Fulfilling obligations.
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Tag: Preview
Impressions: Soulbound Online
Beta Perspective: Valve’s Deadlock
Find out everything you need to know about the upcoming MOBA.
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.
