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Age of Wushu updates with World of Contenders
You could have been a contender. Wait, that's not right -- you could currently be a contender. You could be contending right now. After all, Age of Wushu's latest update is specifically titled "World of Contenders," odds are good that you could be one heck of a contender. So get in there and contend! Yes, the latest major update for the game is live, and it offers a lot of ways for players to contend with one another, most notably the Dragon and Tiger Tournament featuring a series of one-on-one duels in large arenas. You can also take part in the weekly battles between schools added with the School Rivalry system. Not really up for contention? There's still plenty to access with the addition of the fourth Internal skill and a new set of skills exclusive to married couples. Get patched up and get ready to contend just as much as you'd like, as it seems Snail Games is indeed looking out for you.
Path of Exile patches in guilds, classes, and balance changes for launch
It's not fair to call Path of Exile's pre-launch patch a kitchen sink patch; this is big enough to include the sink, dishwasher, fridge, and probably a good chunk of the dining room besides. It's a big patch, and when it goes fully live tomorrow, you'll have a chance to play around with the enormous list of features, starting with the addition of an entire system for guilds that didn't exist before. Yes, the patch includes a guild system. And that's not even the biggest part of the patch. It includes a new character class for players who have cleared the game on Normal difficulty, six new world areas, achievements, new skills, new items, and an assortment of balance tweaks and improvements. That's not even touching upon new challenge leagues and the like. The point is that even if you know the game inside and out, you might want to hop in tomorrow and try out the huge array of new options available to you because... really. There's lots of stuff here.
Openly mock gravity with Age of Wushu's flying skills
The wuxia films that inspire many of Age of Wushu's mechanics have a fairly uniform attitude toward vertical mobility: screw gravity. Needless to say, the game takes that lesson to heart. A new article and video detailing the game's Flying skills makes it clear that players will not simply be encouraged to defy gravity but to go all-out and actively mock the idea that anything more than boredom keeps both feet planted on the ground. Flying skills are treated like normal skills in the sense that players must locate skill tomes to unlock new abilities, but once unlocked these skills are only limited by the character's Stamina. As long as your character has Stamina you can feel free to run straight up walls, jump off with a series of spinning backflips, and then land from a great height without so much as a bruise. If you do run out, though... well, gravity responds poorly to mockery. Check out the video just past the cut to see what it looks like to spit in the face of downward velocity.
The Daily Grind: How versatile do you like your characters?
Breadth of utility is one of those concepts that rarely gets brought up in MMO discussions, but we still think about it. In some games, such as City of Heroes, most of the individual character archetypes are pretty one-note -- for all the customization you can give him, your Blaster is still fundamentally capable of only one task (dealing mostly ranged damage). But we also have games such as Champions Online, in which you can build one character to do almost everything at the cost of pretty much taking the same powers as everyone else. Some players want to go with the Final Fantasy XI approach, creating one character who can learn to do pretty much everything in the game, given enough time. Others prefer a more focused approach a la World of Warcraft, a game in which a character does one thing and specializes in it heavily. What do you feel? How diverse do you want each individual character's ability pool to be, and are you willing to give up some flexibility if it means more unique skills for your particular focus? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
