Why Aren't You Playing: Defiance On PC

Defiance is one of those games that I find complicated to review, because I keep going back to it and having a good deal of fun despite the fact that certain features leave me bashing my head on the desk in frustration. On one end, you have a pretty solid shooter set in a persistent post-apocalyptic world that contains regular events, a living story, and more. On the other hand, I have to sit back and wonder if the people who approved certain features have ever played, let alone developed, a video game before. Defiance’s high points are quite high indeed, and while all MMOs have bugs that will be patched out overtime, the real depression comes from knowing that certain issues with the game were intended “features.”

In the epic struggle between RPG and shooter, the shooter element is the clear winner in Defiance. There is no hotbar at the bottom, you won’t be mashing numbers, and your active abilities roll down to your main power (shield, overcharge, decoy, or invisibility) and a reloading grenade cooldown. While leveling up gives you points to invest in equipping and upgrading passive skills that offer a range of benefits, like the ability to obtain ammo by meleeing NPCs to death or taking half damage when you shield breaks, your ability to stay alive on the battlefield is primarily linked to your skill in aiming and shooting, as well as your ability to dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge. EGO investment helps incrementally along the way, and there are enough skills to choose from to suit any style, but it’s important to get out of the way right now that Defiance is a shooter in a persistent world. If you are looking for a deep RPG, look elsewhere.

You wouldn’t be too far off by describing Defiance as something of an open world Borderlands. Much of the content revolves around easily soloable missions that are simply drive to location and either kill things or kill things while collecting something or defending something. These side missions surround two main plots: One following your personal character’s story and the other which follows the television show. Defiance also includes some features you’ll recognize from other MMOs, including cooperative dungeons and player vs player fights that take place in instanced matches as well as open area shootouts in specific locations.

A lot of the progression in Defiance comes from the massive number of varied weapons that drop from monsters or are rewarded from quests. Pistols, shotguns, submachine guns, LMGs, BMGs, infectors, grenade launches, rocket launchers, shields, and thrown grenades, and more are waiting to spill out of your fallen enemies like a busted and bloody pinata, and they all come with their own special elemental effects. While the base weapon stats themselves don’t heavily progress over time, the elemental effects do and they can put quite a difference between guns you find at the start of the game vs guns closer to end-game. Each weapon can also be customized with mods found on the battlefield, offering scopes, extended magazines, etc.

That said, it is impossible to find a specific weapon to love and hold onto it forever, as Defiance employs something of a love-em-and-leave-em system. If you took part in the EGO rewards, you may have wondered what the +1 weapon skill bonuses were for. Every character has an overall level in each of the weapon types, including the base vehicle types, which progresses as you gain experience while using a particular weapon or merely driving your car around. Each weapon as an item has its own experience bar which, once filled, stops contributing toward your skill in that category. The experience bar fills slowly enough that you never get the feeling that you are cycling through guns too quickly, and the rate at which new guns drop that are similar to the one you are using is fast enough that by the time you need to retire your shotgun, you already have fifteen more waiting in your inventory plus the ones you had to break down to make room.

I’ve seen some other people criticize that the gunplay in Defiance doesn’t pack any power, and I have to disagree. For whatever faults Defiance has, whether or not the guns have power isn’t part of it. Shooting packs a real wallop and while the frequency in explosions may try your patience, both guns and explosives have a real feeling of weight behind them. All Points Bulletin at its original launch tried to combine shooter and MMO and ended up sacrificing the quality of both. Defiance is like a shooter cake that is frosted with persistent online world and decorated with RPG candies. I think it’s time for a cake break.

Defiance also has about as much text talk as you’d find in your average PC shooter. I want to pin this equally on the fact that the chat system is awful and incredibly unfriendly to the user, but I feel like the other half is simply that Defiance isn’t exactly friendly to chat in. Defiance is set up on action sequences, and as such the game isn’t exactly friendly to chatting unless you are sitting around doing nothing, which I suspect isn’t the case for most players. So if Trion does improve the chat window, I hardly see Defiance becoming a bustling social center unless the players modify their behavior to suit.

The AI that you fight against is inconsistently stupid. NPCs like the mutant riflemen or the 99er cyborgs are surprisingly intelligent in their use of grenades, able to perceive when player characters are hiding behind cover and using the grenades to flush them out. I say surprisingly because the rest of the time they are pants-on-head morons. Mobs with rocket launches regularly kill themselves or each other because they shot directly into the wall that they were hiding behind, repeatedly. Sometimes it seems as though the AI is managing to use real tactics, flanking the player and covering each other, while other times they just run about aimlessly or stand still with no cover in sight. Unfortunately most of the time Defiance simply relies on the old quantity over quality, choosing to up the difficulty by taking the same stupid AI and just throwing a lot of them at you. A single mutant might take a bit of health off of you, but shovel an entire platoon in without any breathing room, and eventually those little knocks will kill you.

Defiance violates one of my core rules of gameplay: persistent knockback status. This is also known as PSS (persistent stunned status), and describes a fault in the way the game is programmed without a proper cooldown on either the AI or player’s ability to chain a stun rendering the target unable to move or react, with the only option being to sit there and watch your character die. Enemies with rocket launchers can fire consecutive missiles that don’t allow you to recover from the first knockback before the second hits, hellbug archers spawn in enough numbers that if one hits you, the rest will easily cut you down, and the grenades fired by certain NPCs have a knockback effect that seems to affect players that should be out of the blast radius.

The episode and main missions are easily Defiance’s strong point. As I said in the impressions, there are some genuinely strong storytelling elements, and if there is one thing that will set Defiance apart from the competition, this is it. The structure of the missions themselves is just about the same as the other side missions, but are generally longer and of course contain better voice acting, cinematic effect and propel a meaningful story. Jon Cooper has easily become one of my favorite MMO characters of all time, and the major players in the story are a wealth of personality.

It is particularly sad that a lot of Defiance’s faults are “working as intended,” or at least someone thought they were good ideas. The interface itself is workable enough, even if it is a pain to navigate at times, but the map is truly the work of a sadistic designer. Apparently nobody at Trion has ever looked at a map, because the developer never thought players might find it useful to have defining landmarks, or areas, or really anything helpful labeled on the map outside of the fast travel locations, vendors, and mission starting points. Need to go to the “southern radio tower” for a contract but don’t know where it is? Sucks for you, because the game sure isn’t going to tell you where it is.

I’m going to include this other particular annoyance even though it will probably be patched out at one point. Being shot in the back in certain circumstances will spin your character a full one hundred eighty degrees which apart from being disorienting, will likely lead to your death. I can’t count how many times I’ve died while either fighting a group of NPCs on the ground or running for cover, only to have my character spun around suddenly and be gunned down. It’s even worse when there are two snipers at opposite ends and they take turns spinning you around until you eventually die. It is annoying in itself, coupled with the sniper NPC ability to have perfect aim at any range or in any condition, and worst of all: It was a feature that went through the process of concept to implementation and play testing and no one realized how god awful it is.

I have to applaud Defiance on one bit in particular: Lockboxes. Trion is one of the few companies to actually implement lockboxes in a way that isn’t an obvious grab for cash, and is reasonably attainable by the players who don’t want to be treated like walking wallets. Lockboxes in Defiance aren’t items that are shoveled into your inventory by the bucket load and in the sleaziest way possible, like Cryptic Studios does with its games. Instead they are simply another vendor you visit and pay to open with increasing prices based on the tier of the box.

You can opt to pay in bits (real money currency) to open a lockbox, but honestly why would you? With how many guns you find on the battlefield, odds are you won’t even be thinking about lockboxes until much later in the game. Even then, key fragments are insanely easy to obtain. Between the ease of procuring the scrip and fragments to open a lockbox, and the relative unimportant nature of the lockbox, there is no reason any player should be spending real money opening these boxes.

So what is your ultimate conclusion, Omali? I found Defiance to be a very enjoyable game, even though it is held back by the unfortunate understanding that just about every positive aspect of the game leads to a “…but.” It is a solid shooter that takes place over an expansive map, contains a wealth of missions and guns to enjoy, and employs just enough progression to not fall into the sort of mind numbing PvE that plagued Global Agenda, while at the same time not falling into the mindless deathmatch element of Call of Duty. There is a wealth of content and the AI pulls itself off of the fainting couch generally long enough to put up a real fight, and when it is at its prime it is a sight to see.

In conclusion: Despite the fact that I’ve dropped a lot of hatred on Trion and Defiance, Defiance is a game that will keep me coming back. It doesn’t excel in any particular field, but the combined experience of everything put together makes for a solid game with a wealth of content. You’re going to be hard pressed to find a game on the market that matches the style of Defiance. If you fall into the category of people who don’t do well when it comes to an MMO’s launch and the associated bugs, I recommend you stay far away until Defiance has had more time to settle in. Perhaps get yourself acquainted with the television series.

7.5/10 -Not A Must Buy, Enjoyable But Wait For The Demo

Why Aren’t You Playing: Defiance On PC

7.5/10 -Not A Must Buy, Enjoyable But Wait For The Demo

Defiance Initial Impressions

Defiance is simultaneously one of the greatest and one of the worst MMO shooters I have ever played. On one hand, it brings back thoughts of what Tabula Rasa might have looked like if it had been created for a 2013 audience, an open world, seamless shooter with RPG elements and guns. On the other hand, it can be shallow and incredibly juvenile at times. So let’s dive in, shall we?

1. The Story

Defiance’s story will likely completely slip by you if you haven’t been paying attention to the upcoming TV series. The basic story is that the alien race known as the Votan comes to settle on Earth after their home planet is destroyed by a stellar collision. While discussion between Votan and Human governments for peaceful settlement dragged on, a high ranking Votan ambassador is assassinated sparking a war between the two species. This war culminates in the explosion of the Ark fleet in orbit, which rains down destruction and accidentally unleashes terraforming technology and introduces animal and plant species to Earth. The debris from the Arkfall event still rains down on the planet periodically.

This is where you come in. As an Ark hunter, you enter the Bay area under the employment of Karl Von Bach, seeking advanced alien technology that is falling to earth with these Arkfall events. Along the way, you pick up side missions and come across various self-repeating missions that involve saving soldiers or finding new technology.

Which brings me to a complaint about Defiance the game, and its “maturity.” Remember when the Battlestar Galactica remake really overused the word “frak” to bypass the censor? Defiance does the same with the use of the term “shtako,” running the word into the ground with all the grace and subtlety of a teenager who just learned a new swear word and wants to include it in every sentence so people know how clever he is. And the effect plays out even worse in an environment that has no censors, since the characters swear anyway and the whole thing just becomes pointless and annoying. I also don’t need to hear every five minutes about how my NPC partner won’t be joining me on this mission because she’s drunk, or how the commander is surprised to see that she has all of her clothes on.

2. Missions

Progression in Defiance is defined by a series of quests, trials, and mini-games, and ends up being one of the highlights of the game. Each character has a personal storyline, dealing with Von Bach Industries and the hunt for alien artifacts that I referenced earlier. The main quest series actually has some decent dialogue and cutscenes. There is another line of missions that ties directly into the television show, and will receive regular updates once the show starts airing. There are also one-off side missions that become available the more you complete the main storyline quests.

Players of recent MMOs should be familiar with the random encounters. Not really random since they appear at the same point every time, these encounters are essentially short public events that occur on a regular basis. You might pass by a downed helicopter and see “revive the pilots” appear on the screen. Revive the pilots, and you’ll have to defend them from incoming mutant soldiers. In addition to the random encounters, you’ll also come across mini-games of skill. These include time trials with your vehicle, rampages (Saints Row players will recognize this), and hot shots which are basically rampages but with the added requirement of not shooting civilians.

I’m not done talking about content yet. As you level up, you unlock cooperative instances. Raids, basically. There are instanced pvp modes including team deathmatch, capture and hold, and resource gathering as well as a shadow war which takes place in the live area. Pursuits act as Defiance’s achievement system, offering rewards for accomplishing things like modding your weapon or achieving weapon skills.

3. Leveling

Defiance’s leveling system is a little overwhelming. Your main “level” is called your EGO rating, and is leveled by completing quests, killing things, and generally doing what you would expect to gain experience for in an MMO. As you rank up in your EGO, that is how you gain points to put into your skills and unlock perks and new abilities. This is where it gets kind of confusing. Each gun you pick up will have its own experience bar. That bar doesn’t level up the gun itself, it feeds experience into your skill in that gun type. So you pick up a submachine gun and level your submachine gun skill. Once the gun has filled up its bar, it no longer contributes to your overall skill level.

This doesn’t really bother me though because the leveling process for weapon skills seems ultimately unimportant. If it hadn’t been for the pursuits requiring leveling in certain weapon skills, I probably wouldn’t even care about them at all. Interestingly enough you level your three vehicle classes just by driving them. So you’ll just be driving along and then BAM! You’re level three in offroad vehicles. Um, thanks Defiance.

4. The Best Parts

So to start wrapping up this impressions piece, I thought I’d first discuss what is so great about Defiance. As I pointed out in the beginning of this article, I am getting a heavy Tabula Rasa vibe, but what Tabula Rasa should have been. My main complaint in MMO shooters in the past, and this goes for games like All Points Bulletin, is that the developers for some reason don’t give the guns any power to them. In All Points Bulletin you felt like you were carrying around peashooters, and Tabula Rasa similarly had kind of underwhelming gunplay. Defiance is first and foremost a shooter, and Trion never forgets it. For an action MMO to do well, it has to blur that ever-present set of dice that are dictating your damage dealt and taken. Defiance does this extremely well.

Also, the story missions are without a doubt the game’s highlight. The lawkeeper Jon Cooper is one of the most memorable, and actually one of the few memorable, characters I’ve seen in an MMO in a long time. I actually look forward to the story missions and how the cutscenes play out, and in one scene where Cooper has to mercy kill a construction worker, needless to say it was one of the most powerful moments in recent memory. I’ve also been having a lot of fun playing around with hotshots and side missions, including my inevitable victory over that damn chick shoot mission. You have to shoot chickens with a gun with limited ammo, and I found that there is a small window of opportunity where you can throw a grenade, and the game lets you continue playing with your normal weapons until those run out of ammo as well. It’s an exploit, I’m sure it will be patched in that April 15th content update, but I’m willing to savor my gold trophy for the mini-game until then.

5. Aimless Ranting

All of that considered, I can’t help but find Defiance’s problems to be more than annoying. I know that Trion is making equal advertisement to the shooter crowd as they are the MMO gamer, but does everything have to explode? Alien “mortars” fire explosive rounds into the air toward the player with amazing accuracy, all things considered. Flying bugs fire rounds that not only explode, but they also hold you in place. Hell, I even saw my character get headbutted by one of the larger Hellbugs, and there was an explosion. There are enough explosions in Defiance to make Michael Bay uncomfortable, and the more I progress through Defiance, the less sensible they seem to become.

Which leads me to the second thing that I hate about Defiance: Movement. The controls are fine for a third person shooter, although the process of entering and exiting a car could be more responsive. I’m talking about the heavy use of this movement slowing goo. Movement debuffs are obnoxious enough when just a few types of NPCs use it, but since Defiance has just a handful of mob types, you’re going to see it quite a bit. I have had a few times where five of those Hellbug flying mortar things pop up at once and just barrage you to death in seconds, because they have no cooldown on this explosive, sticky, insanely obnoxious attack.

The UI for Defiance is also one of the worst I’ve seen in recent days, and not just because it took me a good ten minutes of searching before I finally figured out where the “exit” button was. For those who don’t know, in order to exit Defiance you must first hit escape to bring up the main menu, click on the button in the lower left hand corner to bring up the radial menu, then avert your eyes to the top right hand side of the screen where the “exit” button sits. Honestly, it sounds easier than it is since you expect the exit to be somewhere on the radial in the center of the screen, so you look through all the options and still can’t find it, and the exit button blends in pretty well with the background with the blue on blue. It’s sort of a hiding-in-plain-sight deal.

And while I’m on the subject of the UI and I’m tearing this game apart more than I expected to, the chat system is terrible and nobody is using it. The chat disappears far too quickly, the profanity filter is ****, and not enough chat displays. You also can’t move the chat box from the lower right hand corner. I’m surprised to see that Trion, a company that has released an MMO in the past and therefore should know what they’re doing when it comes to basic interface, aesthetics, etc, would have screwed up so badly on the way players interface with Defiance, at least on the PC version. The system seems developed for console users with little regard to PC players.

6. Conclusion

I am having a lot of fun in Defiance, even though my article may seem slanted towards the ranting side. If you come into this with the expectation of Tom Clancy level of strategy, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. Defiance falls somewhere between the tactical planning of Rainbow Six games and the beer chugging fist bumping Call of Duty bros, and makes a place for itself in the genre that is unique to the other games you might find on the market.

And I have to applaud Trion for how they have once again aggressively patched their game post-launch. They did the same with Rift, and I can only imagine that we’ll see some heavy discounts on Defiance in the near future to try and shop the game to as many people as possible, especially once the show airs. While I own the PC version, apparently Trion were putting out multiple patches per day on the Xbox360 to fix problems as they popped up. The console versions didn’t have a great launch, but Trion’s been working around the clock to get everything as smooth as possible.

Why Aren't You Playing: Dino Storm

Dino Storm is the kind of game that is born in the dreams of young boys. The more that you think about it, the more it makes sense. Cowboys riding dinosaurs, wielding laser guns, all in a old west setting. The game centers around a village called “Dinoville,” (bet you didn’t see that coming) where everything is bought and sold with Dino Dollars (you wish I was making this up). On paper (or wherever you happen to be reading this) it sounds just crazy enough to be an early April Fool’s prank, or a fever dream, but then you pinch yourself on the face and realize that no, it is indeed a very serious video game.

Created by Splitscreen Studios, Dino Storm is played through the browser and features a pretty cool 3D engine. So grab your laser gun and let’s dive in, shall we?

Gameplay

So we already know Dino Storm breaks some new territory with the whole cowboys and dinosaurs theme, but the game itself lives or dies on a very simple question: Is it fun to play? And my answer is a rather confident yes. You spend 100% of the game strapped to your dinosaur, which can be moved around either by clicking to move or using the keyboard. Quests are exactly what you would expect to find in an MMO, with the added exception that there are a lot less of them, and they are all public quests. Instead of traveling to a hub and picking up twenty or so quests, each area only has one or two quest givers, each of which have one quest in progress at any given time. The quests are along the lines of kill this, escort that, or activate these nodes, nothing particularly new outside of the always-grouped factor.

Combat in Dino Storm is rather love-it-or-leave-it. You have to click on all of your targets and select a large, bulky “attack” button from the drop down menu for your character to initiate his auto-attack. As your dinosaur levels up, you do gain access to new abilities but they are very limited in scope and quantity. You can move and shoot at the same time, which is less useful than it sounds when you factor in that proximity doesn’t mean a whole lot in MMOs, even in melee settings. Your abilities are dictated by the level of your gun and the level of your dinosaur, but you only unlock two for each category and the second ability doesn’t come until much later in the game.

In order to accomplish this leveling, you’re going to need to collect an assortment of items from quests and from killing monsters. Upgrading your weapon requires copious amounts of gun tuning kits and weapon tech upgrade kits. Leveling your dinosaur requires evolution serum. With how generously tuning kits and serum drop, the more difficult item on the list to pull together winds up being the Dino Dollars which are required in the thousands early on in leveling, and oddly enough are easily purchased with cash shop gold coins.

Once you get past the initial area around Dinoville, you start getting into zones that have pvp enabled and that two-clicks-to-attack feature becomes a lot less of a hinderance and a lot more of a necessity. The menu clearly differentiates between players and mobs, and since the public quests have a tendency to become one massive clustertruck of players and dinosaurs crawling over one another and attacking, that extra menu before you attack can mean the difference between attacking a mob or accidentally flagging yourself to another player. The system isn’t perfect, and I did see plenty of players accidentally attacking each other, but it is better than not having a safeguard at all.

One problem I have with Dino Storm in the gameplay area is over the game’s GPS-style system of directing you to the objectives, with footprints leading you where you need to go. While the system mostly works fine, there are several instances where the game is simply unable to find a path, and is perpetually stuck in the “finding your target” mode. I even had this happen while in Dinoville, searching for the casino in the same area. I would much rather have to rely on a static indicator on the map and have the system be reliable than have no indicator and have to hope that the game can figure out its own map.

The other major problem I’ve had is with overlapping quests, especially when they are radically different in level. At one point, our group of about fifteen players were tasked with escorting a caravan to its destination. That travel took us through another quest area where players were fighting high level T-Rex mobs (pictured above) which mobbed and took out our entire group in about three seconds. I don’t know what happened to the players on the quest, but they never showed up to kill the T-Rex group, and we had to wait until they despawned in order to complete the escort mission. On more than one occasion, I’ve had entire groups of bandits spawn into an area and just start randomly attacking people.

The downside to having less quest givers is of course that there is far more limited content than in your standard MMO. All of the combat quests revolve mainly around defending yourself against waves of mobs, whether it be waves of mobs in a specific area or waves of mobs as you escort a couple of trade dinosaurs. After a while the repetition begins to weigh in as you find yourself performing the same tasks over and over in order to forward the main “chapters” which are a set of tasks for each region.

Appeal

When it comes to graphics, my policy is simple: Work within your limits. Aesthetically, there is a huge difference between aiming for the middle and striking gold, or aiming too high and winding up with the product of nightmares. So I give credit to the folks at Splitscreen Studios for figuring out a style and making it work.

Dino Storm looks like a game that might have found home on the old Quake engine, which I personally find to be a more preferable direction than trying to make a realistic looking game and falling into the uncanny valley, or heading down the generic indie route of calling your game “retro” and using 2d graphics. The visuals are low-key, but charming and with their own distinct theme. The dinosaurs look good and the player models are decent enough, even though they lack in any meaningful level of customization.

The UI is one of the worst aspects of Dino Storm. It is basic, bulky, takes up far too much of the screen than it should (especially in window mode), and it’s rather ugly to boot. I have also seen a large number of threads on the forums with people complaining that they are losing their inventories during server crashes, although I have not experienced this myself.

Conclusion

Overall, Dino Storm is a game with a brilliant setting surrounding a decent game on a promising platform. The game is actually rather family-friendly, so if you’re looking for a game to introduce your son/daughter into MMOs, I’d put Dino Storm up there along with Free Realms, Fusion Fall, and a few others. The few rude players I’ve seen have been pretty unanimously rejected by the community, and the game has systems in place to protect someone from getting ganked or spawn camped, alongside an actively policing player base.

Dino Storm isn’t in the realm of hardcore gaming, but considering that after the main city players are able to freely attack one another (albeit with repercussions for doing so) and take control of spawn points, not to mention that you need to do a corpse run for your quest items and sell-able goods which are left on your body upon death, not to mention that you are most likely to die from being piled by mobs or sniped by a player, I hesitate to call it a soft core title. Instead, it’s a bit more in the range of RuneScape pre-gravestones. Think of it as a mid-core title for players who are either enticed by the theme, or are new to the genre and would like something a bit tougher than Free Realms or Fusion Fall.

I give Dino Storm a B+. Aside from some bugs, there isn’t anything wrong with the game on a fundamental level. More depth would do nothing but help it. If this is an indication as to where browser based MMOs are headed, the future looks very bright indeed.

Why Aren’t You Playing: Dino Storm

Created by Splitscreen Studios, Dino Storm is played through the browser and features a pretty cool 3D engine. So grab your laser gun and let’s dive in, shall we?

Gameplay

Appeal

Conclusion

Path of Exile: Why Aren't You Playing?

I consider myself more of an older school MMO gamer here at MMO Fallout, so I have a simple policy regarding beta status: Once the wipes stop and the cash shop starts rolling, the game is in soft launch and the “it’s just beta” excuse doesn’t fly anymore. Path of Exile has become quite popular recently, not just because it has shown itself to be a pretty solid game, but because the free to play model is exactly what people want out of it: No nickel and diming, no pay to win. Path of Exile also has the opportunity to display itself to jaded gamers who purchased and were disappointed with whatever feature from Diablo 3 (take your pick) they didn’t like. Path of Exile builds upon the dungeon crawling experience, while simultaneously taking much of what you knew about the genre and throwing it right out the window.

You may have noticed a very important detail missing from the screenshot above (apart from the incredibly limited inventory): A gold counter. There isn’t one. Path of Exile does not feature a cash currency of any kind, a move that is surely at least partially intended as a repellent to any potential gold farmers. You can still buy and sell items at vendors, however depending on what you want to transact, the “currency” you’ll be using is actually a combination of several key items from Scrolls of Wisdom (identify items) to specific stones which can also be used to grant magical properties to items. The lack of currency also means that if you plan on trading with other players, you’ll need to be decent at bartering (or at least hope that they aren’t). It also means that you’ll need to bring something to the table worth trading, since the option to grind mobs for hours to generate gold is no longer viable.

You also won’t have cash to spend on massive amounts of health potions. Your character has five slots to fill with health, mana, and miscellaneous potions. As you level up, better vials become available in the shops and dropped through creatures, and those vials themselves can be upgraded with magic stats and various buffs to offer better healing power, more uses per vial, etc. The kick to the vial is that they refill whenever you enter a new zone, as well as randomly during combat.

While we’re on the subject of reinventing the wheel, why don’t you have a look at Path of Exile’s skill tree:

Yikes! Don’t panic, though, that overwhelming monstrosity is not an active skill tree. As you level up, you’ll gain the regular assortment of points that go into what is called a “passive skill tree.” The tree branches out like an active skill system, except instead of dictating your abilities, you put your points into slots which grant passive traits. +10 dexterity or +8% bow damage, or +10 intelligence, etc. It is worth doing some research down the line into where you want your traits to go, and although you won’t make use of a great majority of the board, you’ll find the game becomes much easier if you know where you are heading. Find the traits suitable to your class, and branch toward them. Once you make your destination, you can start branching out from there. It seems that unless you completely ignore stats related to your class, it’s pretty difficult to gimp your character down the line.

So if the active skills are not delegated through points, where do you get them from, you might be asking. Another simple answer that shakes even more ground. As you complete quests and continue the massacre of various creatures, zombies, and mud monsters, you’ll come across skill gems which are placed into the sockets of your equipment. Gems come in green, red, and blue flavors and are how you obtain and customize your abilities. For instance, my ranger is equipped with a fire shot, split shot, rain of arrows, puncture, and poison. Each skill corresponds to a key on the mouse (left, right, middle) as well as five customizable keyboard keys (Q,W,E,R,T). Skill gems level up universally as long as they are equipped while you are in combat, so you don’t need to grind poison shot (for example) in order to level it up. Just play as you normally would, and each gem builds up power as you go. To add to functionality, skill gems can be added and removed from equipment with a simple right click, no need to worry about enchanting or failure.

As you may have expected, this adds another level of depth to Path of Exile. In order to use a skill gem, it must be linked to your weapon or armor (it doesn’t matter which). This means that often times you may have to trade some of your abilities in return for far superior equipment that doesn’t have the same gem sockets. You may, for instance, be using a bow with two green sockets, only to find a much superior bow that only has one green, or perhaps zero green sockets. So you can either lose one or two abilities for the time being (until you find a bow or armor with suitable slots) or go without the boost to your base stats.

The cash shop, true to its word, only offers cosmetic items. You can buy pets which are purely cosmetic, special dance animations, alternate skill effects, and alternate item effects. The only piece that has an actual effect on your account is the ability to buy extra stash tabs and extra character slots, and unless you are an intense hoarder of items or altaholic, you won’t have much use of either.

If this review seems like I’m just rattling off a list of features that Path of Exile has that aren’t present in many other ARPGs, that is intentional. At its core, Path of Exile is the same Diablo style game you already either love or hate, but I felt from the start that some of the features I mention above may take the game down a path that some Diablo/Torchlight/etc fans don’t want to go down. So if the core of your fun in Diablo or Torchlight was the constant running of vendor trash, you won’t find that here. If your idea of combat is buying limitless health potions and chugging them down in mass quantities, you won’t find that here. If you’re a gold farmer and want an easy free to play game to con, you won’t find that here.

Path of Exile feels like a separate generation from the rest of its ARPG brethren, keeping what makes the genre great while at the same time creating a new path for itself to walk down. It is a free to play game with a cash shop that most gamers would only hope to dream of if their game of choice didn’t charge $5 for the Sweet Dreams lockbox. I would definitely recommend Path of Exile as a must play.

Path of Exile: Why Aren’t You Playing?

While we’re on the subject of reinventing the wheel, why don’t you have a look at Path of Exile’s skill tree:

Why Aren’t You Playing: RaiderZ Part 1

If I had a nickel for every time someone told me “hey Omali, check out this new MMO from Korea, it is totally different,” I would put those nickels in a sock and use it to beat those people unconscious. And yet, half because I know it won’t go anywhere and half because I enjoy torturing myself, I inevitably download the game and play it, hate it only as much as I hate myself, and uninstall the godforsaken pay-to-win uninspired grindfest. This time, however, I was invited to the beta under the pretense of “it’s just like TERA, but free!” Which is great, because juggling subscriptions was really the reason I left TERA.

In fact, don’t mind if I accidentally refer to RaiderZ as TERA at any point in this article.

1. Combat

RaiderZ is polite enough to introduce its new players to the variables of combat relatively early in their playing experience. In short, what this means is that in order to stay alive or function with any sort of efficiency in RaizerZ, you’re going to have to know when to hold em, know when to fold em. Combat is very similar to titles like TERA in that you’ll be tasked with dodging, blocking, and choosing the right moment when to strike. Dodging isn’t an end-all beat-all, and won’t protect you 100% from taking damage, but it is a very important tool in mitigating and holding off as much damage as possible. Creatures will shove, throw, ram, and eat their foes, meaning if you want to have a chance at survival, you’re going to need to pay attention.

Because of this, combat in RaiderZ is what I like to call: Engaging. Sure, you can go all out DPS, focus on just smashing your target as much and as quickly as possible, but you will likely die a lot or at least be forced to either guzzle down enough potions to heal a small army, or sit out of combat waiting for your health to regenerate. Or, at the cost of slightly longer battles in the short run, you can make intelligent use of your dodge, block, and special attacks to mitigate, block, and interrupt attacks.

I also like the idea that you can literally beat things off of certain mobs, and either consume them on the spot or use them as a weapon. Certain enemies like crabs will randomly drop crab meat, for instance, which can be picked up and eaten to boost health regeneration for a small amount of time. Other creatures will drop their weapon or body parts that can be picked up and used as a temporary weapon of your own. There is also an inherent satisfaction in breaking off the body part of something you just beat to death, and using it to slaughter its nearby tribe members.

2. Quests, Resources, And Grind

Outside of its combat, there isn’t much innovation to RaiderZ. The leveling process is the standard grind of moving from hub to hub, taking on quests and occasionally fighting “party” size monsters. Again, what makes RaiderZ enjoyable and engaging is the combat, even though as you progress through the game, you begin to realize that it may just be the one degree of separation that keeps this title from being thrown in the pit with the other thousand generic MMOs that come out of Korea every year. There is a story aspect that plays out through instanced areas, and is a decent part of the game.

Since RaiderZ is a monster hunting game, this is also where you will obtain most of your gear. As you wage your genocide against the hodgers, bandits, and bears (oh my), you will come across various crafting materials to use in forging new equipment. There isn’t much thinking in crafting your equipment, either. You simply go to a vendor in one of the cities or villages, they show you a recipe that displays exactly what creature drops each item, and you go and beat the crap out of said creature until it drops what you want. Unfortunately one issue I’ve come across is that in the time it takes to knock the correct resources out of a mob in quantities high enough to make a set of armor, I’ve already outleveled the stuff I was going to craft and have to load up on a new mob.

PvP in RaiderZ is really on the back burner, although there is an open PvP zone you are forced to go through if you want to progress to the end-game.

3. Gold Farmers, Chat Spam Galore

I saved this for last, because I know for someone like myself this can really kill a game. RaiderZ is filled to bursting with gold farmers, both in-game and spamming chat. The starting areas, as well as the first main city you hit (Ingen) are so full of gold farmers that chat is impossible, due to the overwhelming level of spam. The problem with gold spam might not be so great if RaiderZ had some automated system built in to stop it, but until that happens, players either have to ignore it or individually block each player.

In fact, the chat system in RaiderZ is mediocre, bordering on pathetic. Not only does Perfect World not offer a simple way to click on someone’s name to add them to your block/friend list, the game makes the Kindergarten level mistake of using a font that has the same symbol for the uppercase i as it does for the lower case l. So even if you want to block the number of gold farmers or private server ad bots, many of them use names consisting of random combinations of both letters, making them difficult if not impossible to ignore.

Next Time: Cash Shop, Perfect World, And More…

Why Aren't You Playing: RaiderZ Part 1

In fact, don’t mind if I accidentally refer to RaiderZ as TERA at any point in this article.

1. Combat

2. Quests, Resources, And Grind

PvP in RaiderZ is really on the back burner, although there is an open PvP zone you are forced to go through if you want to progress to the end-game.

3. Gold Farmers, Chat Spam Galore

Next Time: Cash Shop, Perfect World, And More…

Guild Wars 2 Impressions Part 2: Crafting, WvWvW

First off, I would like to apologize to the servers currently fighting Blackgate. Sorry we are completely dominating the board, that is. I kid, but seriously my server is whooping some major ass in the world vs world scene. Anyway, in the previous hands on I had a chance at discussing the questing of Guild Wars 2 and the overflow servers. For today’s hands on I looked at the World Vs World Vs World and crafting.

1. Crafting Myself A Better Headline

Guild Wars 2 allows you to take on two crafts at a time, but with a catch: Apparently you can swap them at any time and still retain the levels (don’t quote me on this). Additionally, it doesn’t matter what your professions are, you are able to collect resources from any skill as long as you have the requisite tool. Each tool has a certain number of uses before it breaks and needs to be replaced, and each tool has certain tiers that must be purchased in order to gather higher level items.

Crafting should be familiar to anyone who has played an MMO. You find materials by salvaging items (which, like Guild Wars, is done with a kit and is not its own profession), gathering resource nodes, and gutting mobs for their delicious flesh and skins. Unlike its fellow games, however, Guild Wars 2 has a fancy ability to deposit your crafting goods remotely. So if you are running around and suddenly find yourself filled up with ingots, fibers, pelts, and more, you can hit a simple button and deposit them in your collections bank. Later on when you are at a crafting station, you can just as easily withdraw said items.

Naturally some of the materials you won’t be able to get at all from the wild, forcing your hand to purchase from the many in-game NPCs. Certain resources also can only be purchased with karma points, which are obtained by completing live events. Additionally, crafting is quite a bit more involved than your average MMO. Most crafting skills have raw materials that are crafted into components, but also require another step before they can be turned into armor/weapons. For instance, in order to make a leather vest, one must first create a couple of vest parts which are then crafted into the vest.

The monetary restrictions of crafting prevent you from out-leveling your character in skills.

2. World Vs World Vs World: My Word

There is a word for Guild Wars 2’s world vs world vs world mode, but I’m too busy beating down the hordes of the other servers to think about it. World Vs World allows players to represent their server against select opponents in rounds that last two weeks. At the end of the two week period, the scores are tallied and the servers with the best scores win. This takes place on four massive maps where players fight for control over various territories. The zones act as any normal Guild Wars 2 area, so there are also mobs (both passive and aggressive) and resource nodes to be mined for goods, as well as merchants, trainers, and profession zones.

The number of options to help your team in World Vs World is truly astounding. You can fortify keeps, protect caravans, attack enemy keeps, defend your own keeps, operate siege weaponry, and rebuild after a devastating defense. Handy markers on the map let you know where battle is taking place, and keep assaults quickly turn into massive sieges with well over a hundred players present. The experience of being in one of these sieges, both as attacker and defender, is quite difficult to express without experiencing it for yourself. The guilds already in place are doing their best to make the experience as epic as possible.

It is also possible to gain drops off of your enemies. You aren’t stealing any of their loot, but the game treats it as a mob kill and will spawn loot bags with random materials, weapons, equipment, etc. You won’t gain much experience or loot from PvP in this fashion, but it does provide an incentive for players who might otherwise not bother.

3. Daily/Monthly Achievements

I can only assume my monthly achievements will be reset at the end of August, a pity considering the game only launched the 25th. Guild Wars 2 offers daily and monthly achievements, with rewards for completing sets of achievements as well as the whole list. Daily achievements are rather easy, from number of kills, variety of kills, gathering, etc. Monthly quests are a bit more involved, including salvaging items in mass, experience without death, number of invaders killed, and completing events.

The rewards for completing these events is well worth the effort required, however.

4. Next Time…

Next time I hope to talk to you all a bit more about the auction house. As I said yesterday, it is still offline.

7.5/10 -Not A Must Buy, Enjoyable But Wait For The Demo

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7.5/10 -Not A Must Buy, Enjoyable But Wait For The Demo

Spread It:

1. The Story

2. Missions

3. Leveling

4. The Best Parts

5. Aimless Ranting

6. Conclusion

Spread It:

Gameplay

Appeal

Conclusion

Spread It:

Gameplay

Appeal

Conclusion

Spread It:

Spread It:

Spread It:

1. Combat

2. Quests, Resources, And Grind

3. Gold Farmers, Chat Spam Galore

Next Time: Cash Shop, Perfect World, And More…

Spread It:

1. Combat

2. Quests, Resources, And Grind

3. Gold Farmers, Chat Spam Galore

Next Time: Cash Shop, Perfect World, And More…

Spread It:

1. Crafting Myself A Better Headline

2. World Vs World Vs World: My Word

3. Daily/Monthly Achievements

4. Next Time…

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