One of my favorite parts of getting a press release is getting a press release that doesn’t reveal any information about the game itself. You get a vague promise about a game that might happen someday if some people get together. Normally, I don’t give that much of my time. This announcement is different. There’s a new MMO and the folks behind it represent some of my favorite games in recent memory. I think you’ll be stoked on this too.
RPS Feature Online siege warfare from some ex-Bungie dudes
I’ve been playing the closed beta of Conqueror’s Blade, a lavish medieval warfare MMO from a team led by assorted Halo alumni. It arrives with eerily similar timing to that other big-scale medieval game Kingdom Come: Deliverance, but entirely multiplayer rather than singleplayer, and is all about bundling together hacky-slashy third-person tropes with a massed-army siege mentality.
Total War has made its own attempt to provide a boots-on-the-ground view of its enormous historical skirmishes, but 2005’s Spartan: Total Warrior wasn’t exactly a crowd-pleaser. Here’s a fresh take on playing as a general who gets their hands oh-so-dirty.
When Brendan last took a look at Dual Universe [official site], the sandbox civilisation-building MMORPG was populated only by robots. That’s all changed with the launch of the pre-alpha for people who’ve already backed the game, with the new trailer featuring honest to goodness real life humans running around Dual Universe’s ambitious sci-fi world. If you’re a fan of swooping spaceship panoramas and tingly sci-fi music, then click on through. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature A conspiracy of currencies
The Secret World was always a game struggling to crawl out from under the weight of its own genre. Many have attempted to build a story-led MMO – and it’s a noble pursuit – but no one has ever quite figured out how to do it, not least because an MMO is a terrible setting in which to tell a story. The Secret World got the closest so far. The intricately woven tale of conspiracy upon conspiracy was a huge hook when the game first released five years ago, and some could forgive the janky grindy weirdness of its online necessities to enjoy a setting and quest style not seen before in the genre. Will more people learn to see past the structural faults now, with its free-to-play reboot as Secret World Legends [official site]? Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Digital archeology
There’s no better way to cause trouble than to talk about ‘firsts’. Say for instance that King’s Quest IV featured the first female adventure character, and you’re probably going to be drowned out by some pedant waving a copy of Infocom’s Plundered Hearts in your face. That pedant may even be me. Of course, that’s nothing compared to the folly of calling, say, Everquest the first MMO and leaving it without some very quick clarification. The extent of the first M in MMORPG, the importance of success over existence, the jump between mainframe and computer and all manner of other stuff makes it tricky to plant a flag everyone can actually agree deserves to be there.
But there aren’t many games with a better claim than Lucasarts’ Habitat, the latest classic game to get a fancy modern revival project. It definitely deserves it.
RPS Feature Thanks for the mammaries
If you can’t be famous, you can at least be infamous. Scarlet Blade is pretty much proof that while sex doesn’t necessarily sell, it certainly gets attention. It’s one of the most famous MMOs that pretty much nobody will admit to having played, which shuts down this month with rather less bang than whimper. Essentially, and by publisher Aeria’s own admission, it just isn’t worth updating any more, a botched patch has meant a lack of updates, and ultimately players have been asked to go find new adventure and shinier boobs elsewhere. Truly, the end of an era, and by that I mean of course, not.
RPS Feature The devil's in the details
Trion Worlds have been churning out MMOs for so very long now that one seems to blur into the next. Their latest to appear on Steam, a translation of the South Korean free-to-play original, is Devilian [official site]. It said it was a Diablo-ish action RPG, so I thought – HMMMM? IS IT THOUGH? And took a look. Well, it sort of is. And it’s sort of an afternoon nap in gaming form. Here are my impressions from a few hours of somnambulistic slashing.
Things I never expected to hear myself say: “I’d quite like to go back to Star Wars: The Old Republic” [official site]. This SHOCKING turn of events is in the wake of news that its new expansion, Knights of the Fallen Empire, restores a little of the KOTOR-era Bioware magic that was sadly lacking from the majority of the base game. I suspect most of us expected that EA would leave the over-hyped and, at least initially, underperforming MMO to die a slow, quiet death on its own, but instead it seems they’re taking advantage of unchecked consumerism excitement around The Force Awakens, and making TOR a far more appealing prospect for people who can’t get enough of Far Away / Long Time Ago. Steven’s hands-on report last week detailed why this is worth paying attention to, especially if you’re more of a solo roleplayer, and now the expansion’s actually out. Trailers and whatnot below.
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Transformice [official site], arguably the world’s first MMO mouse simulator platformer, arrive on Steam this week. It’s not a new game – believe it or not, there’s been a dozen or more of them living in your wall cavities for, ooh, I’d say about five years ago looking at the damage they’ve done.
*sucks air through teeth*
Yep, it’s going to cost a few bob to fix all of that up. I’d say at least- wait, free? It’s free? And supported through the sale of cosmetic items? Which are also all unlockable through play?
Word has sneaked out that Blizzard are introducing a new trial account type provisionally dubbed ‘Veteran Edition’ in World of Warcraft‘s update 6.1. MMO Champion turned up patch notes mentioning the Veteran Edition, leading folks to speculate away and some to start doomsaying about a free-to-play shift. Relax, it’s all fine. Blizzard stepped in to explain it’ll simply be a trial open to lapsed subscribers too.
Panda Knife Tree understand what partying is really about: friends, fantastical beings, and the ability to gut these rare and precious beings so you can rifle through their entrails for loot. Mwa-ha-ha-ha. Er. Their upcoming browser-based game Ultimate Party promises to bring you exactly that, and then some. It won’t just be your standard isometric ARPG, oh no. It’s supposed to be an MMO ARPG, which seems to mean “You can play with 255 like-minded hellions instead of just six.”
To my eye, Star Wars The Old Republic was an awkward marriage of BioWare’s singleplayer storytelling and World of Warcraft-derived MMO mechanics. It’s a marriage which seemed to satisfy no one, dooming SWTOR to a brief honeymoon and a slowly diminishing life of quiet desperation. A sad, science fiction Revolutionary Road.
Nice of BioWare to throw the game and its players a little lovin’ then, in a new expansion called Shadow of Revan. It’s raises the level cap to 60, adds a couple of new worlds like Yavin 4, offers new high-level raids, and introduces a new “discipline system” which will affect everyone, including those who don’t buy this $20 add-on. There’s an announcement trailer below.
RPS Feature Hatworld!
We always feel that MMOs are difficult to review in a single article, and Wildstar is even larger than most. To give a broader sense of what playing it is like, we asked Philippa Warr to venture inside and report back in three parts (part one). Part two covers more combat detail, and getting to grips with PvP and dungeons.
In a piece of advice likely cribbed from Game of Thrones, the Wildstar respawn narrator has just told me to “use the pointy end” while fighting. I went for the Esper class so my weapon is actually a shuriken. The whole damn thing is a pointy end and yet I’m still dead. Maybe I’ve been hitting them with the flat side.
It is at this point I decide to investigate exactly how combat works. Becoming more efficient should speed up the levelling process which in turn opens up level-gated abilities, dungeons and so on in MMO land. It should also mean I cease banging my head repeatedly against quests which are allegedly aimed at my level.
RPS Feature But Is It A Star?
We always feel that MMOs are difficult to review in a single article, and Wildstar is even larger than most. To give a broader sense of what playing it is like, we asked Philippa Warr to venture inside and report back in three parts. In part one, she covers the first 18 levels of combat, questing and exploration.
“Help! Bees! Bees everywhere! HELP ME!”
This recent Wildstar experience reminds me of that bit in My Girl where Macauley Culkin angers a bunch of hostile buzzbings several levels higher than him, realises his questing partner Anna Chlumsky has wandered off to sell loot and tries to escape by falling into a lake. He dies, tragically and so do I. But where Macauley Culkin stays dead and loses his glasses I am resurrected and resolve to give those weaponised bees a combat-based telling off that will become the stuff of legend.
If there was one winner at this year’s E3, it was fans of open worlds. The industry has become so efficient at creating beautiful places that there’s half a dozen games coming in the next year that I want to play in spite of their mechanics, not because of them. Skyforge is on the list. It’s an MMO likely to be a grind to play, but it’s set in the kind of techno-fantasy world that juts mountain palaces up against spaceships and sets it all under a vibrant blue sky. There’s a trailer introducing that world below, alongside another talking through some of the game’s combat and leveling mechanics.
We’re not the world’s biggest fans of these traditionally sturctured fantasy MMOs, but Neverwinter is a rare exception. The game lured John into its embrace and cradled him there in a pleasing rhythm of free-to-play questing, levelling and monster-bashing for the length of a three-part diary series. That’s old age, in RPS-diary years.
So maybe you’re already playing it on John’s recommendation, or maybe you saw yesterday’s news about the Icewind Dale expansion and decided it was finally time to give it a try. In any case, we’ve got 10,000 free keys for an in-game booster pack, in case you needed an extra excuse to finally hit download, install and play.
RPS Feature Particle Trail
I think my struggle to calculate an opening line for Cloud Chamber is rather indicative of quite what a peculiar, interesting and original thing it is. But that seemed to work. A multiplayer game in which “playing” is discussing, where there are no puzzles but you’re always puzzled, where mysteries are crowd-solved, but spoilers are impossible. I’ve got a lot of explaining to do.
Sage, Konkle & Crenshaw sounds like a folk band–and who am I to say they aren’t–but they are also three developers working on The Elder Scrolls Online. The three of them banded together, as folk tend to do in MMOs, and recorded a little play session, showing-off a little bit of the game’s group content. I love wandering the worlds Bethesda builds, but when a game includes most of Tamriel, being able to easily and swiftly team up with friends is definitely a plus.
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It would be a fool who ignored the power of Maple Story. However, we arguably weren’t fools for not troubling you with the news of a MapleStory 2 last month. At that point Korean publishers Nexon had only put up a useless teaser site. Now there’s a trailer to make something of a more useful announcement.
You don’t care about MapleStory, you say? Sure, it’s not exactly core RPS material. But we should be interested it in anthropologically, if nothing else. This is a game that’s seen over 67 million players, and earned more than $300m before it was even famous. It’s a phenomenon, no question. And now it’s got a really stupid CGI trailer, complete with dubstep.
…DAHN DAHN DAHN…. April 4, 2014. There, look, I know was a big old tease in the headline but at least I didn’t make you wait long, did I? 4/4/14 is indeed the release date for Bethesda’s MMO adaptation of The Elder Scrolls RPG series, and that’s for PC and Mac – next Jennifer systems will follow in June.
Here’s a PVP trailer, too.
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