Impressions – Page 6

Impressions: Uprising Is A Positive Sign For Overwatch PvE

Following Overwatch’s rather simplistic Halloween event, it was only a matter of time before the game received another cooperative game mode. This new mode has two separate versions, but for the sake of starting out I’ll focus on the story mode. Story mode takes place seven years in the past and sets you up with a team of four made up of Mercy, Reinhardt, Torbjorn, and the rookie Tracer. Your team is given orders by Commander Jack Morrison (Soldier 76) to take on an extremist faction of omnics called the Null Sector that have taken over a portion of London.

The second version of the game is the same concept, but there are no character restrictions.

Effectively, your goal is to take over three locations in a row, escort a payload, and finally kill a boss robot, all while a bunch of other robots stand in your way. The mode itself feels like Overwatch’s take on Valve’s Left 4 Dead, except with robots instead of zombies. It’s also a nice change from the Halloween event, placing the players on the attack rather than defending a single point. Lore and collection enthusiasts will also find something to enjoy with the new skins and dialog discussing the characters as they existed those years past. The concept gives Blizzard a virtual wealth of lore that can be spun into its own story, focusing on specific characters and events in the game’s timeline.

Taken as the story mode, Uprising gets pretty difficult above easy mode. The free hero mode is much less difficult as open access to heroes makes way for less balanced, virtually broken encounters. Regardless, the event is far less static than the Junkenstein Halloween event, is more relevant to the overall story, and overall has gameplay that is more inviting for multiple playthroughs.

Hopefully this leads to more permanent cooperative modes, or even something similar to Valve’s Mann Up mode with a set of loosely connected campaigns

Best Of Greenlight: Streets of Rogue

Best of Greenlight is a space where I’d like to talk about games that are deserving of your attention, rather than focus entirely on shady independent developers and their shady asset flips and shady copyright takedown notices. The best part about the current spotlight game is that you can play it right now: It is currently in the middle of a free weekend.

Streets of Rogue looks a lot like The Escapists, is developed by Matt Dabrowski, and is currently in early access on Steam. I know what you’re thinking, ‘another retro-inspired hardcore rogue-lite?’ I’m not deaf to your complaints, in fact I’m willing to admit that if it weren’t for the free weekend that I probably wouldn’t have given this a shot myself. What this package contains is a rather charming game, with tight controls, a variety of systems, and more. In short, it actually makes an effort to set itself apart.

The core of all dungeon crawling rogue-lites is pretty much the same: You go through a dungeon, you kill the things, you get loot, and you level up. Ultimately your character dies and you start it all over again, albeit with some sort of overarching progression system that gives you a little more to go on with each passing session. Streets of Rogue is more than just that, rather than populating the level with a host of angry creatures and letting you have at it, the game actually encourages some level of diplomacy, provided you’re willing to go along with it. If you’d rather just go through each level and massacre the whole map, more power to you.

First thing you’ll do before being thrown into the fray is choose your class for that session, each one with their own strengths, weaknesses, and starting items. The soldier for instance starts with a machine gun and regenerates health when it is under 20. The gorilla, meanwhile, has a very powerful attack but his stupid gorilla brain can’t talk English, and therefore can’t interact with characters, his stupid gorilla hands can’t use guns, scientists hate him and will attack on sight, and bartenders don’t want him in their bar (have you ever seen a gorilla pay his bar tab? Point made). A number of factions populate the world, from cops to the ongoing feud between the blahd and the crepe gangs, scientists, and all kinds of strange bedfellows.

But what makes the game pretty unique is that you’re not just going through a dungeon while fighting off a range of NPCs, rather each map is a procedurally generated zone consisting of a random assortment of characters, an assortment of tasks, and you are given pretty free reign to take on those tasks as you see fit. For example, you have to terminate a character who is hiding behind a locked door. You can knock on the door and see if they’ll come answer it, beat the door down with your fists (provided you’re strong enough), blow it open with a weapon, go outside and shatter the window so the NPC comes to investigate, use a lockpick on the door, use a charge on the door, or go to the outside ventilation system (if the building has one) and inject something into it to either kill or force out the inhabitants.

To give another angle to how the AI reacts to events, in another mission I was tasked with killing a scientist in his home, which had a big mean looking bouncer standing right outside the door. I blew a charge on the door bringing the bouncer down to very low health, which was enough for him to decide the job wasn’t worth it and quit right there on the spot. In another instance, I had to terminate a character being held prisoner in the local jail. After taking out the guard and using the computer to unlock the cell doors, I found my target in a fight with another prisoner. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who wanted this guy dead.

I find the fighting to be extremely satisfying in Streets of Rogue, every punch and whack met with a sickening crunch as your target gets knocked back, even more so when you manage to punch them so hard that they crash through a wall. With the AI system in place, it’s very easy in certain areas for small fights to break out into riots, with buildings exploding and people beating each other to death as the police show up and start blasting indiscriminately, resulting in some bystanders getting shot and either joining in or freaking out and running off. Companies love using the buzzword “the game is different every time you play!” and I think this may be one of the few times that that promise actually comes true.

Your currency for meta progression is chicken nuggets, which you’ll receive for completing missions which are required in order to progress to further levels. Chicken nuggets can be used to unlock traits, rewards, and more.

Since Streets of Rogue still has a day and change left on its free weekend, I highly suggest you give the game a try. Otherwise it sells for $14.99. If you do give Streets of Rogue a try, let us know what you think in the comments below.

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.

Impressions: Riders of Icarus

(Disclosure: Nexon provided a review key so we could get into the head start)

My initial reaction to Riders of Icarus fell into the disturbingly common pit of “oh look, another Korean MMO with a gimmick.” Several closed beta tests later, not to mention giving away literally thousands of keys, and I can safely say that this game definitely blew away my expectations.

Riders of Icarus allows for one of two keyboard setups, with the first geared toward TERA players and the second for fans of the more traditional MMO. Even if you’re sick of the World of Warcraft number roll, I suggest choosing that over the action-oriented system. Suffice to say, it is effective broken at the moment.

As you level up, combat in Riders of Icarus becomes more geared toward putting together combos anyway. Combo moves allow you to string together attacks in a way that is devastating while not forcing you to memorize your hotbar or move items around the screen. In addition, they are forgiving enough that if lag or a slipped finger hits the wrong button, you can generally pick up with another key stroke. Moves in Icarus pack a punch, and I never get tired of the crunch effect that plays when I kick a mob two feet into the air.

Given that this is a free to play game, inevitably the question comes to the cash shop. In 2016, can we finally have a newly released free to play game that doesn’t have a ridiculous cash shop? Absolutely. The cash shop consists of lucky boxes (skins for familiars), convenience items, boosters, and outfits. Cash shop items are bought with Ellum, which can also be obtained in game. The shop isn’t perfect, I’m sure many players will take umbrage with the 100% HP/Mana flasks that are sold.

Icarus also offers premium service, a subscription that can be bought in 30, 90, and 180 day packages. Premium offers daily potion stipends, 20% experience boosts, free use of transit shrines, bonus Ellum, and more.

Riders of Icarus is a blessing, or a curse depending on how you look at it, for collectors. Taming familiars is a major feature of the game, and there are a lot of creatures to collect. Running through each zone, effectively any non-bipedal creature can be tamed and collected. Right now my collection consists of two reindeer, two horses, two birds, a couple wolves, and a kangaroo-esque creature called a “Woodland Joey.”

Taming itself is where the game errs at Pokemon. You’re better off weaking your foe before you attempt to tame them, at which point the game turns into a rodeo mini-game that relies partially on pressing the right buttons when they show up and half on pure dumb luck. Higher level familiars will require more intricate measures of taming, such as collecting certain items or jumping off of a cliff onto them, but there’s nothing quite like seeing players zooming around above on their tamed dragons.

Familiars are a project in themselves, as they gain experience, level up, and geared up for combat. Familiar leveling adds a nice side-progression to the game since your familiar is constantly gaining experience through the simple act of traveling or just sitting around. They can be turned into pets, assisting players in combat, or sacrificed and used to gear up your equipment in the name of higher stats.

One of the largest issues facing Riders of Icarus right now is the fact that this is a Nexon game, and as such you can guarantee that gold farmers are numerous and not just operating unabated, but with help from the developer themselves. It took a guild member explaining why the ignore feature wasn’t blocking gold spam. Ignoring users doesn’t block global or regional chat, just whispers and party invites. In other words, it is completely useless and chat right now has been deserted sans the same five bots spamming their respective websites.

The other big issue is the fact that mobs have very small movement ranges, you’ll recognize this in other games where an NPC will pull back to its accepted area of movement and go back to full health. It doesn’t crop up as much on standard enemies, but fighting bigger boss monsters gets very annoying when you use a range attack and they rush up, hit you, then immediately run back.

Otherwise, Riders of Icarus is shaping up to be an excellent themepark MMO. If you’re the kind of person who hates questing being the main form of leveling, this game isn’t going to appeal much. For everyone else, Icarus is well deserving of its current “mostly positive” rating on Steam.

Right now my focus is on hitting the current level cap, 25 at least until the game goes into full open beta on the 6th.

[Video] Impressions: The Decimation of Olrath

Beta Perspective: RuneScape NXT Impressions

I consider myself something of a fan of RuneScape, having played it continuously since 2004 and racked up more than four thousand hours of gameplay, and I’m sure few would disagree with that statement. That being said, I’ve been heavily critical of Jagex as a company and certain facets of RuneScape as a game, and nothing has caught my attention quite like RuneScape’s bloated, near-useless client.

It’s no secret that RuneScape has become massive over the years, straining the client to the point where it’s basically held together with gum and tape. The old client’s days were numbered when the big browsers announced that the end of days were coming for Java support, due to its instability and general habit of opening massive security holes in people’s computers. For RuneScape, Jagex made the attempt to jump ship a couple of years ago with an HTML client, a venture that has so far come up empty thanks in part to the platform itself not coming along as quickly as expected.

Jagex could have launched NXT with none of the visual upgrades and this would instantly be my update of the year. The current RuneScape client is incredibly janky, depending where I am in the world and what I’m doing it will either run smoothly or horribly and turning the graphics down does absolutely nothing to fix this. In the NXT client, I am able to set everything to its maximum value and still manage to play the game at over 70 frames per second. I teleport, I start skilling, killing things, moving around to new areas, and the game remains stable and smooth as butter.

But to top it off, Jagex has made the game look better than ever. The draw distance is now massive, as far as the eye can see, and holds up RuneScape’s unique graphical styling. The new client has made it painfully obvious in some areas how laughably small the world is, a fact previously hidden by the game’s short-sighted draw distance, but for the most part so far Jagex has done its job to play tricks and make the smallness of the world a lot harder to notice.

My first real thought while playing on the NXT client is the depressing thought that this beta is going to end in a few days, and at least until the client launches sometime in…sometime, I’ll have to sit through the old client for the time being. There are numerous visual bugs that are present in the beta, but since the game is running on the live servers there isn’t much of a reason not to give it a go if you are eligible to play this weekend.

I’ll be playing RuneScape quite regularly through the weekend.

MMOments: Big Farm

(Disclosure: This is a collaboration between MMO Fallout and Poki.com.)

When I look at games like Big Farm, I see a genre soured by the greedy actions of a monolithic developer that tried and miraculously failed to build an empire out of monetizing its own property at the cost of public relations and long term success. I am, of course, referring to Zynga, the least threatening cash vampire since Uwe Boll started his directorial career, and the only company capable of collapsing the public relations of an entire genre.

There really is nothing inherently wrong with time management games. They know what they are and they don’t claim to be what they aren’t, and they don’t spend much time reaching outside the demographic. On the spectrum of gaming, you can’t get much more casual without going into the territory of games that play themselves, or perhaps a pedometer, but they certainly have a wide audience who enjoy them daily.

Big Farm, as its name implies, is a game that starts the player off with a small farm that inevitably grows into a big farm. This is accomplished by building fields out to grow plants and raise animals which are then sold to the market for money or used as resources to grow further goods.

The process does get pretty involved later on. Eventually you’ll be doing things like growing corn to turn into chicken feed in order to raise chickens to collect their dung to turn into fertilizer to grow apples in your orchard and compost the fallen leaves from the trees into humus which can be used on your corn seeds. That’s a mouthful.

The number of buildings, what you can grow, and how much you can store is all governed by an overall level which raises as you complete simple quests (gather x, build y) and gain experience. Higher levels allow for more buildings, expanding the farm, upgrades, and new plants. Along the way you’ll have to worry about factors like population, happiness, and space. You need more houses to hire workers, but more houses decreases happiness which increases production costs. To make your workers happy, you need to build decorations which take up precious farm space. It’s a balance of cost vs efficiency that is completely up to the player.

As far as the cash shop goes, Big Farm primarily sells convenience goods. What few non-decorative buildings you can buy are pretty cheap and offer little bonus as an alternative. Luckily you can amass a small fortune in gold through the game’s level up rewards, by completing quests, and through email promotions by Good Game Studios that are constantly being sent out.

Players can compete against each other in blue ribbon missions that usually involve harvesting more of a certain plant than everyone else, with rewards going out regardless of what place you end up in. Big Farm’s version of a guild is called a cooperative, where players can collaborate on missions with big payoffs, and contribute towards bonuses that reward the entire cooperative.

Big Farm’s ultra-casual nature is sure to drive many gamers away, but for those who enjoy time management games, it’s a decent looking game without the overbearing cash shop butting in. If you take it as a race to the finish, you’re going to see a lot more popups asking you to fork over for some gold, but for those of you who recognize that it is something to be cultivated over months instead of days, you’ll have a much more enjoyable time.

If you do decide to check out Big Farm, you can find it and other MMOs (as well as other games) on poki.com.

MMOments: Elder Scrolls Online Part 2

Despite some setbacks, my time spent playing The Elder Scrolls Online hasn’t exactly diminished over the past week or so. I find myself dropping the game for the day due to quest-breaking bugs quite often, but it always seems that they are fixed by the next time I log in. I keep going back to my newly purchased Playstation 4, but I find that experience even worse with Warframe and Blacklight Retribution both plagued with bugs of their own. With that in mind, I don’t think that I am even close to the burnout point with ESO.

At this point, Razum-Dar has easily become my favorite character in the game. If you don’t know who this guy is, Razum-Dar is a Khajiit and agent for Queen Ayreen, that players will interact with a lot in the Aldmeri Dominion quest chain. Whenever my character wakes up in Jail, Razum-Dar is no doubt not far behind and in the process of murdering every single guard to secure my freedom. The quests and their stories are, without a doubt, fantastic.

In one storyline, for instance, I wound up uncovering a training academy that was treating its trainees like slaves and, in some cases, murdering those who act out of line. In another, I uncovered the secret behind an entire village turned to stone. The conclusion will surprise you.

The more that I play The Elder Scrolls Online, the more I get used to the floaty, not-100%-accurate combat. You get used to the fact that the game provides some lenience for lag which results in wider hit cones, or how magic attacks are auto-aimed. The issue with bugs in Elder Scrolls is one that varies from day to day. Mostly the instances of broken quests, NPCs, or missing nodes is dwindling. It seems like whenever the game does break, now, the bugs are worse. The loading screen stuck in a never ending cycle, crashes to desktop, being thrown out of the world, falling under the map, etc. Items disappearing from banks, the works.

Keeping interest in the war in Cyrodil is difficult, and I will admit that this is my sore loser side talking. The Daggerfall Covenant on Skull Crusher has completely rolled both of the other factions to the point where you can see below that they are nearly one hundred thousand points ahead of both of us. Turns out that Zenimax’s prediction that balance would be kept by the two losing factions ganging up is complete bunk, at least as far as my campaign goes. My faction isn’t even showing up anymore. I can’t even get the 15,000 alliance points needed to change campaign.

It is rather disappointing because, for Elder Scrolls Online, a disappointing campaign lasts three months. The good thing is that there is so much to do in The Elder Scrolls Online that I can pretty much ignore the PvP for the time being, between questing and exploring, completing achievements and finding treasure chests.

Ever since the last MMOments article, I only had one instance where I was ready to throw my computer out the window, and it is a quest in the Aldmeri Dominion campaign where your companion turns into a werewolf. Some combination of bugs and lag resulted in the most frustrating fight I have ever experienced in this game, where he was hitting me from across the room, cone of fire attacks would simply auto-target me even if I was directly behind him and nowhere near the area of effect, blocking was not working, and I would randomly go from half-health to dead instantly. Frustrating, yes.

The next MMOments that I run for Elder Scrolls Online will be in about a month. For now, this will continue to be my primary MMO.

MMOments: Elder Scrolls Online Part 1

The Elder Scrolls Online is a game that, for all intent and purpose, should have launched and immediately crashed into the ground. Most of us will remember a couple of years back when pre-alpha footage leaked onto the net, showcasing a product that looked nothing like what we would expect out of an Elder Scrolls MMO. It looked like a shoddily built World of Warcraft clone, a cheap mockery that harkened back to the days where the MMO was a stick that companies used to beat their properties to death. With the impressions deep in everyone’s mind, and much of the media already declaring the game dead on arrival, Zenimax went back to the drawing board and reshaped the game to what it is today.

And frankly, we should be thanking every single person who overwhelmed Zenimax with feedback after that leak. We will likely never know for sure if that is how the game would have turned out had the leak never happened, but I’m willing to go ahead and say we should treat the scenario as Earth Prime and be thankful that Warhammer Online hasn’t been guaranteed a successor in post-launch exodus. The game as it is right now isn’t perfect, but it is indicative of a company that quickly pulled its head out and at some point since that pre-alpha footage was taken, started treating the game like more of an Elder Scrolls experience and less like a new World of Warcraft.

But what The Elder Scrolls Online fulfills is wholly based on your expectations. If you want Skyrim online, you’re out of luck. As with previous additions to the series, ESO is a new take on the Elder Scrolls formula that adds and removes features as it sees fit. There is certain to be a block of Elder Scrolls fans who want nothing to do with this title, as we saw with the releases of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, and undoubtedly those who never played earlier games in the series who will give the game a try.

Elder Scrolls Online brings to MMOs what has so woefully been lacking over the years: Exploration, and more importantly the desire to explore the world around you and tinker with the things that you find. What Zenimax brings to the table isn’t just a scavenger hunt disguised as exploration, either. Whether you find yourself in a dark cave or some alchemist’s house, there is always something to grab your interest. Resources dot the land, herbs require a keen eye and maybe a helpful perk in order to spot in the tall grasses and flowers. Treasure chests can be found and picked for loot, and one of the grandest features of the Elder Scrolls series is back in full force: The books. Those of you who have played Elder Scrolls games will be fully aware of the series’ signature massive library of hundreds of books of varying length, and Online does not disappoint at all.

I have a love hate relationship with the combat in Elder Scrolls Online, and admittedly most of my problems will likely be smoothed out in the next couple of months. Combat is a pretty straightforward system of using your mouse keys to attack and block, and the number keys to use special attacks. Enemies choreograph what they are about to do to give you ample time to defend or interrupt and get in a quick counterblow. Some foes pull off cool abilities, like freezing you in place or hopping over your head to get in an attack from behind. You won’t get very far standing still and spamming buttons.

The problem with Elder Scrolls Online right now is that combat is very clunky and occasionally completely unresponsive and deceptive. I can count several instances where my character simply refused to attack or defend himself, as well as others where he did attack but the animation did not play. In a game where visual cues are everything and bugs can be expected, it becomes frustrating when you can’t tell if your inability to move is because of lag, or because the NPC you are fighting cast a freezing spell but a bug is causing the ice not to show up. ESO also has a terrible habit of not conveying why you can’t do certain actions. Some enemies have the ability to momentarily stun you, but there is no visual cue on the player when they do. Again, no way of knowing if your inability to attack is due to a bug or intended game feature, because it could be either.

When I originally began writing this MMOments piece, I meant to talk about how the interrupt ability was completely broken. Turns out, after reading through a Reddit thread, that isn’t the case. The game tells you to press the left and right mouse buttons to interrupt certain attacks, when what you actually need to do is block and then hit attack. If you press both at the same time like the tutorial tells you, odds are you may accidentally stumble into the right formula ten percent of the time. You can also bind interrupt to a single button, apparently, which is much more convenient.

Leveling in Elder Scrolls Online continues the ongoing evolution of the series, sticking to its roots while branching into new areas. As was the case with Skyrim, leveling up offers points to invest in health, magic, or stamina. Gaining levels and obtaining Skyshards also awards skill points to invest in combat or crafting related skill lines. As with Skyrim, you will need to raise your levels in individual skills by bashing the skulls in of mudcrabs or making mudcrab stew in order to unlock related perks and abilities using your skill points. Those of you familiar with the series will be happy to know that the system of gaining levels by finding specific books has made its way in as well.

One of my peeves with Elder Scrolls Online has fermented in the form of provisioning recipes. Barring finding other players willing to sell them to you, your provisioning ability is tied one hundred percent to recipes that you find randomly in stashes or in mob loot. In the last beta period, I managed to finish the tutorial with four extra copies of all of the starting recipes. Once the game went live, I didn’t find a single recipe until several hours into the game when I managed to stumble upon a recipe for pork soup.

The Elder Scrolls Online looks great and sounds amazing. The world changes rather dramatically as you go through and complete multi-quest storylines which often revolve around liberating some village from a curse or group of bandits. It is a very sharp turnaround from the standard MMO fare where you are asked to kill twenty five wolves to cull overpopulation only for it to have no visible effect on the game. It also diverts away from The Old Republic, where phasing was mostly done in isolated chambers that only you could access.

Oh and did I mention that you get to talk to Sheogorath?

I expect to have a part 2 for MMOments as I go along, likely within the next week or so.

Eldevin Impressions: A Touch of Nostalgia

I suppose it’s a good thing that I murdered every single prisoner in the prison, considering the dead guards and smashed doors, this place probably isn’t suitable for holding any of them for the foreseeable future. The prison will also find itself lacking in a warden, seeing as how I killed the traitorous bastard on the roof of his own building. Since we’re on the topic, you might want to renovate the exterior, I don’t know how but there are a few escaped prisoners hiding out in the house across the street. Maybe send someone to clean that up, or let me do it.

Games like Eldevin and RuneScape have an odd ability to convince us to power our way through what is probably the same kind of grind that we would reject had it been foisted upon us in any other MMO. The lure of vast riches and a growing pile of resources to turn into finished products or dump at a nearby vendor in return for cash to spend on creating more stuff and stabbing more powerful beings in the face is exactly the carrot that hangs just a few inches out of reach on the grind treadmill, but close enough that we think we’ll get it if we just keep running. It is the charming world, beautiful soundtrack, living environment filled with other players all meandering about with their own tasks that make such a grind not just bearable, but actually enjoyable.

Giving my impressions on a game like Eldevin is difficult as breaking the game down into its individual mechanics would provide an inaccurate detailing the overall experience. Eldevin’s saving grace is in the sense that while the game does require a great deal of grind, it perhaps doesn’t feel as pointless as other games where the reward is often just seeing your experience bar tick up. Nearly every action in Eldevin has a purpose, from killing creatures to level up your skinning for resources to use for cooking and making armor, to finding equipment useful for vendoring to afford the catalyst items needed in the second stage of crafting.

The world of Eldevin is one that is brimming with life. Granted, once you give the world a deeper look, you see a bunch of NPCs following pre-scripted paths and animations. Still, it’s a nice touch to walk through town and see people hauling boxes around, city guards going down their paths, guards coming off duty and changing after their shift, etc. It is pretty basic at its core, but a sad reminder as to how little effort other games put into making their world feel more alive rather than a gallery for lifeless quest vendors and merchants.

Crafting is centered primarily around harvesting nodes and turning said products into goods at a station. If crafting is supposed to be a gold sink, Eldevin does it well. Most, if not all, recipes require an item that can only be purchased from vendors at a cost of anywhere from ten copper to five silver (five hundred copper). The slow process of gaining crafting experience can be alleviated slightly through a number of daily quests available for each profession. Players are able to level any skill to its maximum level (40), but you might want to focus on just one or two.

Combat, on the other hand, is where Eldevin meets standard MMO fare. The player has access to melee, range, and magic no matter what class you choose at the start, and combat is dealt through auto attack and specials. Health and mana can be replenished in combat with potions or out of combat with the various food items you can cook or buy. Combat is rather smooth and responsive, although the camera is restrictive and can get in the way, and special attacks have a habit of cancelling out your auto-attack.

Eldevin’s cash shop may be an issue, and not in the sense of pay to win. For a game focused on collecting mass amounts of resources, the fact that Eldevin sells extra inventory slots and bags will be a cause for concern for some. Alternatively, you could criticize the cash shop for selling certain items like health potions for in-game gold because the game delivers them directly to your inventory. There are multiple currencies on the cash shop, not all of which I fully understand at the time of writing and all but one are obtainable in-game.

Alternatively you can subscribe to Eldevin for $7 a month and receive experience boosts as well as a stipend of cash shop currency. I used mine on buying sacks that can be filled with gathered items, and filled them with wheat, meat, hides, and basil. Still, I find Eldevin oddly charming in the same way that RuneScape caught my attention years ago, and considering that I’m still playing the latter a decade later, I have a feeling that I’ll be sticking around in Eldevin for a long time to come.

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It: