Tag: Beta

Raptr Rewards: Claim Mists of Pandaria Beta Keys


*Note: Since I’ve received numerous comments in regard to this and the other Raptr articles, I would like to point out that this is not a sponsored article. MMO Fallout does not accept offers for sponsored articles.*

We here at MMO Fallout love Raptr. If you haven’t heard of it, Raptr is a service similar to Xfire which tracks your games, achievements, time played, and more. As you play games and earn achievements, you rank up in comparison to your fellow gamers, and this is where Raptr leads the pack: Every so often, Raptr offers some great rewards for the simple act of ranking up. These range from in-game items to full games, and coupons to buy games. On the downside, the promotions are quantity and time limited, so you’ll need to be fast to earn them.

The latest deal to hit Raptr soon is a promotion for World of Warcraft. Starting later this week, players who are ranked “Experienced” (top 60%) or above in World of Warcraft will be able to claim a Mists of Pandaria beta key. There are only five thousand keys to be claimed, and they are guaranteed to be gone within just a few hours of the promotion starting.

On another fine note, this giveaway is available in all regions except for China and Korea. Sorry! Beta keys are redeemed through Battle.net.

MMO Fallout will be showcasing more Raptr rewards as they appear.

(Source: Raptr.com)

Getting a Beta Perspective: The Secret World


The Secret World releases on in just a few weeks on July 3rd, and I had yet another opportunity to take a look at the beta this weekend. As you already know from our previous preview, The Secret World is an action-oriented game that plays somewhere between the button mashing of a World of Warcraft game and the more tactical location-oriented button pressing of Funcom’s other title, Age of Conan.

This time around I got my hands on the Dragon faction, a faction out of Tokyo who believe in order through chaos. The opening, however unfortunate, is the exact same as for the Templar: Long, drawn out, and boring. Luckily, it can also be skipped and some of the poor voice actors who appeared in previous beta weekends appear to have been replaced.

Foremost, we need to talk about quests. Quests are, and hold with me here, interesting and engaging. Unlike your other MMOs, you don’t pick up quests by wandering into a hub and nabbing everything in sight. In fact, you can’t. There are hard limits that allow you to only take a very small number of quests simultaneously. Every citizen of Kingsmouth and beyond is unique with their own personality. The presentation readily makes up for the much smaller number of quests available.

While there are a good amount of kill x quests, there are many more that require thought and deduction, offering little or no help on the mini-map. For instance, one of the first quests in Kingsmouth has you talking to survivors to learn more about the fog. It doesn’t tell you who to talk to or even where you should go to talk to them, that is left up to your investigatory skills. Other quests will send you on your way with a vague idea or general area, but no specific pinpoint on your map telling you where to go. Turning in quests is as easy as reporting in via your cell phone.

Perhaps what sets The Secret World apart from other MMOs in this regard is that the game has no levels. Since players are less inclined to try to rush toward end-game, since there really is none, they might feel better sitting back and enjoying the cutscenes and presentation of the quests. When I played The Old Republic, I found myself quickly bored with side-quests. The cinematics did little to numb the pain of quest grinding. In The Secret World, quests are long and spiraling and can regularly contain twenty separate parts.

Keep your thinking caps on, folks. For every brainless killing quest in The Secret World, there are plenty more that will strain your mind and put your investigatory skills to the test. Of course many players will simply have a browser open or beg in chat for answers (the latter being incredibly obnoxious), but there is a sense of accomplishment when you finally figure out the answer.

For example, another quest has you entering the house of a doctor to access the log files on his computer. Your only hint is a photograph that shows fireworks and a hint on the computer about the “song of the seasons.” The answer requires some knowledge of classical music, and I won’t spoil it here. I almost have to question if The Secret World will lose some appeal with its crowd because if you don’t have good deduction skills (or knowledge of classical music), you will probably just wind up looking the answers up online, and that will become annoying after a while.

Crafting in The Secret World is very similar to Minecraft, where you build gear by placing the building blocks in the correct pattern on a grid. Unfortunately, at least in my humble opinion, crafting is still very difficult without reading outside sources and guides for help. In fact there is a crafting guide on the Secret World main page that does an amazing job of explaining the ins and outs of weapon creation.

Combat, as I mentioned before, is a mixture of strategy without going as far as the intricate systems of other games. You will mostly be building energy to pull off attacks that use up said energy, and in the meantime many of the mobs have attacks that need to be dodged. There is a certain level of strategy required in combat, as you have limited space in your active and passive skill section to fill.

We’ll see how the next beta goes. Until then, I still haven’t burnt myself out of The Secret World. The more I play, the more engrossing that the game becomes. Player vs player combat was still absent from the beta but will appear next time.

Preview Upcoming RuneScape Combat Update


The beta for RuneScape’s upcoming combat change is just a few weeks away, but you can get a short preview by watching the above video. The combat preview starts about one and a half minutes into the video, and does not show any of the new interfaces or the combat ability bar, but does showcase several moves players will be able to unleash once the update goes live.

Check it out above. If you haven’t had a chance, sign up for the RuneScape combat beta, set to begin later this month.

Getting A Beta Perspective: The Secret World Templars


Entering into The Secret World takes you to a world your crazy uncle Tom always thought was a reality. The Illuminati is not only a real organization, but they continue to strive toward a New World Order by working behind the scenes and out of sight. In the secret world of The Secret World, the Illuminati also has to deal with equal super powers: The Dragon, an operation that molds its power through chaos and unpredictable action, and the Templars, an ancient organization dedicated to the destruction of evil wherever it rear its ugly head.

If you were to only play, say, the first ten minutes of The Secret World, you might leave the game feeling rather disappointed. Character creation lacks choice, and your character’s introduction to his new found powers goes down the path of a very long and boring cutscene filled with drawn out exposition by what is hopefully a placeholder voice actress. Luckily, this is the low point of the game and the cutscenes and voice actings only get much better from this point.

The world of The Secret World is dark, without a doubt. The locations you travel through are beautifully detailed and permeate with an overwhelming emotion of dread, hopelessness, and the imminent darkness that waits around every corner. The world is coming to an end, and you are one of a select few who are even aware of it. The town of Kingsmouth offers plenty of nods to your favorite fiction stories, from Lovecraft to a possible nod toward Left 4 Dead with the vehicles (jump on a vehicle and the alarm goes off, calling in zombies).

The tutorial is a high time to leave your ego at the door. You are not the hero that The Secret World deserves, and the game makes no qualms about telling you right up, “you are not the only one, and you are not the chosen one.” The tutorial gives you a chance to try out and select a desired weapon from the list. Your choices are between melee (sword, brass knuckles, sledgehammer), guns (pistol, shotgun, assault rifle), and magic (elemental, blood, and chaos). Personally, I chose the sledgehammer. They don’t call me Sledgehammer Omali for nothing. In fact, they don’t call me that at all.

Combat in The Secret World is familiar and fast, somewhere around the lines of Age of Conan without the directional attack/block mechanics. You have attacks that build energy and attacks that deplete energy. With my sledgehammer, special attacks were mainly focused toward hitting multiple targets. Magic and guns were not radically different to melee, albeit at a longer attack range.

Leveling can be an overwhelming experience, especially when you first lay eyes on the skill wheel presented to you. The Secret World offers the ability to create the character you want to play, and if you don’t know what character you want to play, this can come off as almost too much freedom. Luckily, you don’t have to worry about accidentally gimping your character by spreading his abilities out too far, later on you have the ability to build decks of skill combinations and change them on the fly.

I hesitate to talk about performance with The Secret World, although the beta worked just fine with a few hiccups here and there that likely had more to do with running capture software at the same time I was playing. From the limited area that I saw in the Templar beta, The Secret World is coming along great. The map of Kingsmouth is huge, with quests and collectibles scattered around to encourage exploring every nook and cranny of this dark future.

With some luck, I will be able to provide more beta coverage of the other factions in the near future. For now, I had a lot of fun playing The Secret World and can’t wait until the game launches later this year.

Summer 2012: Beta Test New RuneScape Combat System


Remember that major combat overhaul I’ve been talking about? Earlier this month, Jagex’s Mark Gerhard revealed that the update is coming late in the summer. In fact, the update is going to be such a significant change to RuneScape, the largest since RuneScape made a major engine update in 2004, that Jagex has seen fit to perform a public beta test at the end of June.

As this is such a significant evolution of the game, we’ll be running our first ever BETA test, starting in the week commencing with the 25th of June. We value your input, and we know you are the best people to tell us what works and what doesn’t.

This is rather interesting, as the last time Jagex held a public beta was when RuneScape transitioned to RuneScape 2 back in 2004.

Next week we’ll be sharing many more details and how to get access to the Beta test, so check back in with us and be ready to mark your calendars for the big day!

Check out the full news post at the link below.

(Source: RuneScape website)

Ghost Recon Online Keys: First Come First Serve


Hey there. If you’ve been looking for Ghost Recon Online keys, look no more. MMO Fallout has three keys to give away, listed below, first come first serve. Follow the instructions to redeem your key.

  • GRN-N9NM-CA9V-CAQQ-BHTY
  • GRN-N9TG-DMLX-3YWG-L73C
  • GRN-N9TM-JP9Q-K6G8-WGCL

Follow @mmofallout on Twitter or subscribe to our RSS for the drop on future beta keys and giveaways.

Guild Wars 2: Genius Method of Catching NDA Violators.


Click to enlarge

How do you stop someone from stealing your art and claiming it as their own? You watermark it, just enough so that it doesn’t get in the way of the actual image. How does a developer stop people from violating the non-disclosure agreement and posting screenshots of, say, Guild Wars 2 anonymously? Equal levels of watermarking.

Now, the above is not a screenshot from Guild Wars 2, as posting a screenshot of such feature from Guild Wars 2 even for proof of concept is what my lawyers refer to as “digging myself into a hole” that they will later “shoot and bury me in,” so instead I’m using an old April Fool’s teaser of the Guild Wars commando class. Click on the picture to enlarge it, and you can see my email address watermarked frequently enough that you couldn’t possibly crop a usable picture.

Obviously this doesn’t prevent people from posting their thoughts of the beta test without repercussion, but it does make it impossible to post screenshots without Arenanet taking action against the account.

Reminder to all closed beta players: you’re under NDA. Don’t risk breaking the NDA, you could permanently lose access to all ArenaNet games. ~RB2

TERA Beta Preview Part 3: Prisoner of Azerbaijan


[Editor’s Note: I highly recommend reading Part 2 before you read part 3]

I’ve mentioned before on Twitter and in discussions that I support a combination of a localized auction house and player owned shops that can be spread over the countryside. Granted, my business tactics come from a time where I could set up my shop NPC outside of a large raid dungeon and stock it with health/mana potions, buff potions, resurrection scrolls, etc, but that is a story for a different time.

For the beta, I want to say that it is working like a wonder. My Popori archer made it to level 16 this weekend without experiencing any bugs. There was one server outage this time around, but otherwise the connection in my server went along fine even at peak hours. Zones were once again overcrowded at all times of the day, however, but that is to be expected with only a few servers running and should space out at release.

First thing’s first: I was able to preview crafting and all I can say is that it is generic, but useful, and incredibly expensive. Buying the materials from the Weaponcraft materials vendor for my first weaponcraft quest cost me thirty thousand gold, of which I received one hundred back as payment for completing the quest. I did manage to get some real armor crafted, and considering the extremely slow rate at which looting mobs has been providing me with armor and weapons, crafting is looking to become a very useful asset.

Otherwise crafting is a simple method of gathering materials, buying stuff you can’t find on the field from vendors, and watching a progress bar load. And then once you no longer have use for a specific material, dump it on one of the ten thousand vendors carrying work orders for it. Crafting materials are in extremely high demand, and I hope that the outrageous prices that players are willing to throw for them in beta rolls over to the live game.

Leveling is still a rather mind-numbing grind of quests asking me to kill X-mobs, but I’ve noticed the inclusion of a new quest type: Guild quests. There are also special “suppression order” (repeatable) quests, and they were my number one annoyance this weekend. As far as I know, this is an intended “feature,” that in each quest you are generally required to obtain “proof” of a kill, meaning a drop. For myself, the drop rate on “proof” is so low that I managed to kill somewhere around forty centaur before the quest ticker moved up by one.

Again, I complain but TERA offers some of the most fun I’ve had in a recently released MMO. The action-combat is still the highlight, and in case the pictures don’t say it, the game still looks absolutely gorgeous. There are two closed beta tests left, with one open beta in April. I will see you then!

I received a few complaints last time for not talking about the lawsuit between NCSoft and Bluehole Studios, some people saying I shouldn’t be promoting TERA until the outcome of the trial is determined. One important factor you should know with the lawsuit against TERA is that even though NCSoft won in Korea, the game was still able to launch. I have very little doubt that even if NCSoft were to gain victory in the states that the court would actually shut down or prevent TERA from releasing.