weekend – MMO Fallout

If you’ve ever wanted to play all three of Funcom’s Conan games and not have to pay anything for the privilege, you’re in luck. Starting September 19 and running through September 23, you can download Conan Exiles and Conan Unconquered. You can also play Age of Conan which was already free to play, but just pretend that it’s one of those play now keep forever deals that you can play whenever and also keep.

So if your taste is MMO, tower defense, or survival sandbox, you’re in for a treat this weekend.

Beta Perspective: Wild Buster Is The Final Fantasy XIII of Diablo Clones

I’m having quite a bit of fun with Wild Buster, the latest MMOARPG to hit beta, but the game is rather one dimensional and I have a feeling that’s going to hurt its potential.

If you haven’t heard of Wild Buster, this is the Diablo-style game that has hinged some of its marketing on the inclusion of Duke Nukem and Serious Sam as official, licensed characters. The game is currently enjoying its last beta weekend before early access, so I decided to jump in and give my two cents.

Final Fantasy XIII was rather creatively labeled a corridor simulator, and if you translated that element into a Diablo clone, you’d probably end up with Wild Buster. Not to say the game is poorly designed; combat is smooth and responsive, the visuals aren’t half-bad, and there is plenty of loot to go around without going overboard. There are a number of classes across the two factions that operate quite distinctly from one another, and there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of tomfoolery in the cash shop department at least at this juncture.

But the level design is horrendous, a series of re-skinned corridors where the only option is to go forward, defeating small groups of trash mobs with the occasional mini-boss style character, before you eventually face off against the big boss of the dungeon. Games in this genre generally make use of randomly generated dungeons to provide players with a varied landscape.

These games are mostly pretty linear but provide an open enough area to make up for that, but in Wild Buster you’ll just be going down hallway after hallway, without even the illusion of being able to move around. Even the bosses themselves seem poorly designed, mostly tanks with high health counters and stunning attacks, whose fights mostly boil down to increasingly spawning trash mobs and area of effect damage totems.

Wild Buster also seems to have some vestigial features in place, like being able to jump which doesn’t seem do much of anything. At least in the first twenty levels you won’t encounter anything that requires you to jump, nor do enemies appear to have attacks that can be jumped over.

Still, the hack and slashy, killing monsters in large quantities aspect is keeping me playing Wild Buster despite the grievances that I have with the beta at this time. I get the feeling that Wild Buster won’t so much fade out of my interest as much as it will hit a hard dead end where I just stop playing.

Oh and the game committed the cardinal sin of using “might’of” is a word as though that’s still okay in 2017.

[Community] Wild West Online, Another Bad Weekend, and Humble Pie On Refunds

Wild West Online might be the worst game of 2017, and its alpha weekend rollout might be the worst pitch to buy a game that I have seen since The WarZ did it years ago, but I have to give some kudos to the team. Let’s talk.

This weekend marked the second alpha test weekend for Wild West Online, a game that I have not shown much mercy to. The first weekend was written off as a technical test, an idea that I fully rejected at the time and will continue to do so. Once again, it doesn’t matter what WWO Partners calls the weekend. From the perspective of a customer, I don’t really care that all you were hoping to do was test server capacity and various other bugs. WWO offered two weekends to test the game before the guaranteed refund period passed, after which you’re out of luck and stuck with whatever the game gives you.

This is, regardless of what you or the community call the weekend, a trial period for the product, where you’re trying to convince people that the game will be worth their money. To present the offer of two whole alpha tests to figure out of the game is worth keeping your pre-order, and then to turn around and showcase that with much of the game’s content turned off, is at the very least mildly insulting. It’s like a restaurant offering free samples on its soup, but the sample itself is an uncooked piece of an onion that was part of the recipe. It’s a poor indicator of the full product and you start to wonder who in the kitchen decided to use this to gauge consumer interest.

The second alpha weekend did some polishing on the first, but didn’t really add anything new. As a result, I once again have to conclude that there isn’t enough in the game to warrant buying it at this stage, and that the preview weekend wasn’t enough to convince me that the game can’t go entirely south before launch.

I will give kudos to the team for holding up their end of the bargain this time. After seeing how little progress had been made with the second weekend, I submitted an email to Xsolla’s support with a simple message with my receipt code and game key and asked for a refund. I received it, barely a half hour later. I’ve offered my doubts on Xsolla and Wild West Online, especially after how the refund policy for WarZ was botched, but I will give credit where credit is due: They held up their end of the bargain and gave me my refund with no questions asked. Looking at the forums, it appears that other users also aren’t having an issue getting refunds as well and most are receiving responses within a half hour as well.

So kudos for that, Xsolla.

Double Experience Weekend Coming To Neverwinter

RuneScape isn’t the only game feeling generous with the experience this weekend. Adventurers in Neverwinter will once again have the opportunity to level up those companions at half the effort, as Perfect World Entertainment is running another double experience weekend. Starting Thursday at 7:30am PST and running through Monday February 20th at 7:30am PST, both player characters and their companions will receive 100% bonus experience.

This bonus applies to kills, professions, quests, and invocation. Your companions will level up at double the rate as well, making this weekend handy for bringing those stragglers up to speed.

(Source: Perfect World Entertainment)

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