Seven days is all Samara needs to come out of the television and kill you. Oddly enough, that may also be how long it takes to get hooked back into World of Warcraft. If you quit World of Warcraft more than a month ago, odds are there is an email in your inbox inviting you to come back for seven days to give the game another go, assuming you hadn’t already with the fairly new up-to-level-20 extended trial.
If it’s been a long time since you last played, you will be relieved to hear that installing WoW is no longer an all day venture. Rather, thanks to Blizzard’s relatively new streaming service, you can get in the game in as little as a half hour, with the only downside being longer load times as the game downloads that zone’s information (30 seconds to a minute, I’ve found). You may also have to reset your password, as my initial attempts to log in were met with “your account has been locked” and requiring me to reset my password, and that is with authenticator ownership.
As my emails have shown, I’m not the only one still confused about DC Universe’s upcoming server merger/melding on Monday. Previously, I presumed that this not-merge-merger would allow players to keep their names, as the servers weren’t merging. As it turns out, however, that is not the case. When the mergers go live on Monday, players may find that their superhero title is no longer accessible, and must be changed.
Sony is handling this in a semi-traditional fashion. Players who are subscribed will take precedence over those who do not. If two players carry the same name, the character with more hours logged will be allowed to continue the honor of having that name. If you are on the losing end of the ticket, you will receive a token for a free name change. Also mentioned is how players will change between PvE and PvP phases. In order to swap roles, heroes will have to visit the Watchtower, while villains will need to visit the Hall of Doom.
Hopefully this will bring the much needed population to a game whose multi-year longevity is still deeply in question. The megaservers roll out Monday.
Why Should I Play is a new series where I dive into games and discuss my experiences. This article is not meant to be un-bias’d and due to the intrinsic nature of MMOs, reflects the product at the time of publish but may not reflect the product at the time of reading. As always, MMO Fallout suggests you make use of free trials to form your own opinion of the game.
Gods & Heroes launched back in June to a rather low reception and equally mediocre ratings. A couple of weeks after launch, Heatwave Interactive announced that the game didn’t garner as much attention as they were hoping, and that the company had plans to implement several ideas including free to play at some unannounced point in the future. A few days ago, the company announced the release of the 3-day trial, allowing unlimited access (for three days) to all Gods & Heroes had to offer, along with a price drop to $29.99. I dived in head first into the three day trial to check out what Gods & Heroes had to offer.
Through my first day in Gods & Heroes, I kept asking myself why the game felt so familiar, and it wasn’t until around level six or seven that enlightenment hit me: Gods & Heroes feels like a game that should have come out years ago. The landscape in many places looks stunning, with impressive detail and variation in the flowers and trees that populate the landscape. The armor shows off the multiple pieces that put it together, and the characters look decent, although a bit shiny and emotionless. The buildings, however, are the sore spot in visual design, with a small amount of structures reused to populate the world.
The main advertising points of Gods & Heroes are the estate system and the minion management. Almost immediately, you are introduced to your private, dilapidated estate that must be built from the ground up to its former glory. As you complete quests for the NPCs in your village, you gain access to better perks for your minions, from armor, weapons, etc. The game uses a rather cheap method of having your buildings phase through construction right in front of you when you complete an upgrade quest, but that’s a rather inconsequential aesthetic flaw.
The meat of the game is a been-there-done-that fantasy MMO set in ancient Rome. Your main mode of leveling consists of going around and finding quests that task you with killing a number of NPCs, harvesting nodes, or killing NPCs to harvest things off of them. As you level up, you will follow the basic system of taking your trash to the vendor, buying new armor and weapons, setting up your alternate advancement points (feats) and upgrading your minions. The idea of bringing squad mechanics into a solo-oriented game will make your time spent in Rome a little too easy, however.
Gods & Heroes is funny and charming in parts. In one memorable quest, I had to bust up a multi-day long party by smashing wine vats that we then discovered were spiked with a magical essence. Inevitably, I killed the guy behind the magic and given the confirmation that the party would be broken up as soon as everyone sobered up.
Why You Aren’t Playing Gods & Heroes
You may have heard that Gods & Heroes is on the easy side, and that would be completely accurate. Having one minion makes the game easy enough, and that is before you hit higher levels and your squad increases to four. Now, to its credit, there are supposed to be later sections in the game that only allow for a limited number of minions, but with two sword wielding minions, I was steamrolling over anything that came my way. But you can put minions away if you want to make the game more difficult, there is no obligation to have your minions out.
Perhaps the biggest problem with Gods & Heroes is that the game is bugged like a hotel room in a prostitution sting. The game crashed maybe once every two hours, either giving me a “Godsandheroes.exe has stopped responding” Windows error, or simply losing connection to the server. Not that I was at risk of dying, thanks to my two tanks, but that doesn’t ease the frustration of those few moments when you know the game is about to crash, but hasn’t actually displayed the message yet. Otherwise, I didn’t have any lag issues while playing, there was no rubber-banding or jolting NPCs to speak of.
Invisible wall.
Second on my list of three big gripes: The terrain. The terrain needs to be revamped so walking isn’t a fight between myself and my character. Slight inclines or tiny but sharp inclines seem to stop my player in his tracks, and I am fairly certain that Heatwave has installed invisible walls in some areas because I’ve found multiple spots that I cannot pass. In the above picture, you can see my character on pretty level ground, but ground that he cannot pass. It is worth noting that this is nowhere near the area limits.
Third: The game has some issues with lack of context sensitive response, or my character is a pacifist. When fighting, I had several instances where my character would just cancel auto-attack, wouldn’t attack at all, or I would hit something on the hotbar and I would see “queuing quick shot” but my character would never use the power. This isn’t a lag issue, to my knowledge. When using hotbar actions, I also found that there is no context for cooldown. The buttons are grayed out until you can use them again, but the countdown timers always say: 00:00:00 remaining, and the buttons regaining their color doesn’t necessarily mean that pressing the associated button will result in attacking again.
So Should I Play Gods & Heroes?
Gods & Heroes is fun, and its major issues are on the hardware front (performance, responsiveness, and terrain/pathfinding). The estate and minion systems are enjoyable and innovative, but the experience is just crushed under the foot of your minions managing to kill the mob before my scout decides to stop ignoring my button presses.
I’m going to leave this up to the reader to decide, download the Gods & Heroes trial and give it the whole three days before you make your decision, but you may want to wait to activate your key until some much needed terrain/stability issues are fixed. I would buy the game as it is now, because I didn’t find the issues to be game-breaking, if it weren’t for the fact that the Star Wars Galaxies weekly article is my primary MMO right now.
Otherwise, I’d give Gods & Heroes a thumbs up. If you haven’t taken part in the 3-day trial, do so.
Why Should I Play is a new series where I dive into games and discuss my experiences. This article is not meant to be un-bias’d and due to the intrinsic nature of MMOs, reflects the product at the time of publish but may not reflect the product at the time of reading. As always, MMO Fallout suggests you make use of free trials to form your own opinion of the game.
Gods & Heroes launched back in June to a rather low reception and equally mediocre ratings. A couple of weeks after launch, Heatwave Interactive announced that the game didn’t garner as much attention as they were hoping, and that the company had plans to implement several ideas including free to play at some unannounced point in the future. A few days ago, the company announced the release of the 3-day trial, allowing unlimited access (for three days) to all Gods & Heroes had to offer, along with a price drop to $29.99. I dived in head first into the three day trial to check out what Gods & Heroes had to offer.
Through my first day in Gods & Heroes, I kept asking myself why the game felt so familiar, and it wasn’t until around level six or seven that enlightenment hit me: Gods & Heroes feels like a game that should have come out years ago. The landscape in many places looks stunning, with impressive detail and variation in the flowers and trees that populate the landscape. The armor shows off the multiple pieces that put it together, and the characters look decent, although a bit shiny and emotionless. The buildings, however, are the sore spot in visual design, with a small amount of structures reused to populate the world.
The main advertising points of Gods & Heroes are the estate system and the minion management. Almost immediately, you are introduced to your private, dilapidated estate that must be built from the ground up to its former glory. As you complete quests for the NPCs in your village, you gain access to better perks for your minions, from armor, weapons, etc. The game uses a rather cheap method of having your buildings phase through construction right in front of you when you complete an upgrade quest, but that’s a rather inconsequential aesthetic flaw.
The meat of the game is a been-there-done-that fantasy MMO set in ancient Rome. Your main mode of leveling consists of going around and finding quests that task you with killing a number of NPCs, harvesting nodes, or killing NPCs to harvest things off of them. As you level up, you will follow the basic system of taking your trash to the vendor, buying new armor and weapons, setting up your alternate advancement points (feats) and upgrading your minions. The idea of bringing squad mechanics into a solo-oriented game will make your time spent in Rome a little too easy, however.
Gods & Heroes is funny and charming in parts. In one memorable quest, I had to bust up a multi-day long party by smashing wine vats that we then discovered were spiked with a magical essence. Inevitably, I killed the guy behind the magic and given the confirmation that the party would be broken up as soon as everyone sobered up.
Why You Aren’t Playing Gods & Heroes
You may have heard that Gods & Heroes is on the easy side, and that would be completely accurate. Having one minion makes the game easy enough, and that is before you hit higher levels and your squad increases to four. Now, to its credit, there are supposed to be later sections in the game that only allow for a limited number of minions, but with two sword wielding minions, I was steamrolling over anything that came my way. But you can put minions away if you want to make the game more difficult, there is no obligation to have your minions out.
Perhaps the biggest problem with Gods & Heroes is that the game is bugged like a hotel room in a prostitution sting. The game crashed maybe once every two hours, either giving me a “Godsandheroes.exe has stopped responding” Windows error, or simply losing connection to the server. Not that I was at risk of dying, thanks to my two tanks, but that doesn’t ease the frustration of those few moments when you know the game is about to crash, but hasn’t actually displayed the message yet. Otherwise, I didn’t have any lag issues while playing, there was no rubber-banding or jolting NPCs to speak of.
Invisible wall.
Second on my list of three big gripes: The terrain. The terrain needs to be revamped so walking isn’t a fight between myself and my character. Slight inclines or tiny but sharp inclines seem to stop my player in his tracks, and I am fairly certain that Heatwave has installed invisible walls in some areas because I’ve found multiple spots that I cannot pass. In the above picture, you can see my character on pretty level ground, but ground that he cannot pass. It is worth noting that this is nowhere near the area limits.
Third: The game has some issues with lack of context sensitive response, or my character is a pacifist. When fighting, I had several instances where my character would just cancel auto-attack, wouldn’t attack at all, or I would hit something on the hotbar and I would see “queuing quick shot” but my character would never use the power. This isn’t a lag issue, to my knowledge. When using hotbar actions, I also found that there is no context for cooldown. The buttons are grayed out until you can use them again, but the countdown timers always say: 00:00:00 remaining, and the buttons regaining their color doesn’t necessarily mean that pressing the associated button will result in attacking again.
So Should I Play Gods & Heroes?
Gods & Heroes is fun, and its major issues are on the hardware front (performance, responsiveness, and terrain/pathfinding). The estate and minion systems are enjoyable and innovative, but the experience is just crushed under the foot of your minions managing to kill the mob before my scout decides to stop ignoring my button presses.
I’m going to leave this up to the reader to decide, download the Gods & Heroes trial and give it the whole three days before you make your decision, but you may want to wait to activate your key until some much needed terrain/stability issues are fixed. I would buy the game as it is now, because I didn’t find the issues to be game-breaking, if it weren’t for the fact that the Star Wars Galaxies weekly article is my primary MMO right now.
Otherwise, I’d give Gods & Heroes a thumbs up. If you haven’t taken part in the 3-day trial, do so.
The question of “how do you kill World of Warcraft” continues to be asked by companies and players alike, yet it is a question that has already been answered. As Blizzard themselves have admitted, World of Warcraft cannot be killed by imitating it:
“Players that have invested time in WOW don’t just want to do the same thing in other game – they want to try something completely new and different,”
-Shane Dabiri, Blizzard, on WoW Clones
Rather, World of Warcraft can only be killed by Blizzard, and it appears that will be as simple as players completing the content and leaving. World of Warcraft’s subscribers peak when an expansion releases and gradually fall as players finish or become bored with the new content. Back in May, Blizzard announced in a conference call that they intend to release expansion packs on a more regular basis to combat this post-release drop in subscriptions, which I theorized could actually lead to players feeling over-charged and have a negative effect (read: Death by Expansions).
Over the past few months, Blizzard has introduced a series of updates to bring new players into the game, including updating the free trial to allow players access to content up to level 20 for absolutely free, with no time limit, and the recent release of World of Warcraft in Portuguese with a new client and servers for Brazil. That being said, this isn’t a doom-saying for World of Warcraft. In fact, despite this drop in subscribers, World of Warcraft’s profit margin continues to grow, $313 million as opposed to $299 million this time last year.
Not that anything I say will stem the “Blizzard will go bankrupt by the end of the year!” posters.
Lods of emone! When Blizzard releases a new pet on the cash shop, you can bet that the GDP of a small island nation will find its way into the World of Warcraft coffers by the end of the month. Even better so, when 100% of the cost is for charity, at least you’ll have a good cause to attach to your new pet.
Blizzard announced that over $1.9 million has been donated to the Red Cross to assist in the Japan relief aid, in the form of a Cenarion Hatchling pet. This figure is a big notch in the increasing amount of charity donations over the past few years by developers and players, and as the MMO Fallout mantra has remained: If you’re going to compete, why not compete over who can donate more?
Under the risk of a new “spam Omali’s website with expletives and win a free iPad,” contest, I must push on. This story was tipped to me by Vetarnias on the MMORPG.com forums. gPotato isn’t the first developer to have a “review our game and have a chance at winning a prize” contest, but considering the number of deleted topics at MMORPG.com’s Uncharted Waters Online forums, I’m guessing they didn’t consult their target before running said competition.
Back in June, Uncharted Waters launched a two-tier contest. The first, create a new character and hit level 80 and the top three achievers will win iPad 2’s. It’s important to note that use of cash shop items to speed leveling is completely within the rules. The second? Spam MMORPG.com and win a 3DS.
Yes, write a review (read: a positive review) or helpful commentary and win either a Nintendo 3DS or a cash shop ticket. The contest page even provides a handy link to the MMORPG.com UWO forums for maximum efficiency. And if you don’t have an MMORPG account, well you can sign up for one just as easy as pie. The promotion is over, the contest ended on the 30th of July, and if you look on the forums the posts have been removed by moderators.
It is unclear if NetMarble and gPotato are going to still be giving out the 3DS given all of the candidates have had their reviews scrubbed. I scoured the forums for any posts between June 20th and now (not a difficult feat as the forums see only a handful of posts each day), and couldn’t find any mention of the contest anywhere, or anyone actually being awarded the prize. Perhaps this whole ordeal is being quietly swept under the rug.
I think a better question to raise here would be if this falls under the jurisdiction of the blogger disclosure laws by the Federal Trade Commission. If it does, and the users who won either of the prizes were in the United States, that person could fall under some heavy penalties for not disclosing in his endorsement that the article was written in return for a gift.
With the impending (read: yet to be revealed) release of Star Wars: The Old Republic, I’m finding gamers can be grouped into two categories. There is the group that can’t get enough Republic news, and the group that believes the game is being far over-hyped. For the former, The Escapist has run a story today that there is still big news to come regarding the upcoming MMO, on the scale of space battles and warzones.
Director James Ohlen would love to tell you what the feature is, but apparently Bioware’s PR department only budgets for allowing talk about what he wishes they would allow him to talk about.
Ohlen also said that players didn’t quite know about everything that The Old Republic had to offer yet. He said that while most of the game’s really big components – things like the space battles or the warzones – had been revealed, there was at least one more announcement to come on that scale. There would be a steady stream on information right up until launch, he added, but he could say any more without getting in trouble with the game’s PR department.
You can read the whole interview this article was derived from, an interview with Newsarama, at their website. The actual quote by Ohlen is:
We have some pretty exciting announcements that will be coming. I don’t think there’s anything on the level of PvP, Warzones, space battles or anything like that. Well, there’s one thing that might be at that level. Depends on what you like about the game, but it’s pretty exciting. Obviously I can’t go more into that, PR will kill me.
The latest trailer for Transformers Universe doesn’t reveal anything about the game (unless you weren’t aware that the game followed the Transformers line), but it has cryptic text, and a Transformer, so…who wants lunch?
Free to play may be coming to Gods & Heroes at some unknown point in the unknown future, but why let that stop you from trying the game now? Launched today by Heatwave Interactive, players can get into the mythological MMO for three days absolutely free of charge. All you have to do is enter your name and email address in this page right here, to be sent your key, and create a Heatwave account to gain access. Simple as counting your bacon before you eat it.
For those of you who go through content like tissue paper on a bad cold, you’ll have access to all content (that is to say, as much as you can get through) in those three days.
For more information on Gods & Heroes, click on the link on the right hand side.
Through my first day in Gods & Heroes, I kept asking myself why the game felt so familiar, and it wasn’t until around level six or seven that enlightenment hit me: Gods & Heroes feels like a game that should have come out years ago. The landscape in many places looks stunning, with impressive detail and variation in the flowers and trees that populate the landscape. The armor shows off the multiple pieces that put it together, and the characters look decent, although a bit shiny and emotionless. The buildings, however, are the sore spot in visual design, with a small amount of structures reused to populate the world.
The meat of the game is a been-there-done-that fantasy MMO set in ancient Rome. Your main mode of leveling consists of going around and finding quests that task you with killing a number of NPCs, harvesting nodes, or killing NPCs to harvest things off of them. As you level up, you will follow the basic system of taking your trash to the vendor, buying new armor and weapons, setting up your alternate advancement points (feats) and upgrading your minions. The idea of bringing squad mechanics into a solo-oriented game will make your time spent in Rome a little too easy, however.
Back in June, Uncharted Waters launched a two-tier contest. The first, create a new character and hit level 80 and the top three achievers will win iPad 2’s. It’s important to note that use of cash shop items to speed leveling is completely within the rules. The second? 
MMO Fallout 