Today, March 29, 2019, marks fifteen years to the day since the official launch of RuneScape 2. It’s incredible to think how much the game and Jagex as a company has changed and evolved over the last decade and a half, but if you want to take a walk down nostalgia road (or visit for the first time), I recommend checking out the following imgur galleries showcasing screenshots from the RuneScape 2 beta with comparisons between the two versions and snapshots from the early days.
Planetside Arena will launch on March 26, Daybreak Game Company announced in a news post circulated today.
Initially set for launch in early 2019, Planetside Arena will now feature an exclusive Founders season to get the “most dedicated” fans in before launch. Before the full game goes live, however, Daybreak is still gearing up for the first closed beta starting on January 30 with specific server times coming later this week. The founder’s season meanwhile will begin on Febuary 20, 2019 and will feature exclusive items that can only be obtained during this season of the battle pass. Those who preorder will receive immediate access to the founder’s season and battle pass.
More information can be found at the official website.
I’ve been spending most of my PS4 time over the past couple of months playing H1Z1 and now Realm Royale, and I have to say I find the Battle Royale genre far more enjoyable on the consoles than on PC. Maybe it’s because of the rampant cheating on PC, maybe it’s because I’m 30 and my reflexes just don’t hold up on a platform where the base can shoot a hair off of a fly from two miles away. Regardless, I’m enjoying myself.
Realm Royale is Hi-Rez Studios loading the style and gameplay elements of Paladins into a cannon and firing it at PUBG. While the base gameplay elements will be familiar to those who have played other games in the genre, Realm Royale is carving a niche all of its own. On the familiar side, you have up to 100 players jumping from a flying bus on to a giant island where they must battle either alone or part of teams in order to be the last person/team standing. Each player starts with a melee weapon and must scrounge around for better quality items so that they may rain down death upon whoever happens to get in their crosshair.
I haven’t played Realm Royale on PC in about a year, so my knowledge of that version is too far out of date to make comparisons. While the base concept is the same, Realm Royale has quite a bit that sets it apart from the competition in terms of meta gaming and quality of life features.
Before the round begins, the first thing you’ll do is choose a class. There are four classes, each with their own perks and weaknesses, such as the assassin gaining 300 health on each kill and the warrior having a higher maximum health and dealing more damage with melee weapons. Each round in Realm Royale starts with you jumping out of the bus and careening down to a spot of your choosing. The goal from here on out is a prolonged arms race in which you travel about the countryside, opening chests, grabbing weapons, and murdering anyone who happens to cross paths. As time progresses, a circle of fog gradually encircles the map, restricting the play field until one person is left standing.
One quality of life feature I like about Realm Royale is that everyone has a mount, accessible with a simple d-pad click. In games like H1Z1 where your starting location is predetermined, it’s possible to get screwed because the game stuck you in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the map with little access to weapons or transportation, leaving you to spend the round just barely keeping ahead of the fog if at all. In Realm Royale, you always have the ability to get where you need to go and fast, and the map is populated enough that you’ll have no problem amassing an arsenal. The balance to this convenience is that you can be knocked off the mount with a single hit.
In addition to your pistols, rifles, shotguns, and magic staffs, player power is also strengthened by picking up various runes and powers scattered around the world. Powers can vary in usefulness, such as one that turns you invisible for a short period of time, one that grants temporary flight, concussion grenades, incendiary grenades, shields, health, etc. Runes, meanwhile, are passive powers that can give you a hell of an advantage on the field, offering perks like regenerating shields, making survival as a chicken easier, and resisting knockback.
Even death in Realm Royale is handled differently. Most battle royale games have a knock-down mechanic in squad modes, where you aren’t instantly killed but instead are knocked out and can be revived by a teammate. In Realm Royale, losing your HP (even in solo) means turning into a chicken that can run and jump around. If you manage to survive until the timer hits zero, you’ll get back into the fight with a certain amount of health. If you are killed as a chicken, or you get turned three times, you’re out of the match. Certain runes found during gameplay can increase your speed, your health, and decrease the timer while in chicken mode, giving survival a strategy all on its own.
The benefit of this is that you rarely get that sudden game over that accompanies other similar titles just because someone with an epic sniper rifle managed to blow your head off through an open window. It also makes encounters with multiple people all the more dangerous, as you can be easily popped while chasing after the player you’ve just chickened, or similarly being the first to go down may present an opportunity to escape and recuperate while everyone turns the guns on each other.
Another thing Realm Royale has going for it is the ability to break down weapons you come across and use shards at forges to craft new items. The catch is that each forge can craft one of each category: health, armor, weapon, runes, ability, and revival (squad mode) so you can’t amass shards and use them to bulk up on potions. The crafting forge takes time and makes sound, which can mast incoming players. It also displays a timer that can be seen by other people, so you can tell when someone is waiting inside. You don’t need to be physically near the forge in order for the time to count down, so you can easily start the queue and hop off to a vantage point to stay safe.
There are also nuggets that you’ll find by looting chests, killing players, and making rank. Nuggets are the in-game currency for Realm Royale, usable to buy cosmetics from the in-game shop. Gaining generally less than a dozen per game, and considering that most rewards are in the realm of thousands of nuggets, it’s a feature that isn’t even worth paying attention to.
I do like that Realm Royale’s battle pass seems to be very easy to level up, I have personally managed one level about every 1-2 matches, but that the game also rewards you with crowns. The first battle pass costs 750 crowns and can reward about 1,100 crowns if you manage to level it up all the way. By this logic, it should be possible to heavily discount or get the next pass completely free, depending on how many crowns you obtain during the course of the season.
The season does not indicate when it ends, however, or if crowns can be used for the next season. I contact Hi-Rez about these details and have not received an answer.
One aspect of Realm Royale I find odd is the inclusion of bot players, mostly because they aren’t indicated as such and Hi-Rez to my understanding and research doesn’t acknowledge their presence in the game. I’ve been playing shooters for more than twenty years, I can generally recognize when a game is using bots by their very obvious behavior. Realm Royale is clearly using bots, as I was able to repeatedly confuse bots causing them to go into animation loops or completely break, being unable to properly walk through a door or constantly moving back and forth on the same spot of land making movements that a normal player shouldn’t be capable of.
Let me be clear on this: I’m not against bots being in a battle royale game, I just find Hi-Rez’s actions surrounding their implementation to be strange. I reached out to Hi-Rez for an official comment and despite stating that I would receive an answer over a week ago, I have not. I will update this piece if I do receive a comment on the season pass questions or regarding bots.
My only real gripe with Realm Royale right now is in relation to a certain unbalanced pistol that can be found/crafted in-game. The poison/fire pistol is severely unbalanced, extremely powerful, and can basically win you a match. The weapon is trash and going up against anyone with one is guaranteed to ruin your mood.
I went into Old School RuneScape’s mobile beta with two questions in mind: How well this game would run on my Google Pixel (original, non XL), how well it would perform in my office which is a lead-wrapped dead zone, and how many seconds it would take my Pixel to be drained of its battery. Sorry, make that three questions.
The answer is surprisingly well on all accounts. I didn’t have much reason to doubt that my Pixel could run RuneScape at a good framerate, although I will never underestimate the ability for phones to mess up running the kind of software that computers of 10 years ago could pull off without a hitch. The game equally performed well in an area where Youtube videos regularly have trouble loading (thank you Cricket), and ultimately it drained by battery only slightly less quickly than I assumed it would.
Mobile Old School answers the demand for when you still want to play RuneScape uninhibited by having to go to work, school, or other obligations. It’s honestly the perfect game to port over to mobile, considering 80% of the leveling in the game is best played while having something else do to and not looking at the screen. Jagex designed the user interface from the ground up, and it makes intuitive use of the touch screen controls in order to present a game that is not horrible to play over a long period of time.
I was afraid that the awkward finger tapping controls of your average phone game would compound the already slightly awkward controls of RuneScape, but Jagex has managed to pull off a rather smooth system. Many actions in the game are notably slower than their PC counterpart, especially anything that would require you to right click (hold your finger on screen), but OSRS compensates making it rather easy to right click NPCs even when they are moving. Clicking anything while your character is running can be a chore, but then again I find it equally a chore to do so in the full version.
The only parts of Old School RuneScape Mobile that I didn’t like were factors that ultimately have nothing to do with the phone itself. Tapping the screen with my fingers is responsive, but everyone’s fingers become fat sausage links when you’re dealing with a game that tiles its buttons on what feels like a 10×10 pixel radius. There’s also the matter of battery, which RuneScape just ate a percentage of in the time it took me to write this previous sentence. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the fact that cell phone batteries these days just suck, and if you’re the kind of person that wants to game on their phone or do anything more taxing than idling, and doesn’t carry around a battery pack, I unfortunately can’t help you.
Thankfully Old School RuneScape Mobile uses the same accounts, same characters, same servers as its desktop version, so when you get home and you’re ready to play on the big screen, you’ll be able to transition without a hitch.
Old School RuneScape has officially hit open beta on Android devices and every member will get their chance to play. Following a successful first day, Jagex today has allowed an additional 250,000 members in with increasing access over the next couple of weeks. With the full launch later this year, including release on iOS devices, players will be able to get their grind on no matter their location (so long as they have cell service).
Also important to note is that the beta is not a segregated part of the game, and players will be on the live servers with their live characters.
(Source: Jagex Press Release)
I meant to play and then discuss the latest episode of the Guild Wars 2 Living Story tonight, but since the game is a bit broken at the moment, I’ll talk about Defiance instead.
I’ve spent a good few hours playing the Defiance 2050 open beta this weekend, and the thought that keeps going through my mind is simple: A relaunch of a five year old game should not be breaking even worse than the original launch, even as a beta. But over the span of several hours, I’ve had my game crash, sat and watched as it became virtually unplayable due to rubberbanding and screen freezing. I’ve seen creatures just randomly despawn, watched as my vehicle refused to show up or in some cases refused to perform basic tasks like turning. Even major functions like the entire tutorial and medic ability had to be disabled during the final beta before head start because they were either broken or were causing server crashes.
But then the weekend ended and the servers became kind of stable. The turning speed of the quad is still absolute garbage and makes driving a major pain, but that’s another story.
I suppose I should get two things out of the way: First, Defiance 2050 is a remaster for the current console generations and PC players are essentially along for the ride. Second, as a gamer I effectively left Defiance for dead around the time that Alcatraz released and Trion Worlds started experimenting with those expeditions that were initially lauded as money-grubbing. It’s around this point that I wrote it off as a dead title, its game code feeling like it was held together with chewing gum and string every time I would go back and find it feeling more and more broken.
I put well over 400 hours into Defiance and had no real motivation to go back, so I’m treating Defiance 2050 as a new world in and of itself.
If you played through the original Defiance beta weekends as I did all those years ago, well Defiance 2050’s beta won’t surprise you since it’s actually the same content but five years down the road. The big mechanical changes to get used to are the inclusion of classes, and subsequent movement of the massive EGO grid into a linear list of class-specific skills. Otherwise, this game still has a mass of activities to sink your face into, be it story missions, side missions, pursuits, major arkfalls, minor arkfalls, emergencies, sieges, incursions, contracts, pvp, coop dungeons, leveling your power, leveling your class, leveling your character, leveling your weapon proficiency, leveling your vehicle proficiency, and of course the age-old tradition of trolling chat.
I’d previously committed myself to playing Defiance 2050 solely on the Xbox, since the whole thing seems redundant to play on PC with the existing version still available on the platform, however this last beta weekend was PC only so I made due with what I had. Outside of the poor server performance, it’s hard to say much about this game that I didn’t say five years ago. After a while of shooting creatures and watching the screen stutter for five to ten seconds only to come back with my character dead on the ground, Defiance 2050 felt less like a happy reintroduction to the world and more of a grim reminder of why I quit in the first place.
That said, I haven’t completely given up on Defiance and am still waiting to see if Trion can turn things around post-launch. Do I have enough faith to buy into the founder’s program? Absolutely not, but I am willing to clock in on day one and give the game a real spin.
The Crew 2 open beta has officially begun for this weekend, and it looks like gamers aren’t quite happy about what developer Ivory Tower is offering.
If you head over to the Steam page, where The Crew 2 currently stands at 37% positive, a large portion of the negative reviews seem to focus on poor handling of the game’s various vehicle types. The Crew 2 lets you race using cars, boats, and planes, all of which control rather rigidly according to early Steam players. While many of the reviews acknowledged that the graphics and performance are a positive, although frame rates are apparently locked to 60, some reviews pointed to the game’s “cringey millennial dialogue” as a point of contention.
Thankfully with the open beta running until June 24, you can try it out for yourself with the only cost being bandwidth and time.
I’ve been trying to put my finger on why I am enjoying H1Z1 on the Playstation 4. Is it the graphics? No, those are relatively standard for a game of this style and mostly subpar in the greater scheme of the Playstation. Is it the streamlined controls and faster paced action than its PC counterpart? We’re probably getting closer. Is it the fact that I can get through a match, kill seven people, and actually have a fleeting shot of winning? Absolutely.
Competence goes a long way toward enjoyment.
H1Z1 is a battle royale game from Daybreak Game Company, originally released on PC and now ported over to PS4 sans its survival mode counterpart. The PS4 version down to its fundamentals is a port of the PC copy but with a lot of the intricacies stripped out. Gone is crafting, your inventory, weapon attachments, and more. What’s left is a survival mode shooter that will likely make you happy that the game isn’t pulling such complicated systems in a rather fast paced game and handing you a controller to fumble your way through it.
For those of you who have managed to avoid this genre, I’ll go over the details: H1Z1 throws up to 100 players on to an island littered with weapons, armor, and vehicles and has them battle it out to the last remaining survivor. You and 99 players are essentially thrown into an arms race where you try to build up your offensive and defensive power by raiding the numerous towns, houses, and camps that litter the landscape. As the match progresses the playable area gets smaller as a toxic gas slowly encroaches upon players. This ultimately leads to each map starting of slow, watching players get picked off, and ending with just a massacre of the remaining players as they all get grouped up into the last remaining safe spaces.
As a genre, the battle royale game mode is all about your experiences and how you experience the game is directly related to whether or not you enjoy it, and how much. Combat is fleeting so there tends to be more memorable moments of survival or failure, like the time I hunkered down in a gas station and wound up taking out six players before being forced out by the toxic gas, or the time I parachuted into the world only to immediately have my brains blown out by some guy who found a pistol seconds before I did. Victory, while likely more common in group games, always seems to have a memorable story behind it of you and the other last remaining dude or dudette battling it out in the toxic fog.
Controls and handling in H1Z1 is pretty unique compared to other shooters on the platform. Guns are tight and control pretty much how you would expect for a third person shooter, but vehicle handling is all over the place thanks to a rather wonky physics system. You’ll be spending a fair amount of time driving in a vehicle, so getting used to the loose turning is going to be necessary for survival.
What makes the gunplay so special in H1Z1 is that the game is very straight forward in how it plays. There is a large enough variety that you’ll inevitably find your favorite close and long range weapons, but basic enough that you’ll figure out what each weapon does within the first few games. Weapons are familiar enough that you’ll know how they work: Pistols can shoot faster but do less damage, or slower and be more powerful. Shotguns are killer at close range while SMGs shoot fast to make up for their lack of punch. The only wacky weapon that H1Z1 really has to offer is the crossbow that shoots explosive arrows, great for area of effect damage or destroying a moving vehicle.
Equipment you pick up is also huge for your survival. You will find basic helmets and makeshift armor everywhere, with higher end military gear available only from caches that dot the landscape. You can also find backpacks that let you carry more weapons and combat boots that let you run faster.
Microtransactions come down to cosmetics which in turn act sort of weird. You can buy gold and then spend said gold on loot crates or earn them through gameplay, and those crates in turn unlock cosmetics for various weapons/equipment that effectively override your current default. How does this work in a game where your items are all found throughout the world? I’m glad you asked. When you equip said item, the look gets overridden to your default. Simple as.
End of the day, I feel like H1Z1 is a game that people will either hate or they will love, until they hit three bad games in a row of dying within three minutes of landing, and log off to stop themselves from angrily throwing their controller through the television, and come online to finish the beta review that they should have done two days ago.
Unless that’s just me.
Starting today, players will be able to get their hands on the invite-only alpha test for Rend, an upcoming faction-based fantasy survival game from Frostkeep Studios. Frostkeep is a new independent studio made up of a number of industry veterans from World of Warcraft, Overwatch, League of Legends, and more.
Launching into early access later this year, Rend promises to challenge gaming tropes by introducing factional combat, RPG mechanics, win/loss conditions, and more into a world of survival.
“Our goal at the start of this project was to continuously grow and improve Rend by gathering direct feedback from our players every step of the way,” said Jeremy Wood, co-founder and CEO, Frostkeep Studios. “As we lovingly craft this game with the help of our players, this project remains just as much theirs as it is ours, and this public alpha marks a significant milestone as we offer even more players around the world the opportunity to enter the world of Rend and join our community.”
More details can be found on the official Steam page. Alpha signups can be found on the official website.
(Source: Press Release)
As MMO Fallout’s official only staffer and the internet’s number one games journalist, I’ve seen a lot. Betas, alphas, pre-alphas, day one patches, you name it. Last year I reviewed to rather poor reception the pre-release build of Shadow of War, and while the preview was condemned as “tone deaf” and “stupid,” I came out of that experience pretty sure that I would never encounter an odder product. And then this week I was sent what I can only assume is a beta build of Old School RuneScape Mobile.
Now I’ve been in some strange betas before, including one for [redacted] where the developer asked us to download a Torrent and then had the nerve to ask us to seed it for each other, but this takes the cake. My beta instructions came in a fancy little box which, upon opening, revealed its contents to be mostly powders and some strange doohickeys: stars and little bits of paper that say “RuneScape Old School” on them. The beta version I was sent is code named “Vanilla Cupcakes,” suggesting that someone at Jagex is taking cues from the Android style of naming updates.
A little bit odd, but I had a job to do.
Now I don’t know much about technology, being a tech journalist, but I do know that one of the basic tenets of mobile is that apps are supposed to be simple to start. Take the photo app I’m using to capture these pictures, I click once to start the app, then click once for every photo I want to take. The setup for this beta has eight steps, the first of which includes preheating the oven and creaming some butter.
Clearly this must be some kind of trial, after all RuneScape is about overcoming bigger foes and if I can’t 1v1 some butter, then what kind of scrub would I be to take on the full beta? This is like one of those Man Crates, that novelty item where the contents are delivered in an actual crate that you have to open with a crowbar. The first half of the tutorial asks you to solo pk some butter, followed by cupcake mix and two eggs at the same time. I’ve been playing RuneScape long enough to remember the Recipe for Disaster quest so none of this really blew my mind. I had to provide my own eggs though, I hope this is going to be fixed for the full release.
The OldSchool RuneScape beta comes in the form of six consumables, not unlike how Nintendo handles demos on its systems, and they appear to expire after a couple of days once loaded and you pretty much have to prepare them all at the same time, so I’ll have to make good use of each one. I went onto the RuneScape Reddit to see if anyone else was complaining about this style of beta build but couldn’t find a single person talking about it. I guess this business model is just accepted now.
And then I saw this note and everything became clear.
Silly me, this isn’t the beta itself, it’s a quest that will inevitably lead me to the beta. Just to show there was no hard feelings, I took the six “mobile devices” I was sent and decided to toss them in the oven to think about what they’d done. A good seventeen to nineteen minutes at 325 degrees will teach a valuable lesson about coming into my kitchen and bamboozling me to get my eggs. Boy does it smell like vanilla bean in my house.
While I let those hotheads cool off, a statement which I’m pretty sure doesn’t qualify as a pun, I went back to the task list. Next step was to cream more butter and beat it with the icing mix. You know it’s hard to fully comprehend just how much butter is in 200g of butter until you see it sitting out on a measuring plate. Hint: It’s a lot of butter.
As I creamed the second batch of butter, I got to thinking about the possibility that I’ve been doing this whole thing wrong and that the list of instructions may have just been a metaphor not meant to be taken literally, like I’d come to find that it’s not the cupcakes on the plate that matter but the cupcakes in my heart. Perhaps this was a sort of strange live event and, upon my completion, my door would be kicked in by Mod Ash who would grab the cupcakes and make a run for it. Maybe, just maybe, I was the target of the world’s most genius, not to mention expensive, plot to trick someone into baking snacks for some hungry, tired developers. Ocean’s Eleven, but British and with only six people.
The last two steps are to cover the cupcakes with icing and then decorate with the stars and those bits of paper with the RuneScape logo on them. The instructions call them “wafers” which apparently mean edible paper, as if implying that the stuff you use to print documents isn’t edible, but I digress. I’ve decided to dub these “ScapeCakes,” because it flows off the tongue easier than “CupScapes.” It might still need some workshopping, I tried to float the idea past my roommate but she was wholly uninterested in the ordeal and seemed more content with napping in front of the heat of the oven.
In conclusion, I’m 35% certain that I was never actually playing any OldSchool RuneScape during this whole process, but I learned some important life lessons along the way like how there’s really never a bad time for cupcakes, I should probably take a class in cupcake decoration, and that this crew of Jagex staffers will get their mitts on my cupcakes when they pull them out of my cold, cupcakeless hands. I’m pretty sure this doesn’t qualify as a preview since I didn’t play anything, but I’m frankly too full of cupcake to remember what the original intention of this article was.
Verdict/Disclosure: 4.5/5 – Jagex has discovered an innovative and delicious new way to deliver beta content, albeit this version isn’t as mobile as a game played straight from the phone. Thank you to Jagex for sending the cupcakes, this is not a sponsored post but more of an example on why I’m not allowed nice things. I don’t actually have access to the Old School Mobile Beta.
MMO Fallout 