Find out everything you need to know about the upcoming MOBA.
Tag: Preview
Grounded Update Gives Players The Bird
A Beta Perspective: Marvel Avengers PS4
Impressions: Shop Titans Is On The Big Screen
Obsidian Entertainment Unveils Grounded
Honey I Shrunk The Kids hits the video game market (not really) as Obsidian Entertainment unveiled its next title: Grounded.
Grounded is a survival first person shooter where you play as one of a group of kids who have inexplicably been shrunk to the size of an ant. You and up to three other players are going to need to build items out of ordinary materials and live off the land if you are going to have any hope of surviving. No word yet on giant oatmeal cream pies.
“Grounded offers our unique take on survival games, creating an unforgettable experience,” said Adam Brennecke, Game Director at Obsidian Entertainment. “It’s a perfect setting to flex our creative muscles. We want to create a versatile sandbox where players can create their own memorable experiences.”
Grounded will come out in Spring 2020 and will be the first early access game to be made available to Game Pass owners. Obsidian Entertainment is currently riding high from the recent release of the fantastic The Outer Worlds.
Source: Press Release
Beta Perspective: Astellia Transports Me To 2009
Astellia is an MMO in 2019 that makes me feel like I’m back in 2009. It’s another game in the long line of titles that come westward and while I don’t have much faith in the game being a runaway success, I decided to jump into the beta to see just how dated it felt. Boy does it feel dated. Before I go into this I’d like to state that neither MMO Fallout as an entity no myself have any inherent problem with sexy characters in games and you can safely read on without the fear of having this random internet commenter make assumptions about your personality based on the games you play.
Now let’s continue.
Astellia Online seemed dead set on making me angry within the first twenty seconds of playing the beta because like much of its ilk, the game handholds you through the tutorial like you are a moron. I generally don’t have an issue with tutorials in games, but the point where I lose my patience is when the game starts treating you like a moron and locks the UI and refuses to let you do anything until you complete some menial task like adding a potion to your hotbar. I also thought I had skipped the tutorial, but then the game still overloads me with ridiculous nonsense that shouldn’t be new to anyone who has ever played a video game.
Unfortunately Astellia takes this even further in its tutorial by just throwing in enemy NPCs that you can’t attack for absolutely no reason. You almost think that the game is broken because there is no indication or response to your keypresses, and the game does let you target these mobs, but your character just doesn’t follow through on your commands. These sound like minor complaints, but it’s a starter to the game’s more asinine ideas like filling the world with invisible walls that are often out in the middle of the level, don’t block anything, and are just shoddy level design. Nothing says wasting my time like making me walk the long way around an area because the game won’t let me jump down an ankle-high embankment.
Eventually at the end of the tutorial you meet Sella, who is an angelic character of good.
Also her jugs are enormous.
It’s at this point I made this possibly bad decision of boosting my character to level 50, which the devs have enabled so people can check out the end-game dungeons during the beta. It also gave me the opportunity to check out the game’s Astels; companions that you level up, each one being a temporary summon that grants various buffs based on the character. There are defensive Astels, offensive Astels, healing Astels, all kinds! And they come in various flavors of cute anime girl, cute anime boy, cute animals, and the strange.
There’s even Scorpio who is his own deal.
Eventually I got bored of being level 50 and thus being horribly overleveled compared to the story content. So I ditched my mage character and decided to go with my old favorite: The ranger. The ranger is my go-to class in MMOs because they reflect my real life personality. Striking from afar because I’m a no-skill scrub who can’t take a punch.
Also her jugs are enormous.
In case you’re wondering, your character staring deadpan into the camera when you flip it around to view yourself from the front is just as unsettling as it looks in the screenshot. At this point, I’d like to state a few things that I have actually found enjoyable in Astellia. I like the story so far. There is a lot of generic “the world is being invaded by demons” storytelling, but there is also an interesting plot about the valiant white knights of the world and how they’re basically moronic, corrupt, and incompetent, led by an enormous jagoff named Meruf who utterly hates you and your Astels for no good reason, and rewards you after you’ve just saved his people by telling you to go fudge yourself.
You come back at one point to find a dude berating Meruf to his face about how much the knights suck and how they’re incapable of protecting civilization under his worthless leadership, and you follow him to save him from a demon named Voltra, who is also dressed like a BDSM queen.
Also her package is enormous.
Another little feature I came to enjoy is the simple fact that Astellia lets you have a spell queued up. It’s a simple function, but astoundingly rare in the MMO sphere. Thankfully the game doesn’t run like unoptimized trash, unlike Bless Online. I’m not going to make any comments about the validity of the cash shop since God only knows how much that could change before launch.
It looks like a big part of Astellia’s income is going to be from subscriptions which offer experience boosts, and selling skins which change the look of your Astel as well as equipment overrides. Astellia isn’t a horrible game by any means, but it’s been done so many times that I can’t see many people flocking to it with great excitement. It’s more of a filler MMO, something to play until the game you’re really looking forward to comes out.
Beta Impressions: MapleStory Rolls Out the Pathfinder
I played a bit of MapleStory this week.
It probably comes as little surprise to my readers that I still have an active MapleStory account, and even less so that Nexon invited me over to check out the upcoming Pathfinder class release for the game.
The Pathfinder is sort of an oddity as a character class, as the story revolving around this character is that she has been blighted with an ancient curse. What this translates to is that your character starts out with reduced stats. Thankfully it doesn’t stick with the player very long, even by MapleStory standards, and by skill level four the curse has been weakened out and removed from your system.
If you haven’t quite figured it out, the Pathfinder class is the latest hero added into a game with a heck of a lot of classes. I enjoyed the time that I had to play with the Pathfinder not just because I tend to play the archer class more in MMOs but because the character is just sort of an all-around bad ass. The Pathfinder is a bow-wielding class, of course, but the focus appears to be more geared toward crowd control. Many of the attacks and especially those that you receive toward the start of the game are geared toward just inflicting mass damage against anything stupid enough to come too close.
I should also note about the curse dampening that the class doesn’t start out gimped by any measure. Your character is effectively slightly less powerful in an area of the game that comprises of the tutorial locations. I assume there is some effect of some stats starting out with a 20% debuff, but considering how low your stats will already be starting out, the Pathfinder isn’t exactly going to be the Dark Souls of MapleStory classes. I’m sorry for having written that, but I had to get the joke in.
As you level up even further, the curse becomes more of a blessing as you not only overcome the stat debuffs but then utilize that ancient curse on your foes in the form of an offensive debuff attack. You also gain the ability to call forth a shadow raven with associated skills later on to improve that mechanic. The shadow raven hangs around for a while and attacks your enemies.
During my time with the Pathfinder, I also checked out the Secret Forest of Elodin theme dungeon which was as adorable as I have come to expect from MapleStory content. I won’t spoil the story for you, but it has to do with nightmares, hearing scary voices in the woods, and making sure that the good and decent folks are safe and sound. This mission, to the best of my knowledge, was already made available in the live game on June 12 (my birthday of course) and is available to all players at least level 30.
I didn’t have as much time as I wanted to play through the Adventure Island, but the even is running in the live game until August 27 and is looking to offer a ton of very cool rewards. The gist of the event should be familiar to MMO players. Players at level 61 can start earning adventure points to convert into adventure coins by killing monsters within 20 levels of their character. You can also make use of AFK items to obtain experience and coins. As the event goes on, higher ranks are being rolled out with better items, better tasks, and better passive stat boosts.
I can’t wait for the Pathfinder to hit the live server, which it will on June 26. It was a fair amount of fun for the time I had playing on the test server and I think that MapleStory players are going to enjoy it along with the various events ongoing that will make leveling another alt a bit lighter of a load.
Stay tuned to MMO Fallout for more MapleStory talk, or just head over to the official website and take a dive in for yourself. Big thanks to a number of people for bringing MMO Fallout on board to check out the class.
Diaries From Azeroth: We Only Said Goodbye With Words
I died a hundred times.
In the six hours that I have put into my Tauren druid over the past two days, I found myself in the same frame of mind going into WOW Classic as I did with Old School RuneScape many years ago: A lot of enthusiasm and confidence that this iteration will do just fine.
Money is far slower to come by, especially early on in the game. I think my retail characters would laugh at the idea that my level 9 druid takes a fair amount of time to scrap together a few silver to buy fishing training. I was actually overjoyed to fill up my bag on Venture Co mob equipment drops after fighting and dying to their mobs for half an hour only to come back and sell them for a cool three silver. Just had to sell one of my bandages and I had enough for the five silver cooking upgrade.
Another thing I saw plenty of during the opening days of the stress test was some real community interaction between players. Druids would cast buffs on other classes, you’d see people helping out and pulling extra mobs off of players, healing them during combat, and just generally answering questions in chat. There was plenty of trolling in chat, sure, but it was rather lighthearted and not so malicious as you’d see in other titles or maybe even in live itself if anyone talked in there.
As someone who started playing World of Warcraft back near the game’s launch, Classic isn’t so much hardcore as it is slower and more meticulous. Your health and mana pools don’t go as far, and enemies are better matched at your level and above, so you’re far less likely to pull more than one creature at a time and you’ll find yourself running out of mana or energy much faster. Mounts are a bigger achievement because of how expensive they are, the fact that you’ll be waiting until level 40 until you can acquire them, and the relatively lower speed of acquiring currency. Enemies drop quest items at a much lower rate, increasing the time you’ll need to spend farming areas with much lower spawn rates.
Everything designed around World of Warcraft Classic is built to be taken…slower. You buy your skills, you cycle your buffs, you level your weapon skills (remember those?), you read the quest text. Available quests don’t show up on the mini-map, NPCs for completed quests show up as dots and only once your draw near to them, and quest locations don’t show up on the map at all. Combat is slower, spells are slower, many of the abilities that you might know as being instant or nearly instant are not that way at all. Pulling in one equal level mob can be a deadly fight, two is almost guaranteed death. Mobs are far more likely to resist or block your attacks, and when you don’t have much mana to spare it can be deadly.
But as a result, the game feels more impactful. Leveling is a part of the experience, not just an inconvenience to get you to the end-game. Going into a group of level 9 mobs at level 8, then returning at level 9 to see how much better you fare is a treat. You won’t go from struggling to beating them with ease with just a level or two, but the fight gets easier. You have to cast one or two less spells, or spend less time running away from fights, or less time out of combat healing. You might have ranked up a spell or an ability in that time, or in my case started patching up my armor for some better defense.
How my life melds with World of Warcraft Classic will be interesting once the game goes live later this year. After all, the me of today is much different than the me of 2005 who had far less in terms of responsibility and time management structuring. I have no interest in gaining access to the beta or taking part in future stress tests as my time is far too precious to put hours into a character that will be erased within a few weeks. Still, for the six hours I played during the stress test, I felt like I entered a portal back into a simpler time in the MMO sphere where walking around and taking in the scenery was enjoyable and not just an inconvenience.
Beta Perspective: Realm Royale On Playstation 4
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.
Early Access: Battle Royale Survivors Is Lazy Dreck
I had to give Battle Royale: Survivors a look, it just had to be done.
Battle Royale: Survivors is the latest in the long line of developers jumping on the PUBG bandwagon and if you’re thinking that this game looks like a twinstick shovelware title built off of the Unity engine, well you’re right on two of the three points. Survivors isn’t a twinstick game, although it would be a much higher quality product if it were. What it is is a shovelware title built on Unity that hopes to piggyback on an existing trend.
Survivors launched into early access on June 18, by which I of course mean that the game launched riddled with bugs and unfinished features, but a functioning cash shop where you can purchase money packs up to the best offer at $24.99. Cash can be swapped for TK, the in-game currency, at a base rate of 2,000TK per $1 USD, meaning the loot boxes run for between $2.50-$3.50 apiece, plus an extra dollar for keys for the higher two options. Additional characters will run you nearly 10k TK, or $5 give or take. Alternately you can grind TK through the games at such a snail’s pace that the game will become unbearable long before you even get close to unlocking your first crate.
Unfortunately the cash shop won’t be able to save a game that is currently sitting at barely enough players to fill up a quarter of a standard battle royale match, and I sit here waiting for my latest match to hit the bare minimum ten players needed to get started.
I’ve already noted that Survivors is not a twin stick shooter, but this is important because the isometric camera might have suggested otherwise. In this game you move with the WASD keys and your character attacks where your are pointed. This leads to shooting mechanics that are so poorly handled and controlled that I found myself constantly coming in the top 3 simply running around in the open with some sort of melee weapon and zerging out my enemies.
Shooting mechanics in Survivors are worthless, to the point where holding a weapon is a detriment in many situations. You can hold the right mouse button to aim, but you move so slow and the aiming itself is so wonky that anyone can run up behind you and start whacking away with a baseball bat, the janky controls and laggy nature of the game allowing them to just jolt left and right while you fumble and try to hit them. In addition, weapons are stupidly underpowered to the point of being useless in their own right.
Which isn’t to say that this title has zero good ideas. The idea to implement fog of war makes it possible to sneak up on people, and the wonky controls actually make it a viable strategy because you can’t really easily keep a 360 degree view on your surroundings. Unfortunately, that’s it. It’s the spicy dijon mustard in the dog food sandwich.
But I call this game lazy because that is exactly what it is. Hastily cobbled together on Unity to throw into early access and hope that people pay far more than the game is worth for the simple act of changing your default character. Nowhere else is this idea of laziness more blatant than the massive buildings that will block your view and make huge swaths of the map impossible to interact with.
If Survivors became a twin-stick shooter, where your character faced the mouse and you had a reticle, the game would be 25% better. Otherwise, right now this game feels like yet another cheap, lazy, unity-based shovelware title. One where the game conveniently tells you to shove off after you complete a match and doesn’t let you continue playing. Really, it’s for your own good.
MMO Fallout 