the map. Use the environment to your advantage, or blow it up to create/destroy cover for your and your foes. Worms is a game that rewards patience and practice, you’ll need to learn each weapon in order to use them efficiently, otherwise the brutality of seasoned veterans and the game’s own AI will make short work of you.

5. OlliOlli/OlliOlli2

Alright, this one technically isn’t a retro game, but it draws inspiration from the days when games were difficult while pretty fair. OlliOlli is a side scrolling game that is all about riding a skateboard and pulling off tricks. You’ll need to be accurate to a T to rack up a high score and beat the games numerous levels, pro-levels, and challenges.

It is a game that can seem unfair at times, but stick with it and you’ll see just how much fun it can be.

Early Access Preview: Hero’s Song Is Certainly A Thing

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Hero’s Song is a thing you can pay money for and gain access to. Thank you, good night. Alright, I’ll keep going.

I think you could look into my history on Twitter and here on this website and easily lose count as to how many times I have said that I refuse to rate games based on what they could be rather than what they are. In consideration of the fact that Hero’s Song technically isn’t even available for purchase outside of those who backed early on Indiegogo, I’m going to make an exception. Not because it’s John Smedley or because of the inevitable rumors that the truck backing into my parking lot is carrying a payload of money.

So let’s get the basics out of the way: Hero’s Song is a point and click ARPG in development by Pixelmage Games and the notorious John Smedley himself. You can join worlds that other players have created or create one yourself and let other people join in. I’m not sure how fleshed out this feature is, but it looks pretty cool. You select a number of gods, give them varying levels of influence on the world, and hit generate. With your creation, the game builds ten thousand years of wars, treaties, slavery, and conquest. In my world, the dwarfs went to war with pretty much everyone and, while they won most of the time, somehow ended up being enslaved by the defeated race. A lot.

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I started out in the city of Sowkirk, which I assume is randomly generated from a list, and immediately find that the Tenab elves in my vicinity are non-hostile but could be attacked. I like this idea, since the game seems to have a ton of varieties to each race, of pulling up that old Everquest system where your relation with each race was fluid and partially based off of your chosen race. If this is what the developers are going for, it is unfinished since I couldn’t find a race relations menu.

Since they don’t seem to hate me, I don’t massacre the populace and I make my way out of the nearby gates. In fact, many of the elves are quite nice and stand around having dialogue with one another. Eventually a few of the elves get into a fight and start killing one another, I assume this is a bug. Heading south and around the barrier, I found myself in the sights of a group of orcs, the leader of which immediately shouted something about splitting my skull open.

Well you can’t make friends with everyone.

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My character is a Paladin, because this is an alpha and if there is any class that would be overpowered it would be the Paladin. There isn’t a whole lot to do in the game right now, mostly running around and killing mobs, leveling up, and checking out what skills you have available.

There are a ton of classes and races, making me wonder if Smedley walked off with some design documents from Everquest Next embedded in his brain. I’d actually like to see some of those features implemented in this title, and the roots certainly seem to be present. Enemies wander around and I quite often saw orcs in battle either with my elven friends or with ghouls/zombies of the night. It’d be interesting if the game not only was a generated world but a living one with roaming enemies that set up camp and can be wiped out.

Eventually the game is going to have functions like quests, and hopefully a working map. The world is gigantic, and there is currently no way of telling where you are. The world generator said it spawned about two thousand dungeons but I have my doubts. Either that or the world truly is gigantic and desperately needs a way of telling where you are.

Regardless, I am definitely interested in Hero’s Song and will be covering it more as Pixelmage adds in features.

Abandonware Asteroids: Outpost Yanked From Steam

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Asteroids: Outpost was the subject of an Early Access Fraudster article back in March, I pointed out that the game had been abandoned by its developer (Salty Games) with no comment by its publisher (Atari, yes that Atari). As an online only game, the fact that the Asteroids servers had evidently been offline since November (as of March) were bad enough, the fact that the game was still up for sale was even worse, that players were attempting to report the game to Valve and getting nowhere is criminal.

Since that article’s posting, I have made numerous attempts to contact both Valve and Atari with no response from either party. Salty Games, as you would expect from a fly-by-night startup somewhere in Los Angeles has zero company presence in the form of a Salty Games account on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Atari doesn’t even seem to be too sure on who they’re working with, because the game’s product page on the Atari website calls them by two separate names: Salty Studios and Salty Games. I was able to track down several people on LinkedIn listing Salty Games as their former place of employment, and it appears that the studio has been defunct for over a year now. Gone before it ever discovered WordPress.

The important piece to take out of this article is that the game has finally been removed from Steam, seven months after my previous write-up. Atari, a company whose customer support and press relations are virtually non-existent since I tried to get answers by sending emails and submitting support queries, has not responded to a single email in those seven months. They completely ignored the fact that the game was still on sale despite being offline and unplayable for months on end, and it isn’t hard to believe that they won’t realize that the game has been pulled from sale until well into next year. The official website points toward Steam’s nonexistent store page, and the forum link ignorantly leads to a full page of warnings that the game is broken and to stay far away.

So while your dreams of an open world PvP sandbox turret defense MMO Asteroids spinoff may be squashed for the time being, the internet can once again feel safe knowing that another bad game is off the market.

Perfect World Entertainment Claims Lockboxes Preview As Bug

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Perfect World Entertainment has dug itself into a controversy this week as the company made the announcement that loot previews are being removed from lockboxes. According to a post on the main website, although this feature has been in the game for a long time, it is evidently a bug. As such, the “bug” is being removed.

Since this bug has been live for a long time and we believe that some players may have come to rely on this bug, we are providing advance notice of the change.

Unsurprisingly, players are responding angrily on the forums with players calling fowl on Perfect World’s attempt to explain away a confirmation screen as an unintended function.

(Source: Neverwinter)

Beta Perspective: Criticism of the Avatar

Shroud of the Avatar starts you out as the corporeal form of the Avatar, an individual who has been summoned to Brittania time and time again to save the world from impending destruction. You meet with Lady British, who tells you that even her husband has returned to deal with evil forces threatening the land.

Lord British is here too? Great, I can’t wait to see how the guy completely ignores me and leaves me with absolutely none of his nation’s wealth to tackle the problem that he’s let fester for the last however many years. The dude’s been a total waste of space for most of the Ultima series, and didn’t even bother showing up for the embarrassing display that was Ultima Forever, although Garriott was long gone by the time that embarrassment of a game was released.

After building your character and answering the Oracle’s questions, you go through the Moon Gate and immediately find yourself in a village that was just ravaged by elves. You come across a dying knight who asks you to take an amulet to Brigid in Resolute. Along the way, you pick up items and figure out how to wield a sword and strike a test dummy.

If there’s one thing I constantly hope that the gaming industry would take away from Richard Garriot’s games, it is to show even a modicum of the respect that Garriot has for role playing and building worlds. I’m talking about putting in more effort than just designing an enemy and plonking him down on a field and calling it a day.

There are numerous areas just in the tutorial zone that you are likely to completely miss out on if you try to power your way through it. For instance, did you know that it is possible to find a healer who tries to cure the wounded soldier? It is, but unless you bypass the gate and head down another path, then talk to the guy and get on the subject of the dead and dying, you’d never know. He can’t save the soldier, but the game appreciates you taking the effort and rewards you as such.

It’s the little things that make the game that much more real feeling. You don’t know anyone’s name until you ask them or they tell you, and generally they won’t right away. Sure, you can weasel your way around the system by clicking on buzzwords or grunting your comments like a caveman, but if you want to dive into the world and type “what is your name?” you can. You won’t learn everything by following the underlined words, so you eventually have to play along if you want things like quests.

Now let’s talk about difficulty.

Are you kidding me? I’m not even out of the tutorial zone and already I’m getting my ass handed to me because the game decided it was high time to throw me into a three on one cluster f-you know, I’m not going to let this discourage me. This wouldn’t be an Ultima game if it didn’t start you out completely ill-equipped for the most basic task at hand. I need to get back into the mentality of RPGs where you need to git gud or get out, and having the game eat your lunch and then stab you in the face with your own fork is exactly the message the game needs to send to players that they aren’t screwing around.

Is it frustrating? Absolutely, but it makes the reward all the sweeter when you’re forced to put in work towards it. That said, nothing will make you smash your keyboard quite like that feeling when you see your attack miss, then miss, then miss, miss again, miss a fifth time, miss, miss, miss, and finally hit two damage only to miss, miss, miss, miss, you get the picture.

But push come to shove, Shroud of the Avatar overshoots Difficult Lane and lands right in the middle of BS Valley. In short: enemies are too densely packed and take too long to kill in respect to how fast they respawn. And to top it off, enemies just seem to waltz in from random areas of the map. You’ll be fighting two archers only to have a wolf and two random other bandits just rush in and start attacking you. So you start taking them out but by the time you finish the guys you killed earlier have respawned and joined the fight again. It’s a never ending cycle in some spots!

Experience in Shroud of the Avatar comes from a pool system. By killing enemies and completing quests you add to the experience pool that then goes toward leveling up skills as you use them. So yes, you do have to quest in Shroud of the Avatar in order to level up. The higher level the skill, the more it will draw from the pool in order to level up. In order to level up efficiently, you’re going to have to put locks on skills and decide where your priorities lie.

So it might come as a bit of surprise when I sum this up by saying that I love this game and my enjoyment is getting higher as I play. The more you fight, the better you get, the higher your stats, and the more punishment you can take out and withstand. Considering how much time I’ve invested into just the first area, I feel like this is going to be a very, very long game.

Rant: The Miserable Experience of Paladins

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I’m writing this while viewing my profile page on Paladins, the latest title by Hi-Rez Studios and something of a cross between a MOBA and modern day Team Fortress 2. It’s a pretty simple concept, one that has been in beta for the better part of the last year. Two teams fight over control of a capture point, with the winner then escorting a payload to the other team’s side.

Your character is customized outside of the match using a collectible card game style “deck” as well as inside the match by buying MOBA-esque items that boost certain stats. It is a popular game, well received by the Steam community with an 84% positive rating, and by all means it is turning out to be a solid game.

But after playing for nearly five hours and never winning a single match, Paladins has been the most miserable experience I have had with a game in recent memory. Not frustrating, miserable. A losing streak in Overwatch is frustrating, being perpetually locked out of my online banking because customer support is rubbish is frustrating. Paladins is miserable, it’s like a delicious slice of pizza that comes out of the oven only for someone to immediately walk all over it.

If you haven’t played Paladins, the primary focus of the game is on objectives. You have to capture the point in order to raise the payload and you must escort the payload in order to successfully deliver said payload. Killing the enemy and not dying to the enemy is a big part of this, however you’ll notice that at no point does killstreak or kill/death/assist ratio come into play in the terms of victory.

This is Hi-Rez’s fault, according to the forums and Reddit community. The game gives too little point incentive to focus on the objective, outside of the obvious winning/losing the match. So my experience with Paladins hasn’t been miserable on account of losing every match, but the moments where I die and watch my team clear out the capture zone, only for all four of them to completely ignore the objective and run off individually to be picked off so the enemy team can waltz right in and take the capture point.

The misery of yet another 0-4 loss because more than half of the team did not bother at all to play the objective. It’s like I’m back in little league soccer, playing on a team of kids who don’t want to be there and don’t give a crap. This isn’t the same problem that I have with standard MOBAs, where public matches are a crapshoot of random people who don’t really know how to play a game where five people are supposed to be juggling three lanes and a jungle area. That’s a complicated game to consistently get five random people to work together on. Paladins is not that complicated.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t say this: I played a couple more games before finishing this piece off and, you know what? I lost. My team lost, but it was a very long game because both teams were fighting their best and the capture point was in a constant state of overtime as the bodies piled up and nobody seemed to be able to get an advantage. We lost 3-4, but we put on a hell of a show. The second game, I won, but it wasn’t fun. This time I wound up on the winning team, watching as none of the players on the other team even bothered approaching the capture point over the course of the match. That isn’t fun either.

One other thing I will say about Paladins is that the community is hell of a lot better than those I’ve encountered in MOBAs, SMITE included. Despite our heavy losses, I haven’t seen a single rage quit, nobody went afk in protest, and there wasn’t any trolling going on in chat. Barring this one, exceptionally major issue with people constantly not playing to the objective, I think Paladins will be the kind of game that could even give Overwatch a run for its money. It is, for all intent and purpose, exactly the fantasy spiritual sequel to Global Agenda that I always wanted.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

MMOments: Star Trek Online On Xbox One

Xbox, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the USS Aye. Its mission, to explore old worlds and relive episodes of a video game that’s kinda like episodes of a tv show. To infinity and beyond.

I’ve been taking a few days to play Star Trek Online and I love this game. Two things I have to disclose before I go forward: One, that I’ve been playing since a few days before the servers went live. Two, I have not played Star Trek Online on the PC literally since it was still a subscription game and virtually only the first three months (approximately). I will not be making comparisons to the PC version, but I may end up playing the PS4 version to see how it holds up technically. That being said, my last memories of Star Trek Online were of a game that launched as hot garbage. A bag of hot garbage that has, as many have told me, cooled off and actually fermented into some delicious kombucha.

It’s been six years since Star Trek Online originally launched, back when Atari was (allegedly) funneling money from Turbine Entertainment into Neverwinter, and I have to admit that I’ve softened up to the idea of the JJ Abrams style Star Trek Universe, one with tons of action and explosions. Star Trek Online takes place in the alternate timeline of the Star Trek Abrams movies, where the Federation and Klingon Empire have fallen into war while the Vulcan deal with the loss of their home world. As the two sides fight, adversaries like the Dominion and Borg become a greater threat. Let’s admit, the old days of the diplomatic Star Trek are mostly gone.

The world presented in this game is grim and depressing, it hit me like a sack of bricks when I beamed onto a planet early on only to see the message “the Borg have already assimilated half of the colony.” You are not the James T. Kirk that would find a way to defeat a station of Klingon by beaming down, karate chopping their leader and bedding their women. Instead, you’re more like the James T. Kirk that would blow up the shields, beam down, and massacre everyone on board. I’m not making a political statement, just pointing out how war-torn this world is.

Gameplay is mostly split up between two modes: On foot and on ship. Ship combat is where the game gets pretty strategic, it’s a placement game where you and your opponent have four main angles of shield to wear down and eventually tear into their hull. Unfortunately you can’t pull of crazy maneuvers like in the TV show, but you do eventually gather quite an arsenal to take on enemy ships. One power, for instance, shuffles your shields while another makes your craft much more mobile for a short period of time. You have to balance out a good offense with a strong defense.

On foot, it’s all about flanking your enemy. For the most part, your six man away team can pretty much mow down anything so long as you keep them up to date on the latest guns and shields dropping into your inventory every twenty seconds. I’ve died once, maybe twice so far in ground combat and most of the time it was because of my own negligence.

For the most part, combat feels exactly how I would expect it to. You’re not on the Enterprise, a ship built mostly to deal with exploration and not necessarily combat. Your default ship is war-ready, meaning that while you can cut through small Klingon fighters like a knife through melted butter, you’re still going to have a rough time with higher tier enemies. One aspect of the original launch that I absolutely hated was the fact that you were already destroying Borg cubes en masse before the tutorial was even over. Yes, not even in the captain’s seat long enough for the replicator’s tea to cool down, and you’re already taking down the galaxy’s most deadly enemy.

Now, the Borg cube appears and the game pretty much shouts that you have absolutely no chance of even putting a dent in this behemoth, even bringing in other Federation ships to prove it. This is ultimately what I love about Star Trek Online, every mission feels like a self-contained episode that could conceivably play on TV, all part of an overarching seasonal plot. The first season is all about the war with the Klingon, why it happened, and how you can work to stop it. The graphics are nothing to write home about, but the sounds and little details all come together to provide an experience that is quintessentially Star Trek.

The controls in Star Trek Online leave much to be desired, in that they are at least 50% worthless. On the ground, you can hold the left bumper to lock on with your weapon. This button is useless and, for the most part, doesn’t work. It either locks on to your allies, refuses to cycle between targets, or won’t lock on at all despite your enemy being right in the crosshair. The ship has the same problems, this time being activated with the right joystick. I’ve dumped use of these buttons altogether.

In addition, the interface to the game is just godawful, more than it should reasonably be. The game is highly inconsistent on whether or not prompts will display on screen or force you to hold A to interact with them, NPCs and planets require you to be in precisely the right position much of the time in order to interact with them, and menus are clunky to navigate. The game feels dated, and I feel like it’s going to put off some people who might otherwise enjoy it.

Still, Star Trek Online is in a position of better late than never coming to consoles. If you haven’t given this game a chance on PC, I highly recommend it on consoles.

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