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Bladestorm: Nightmare won't rally the troops until March 17
Publisher Koei Tecmo has opted to delay the release of its "Troop Command Action" game Bladestorm: Nightmare from its initial March 3 launch date to March 17. As you'd expect from a sequel to 2007's Bladestorm: The Hundred Years' War, Bladestorm: Nightmare also takes place in the lengthy medieval conflict between England's Plantagenets and the French House of Valois. Unlike most historically-focused Koei Tecmo action games (collectively known as the "musou" subgenre), Bladestorm: Nightmare grants players control over a squad of troops instead of a sole fighter. This both adds novel complexity to the game's combat system and differentiates Bladestorm: Nightmare from the superficially similar (and far more prolific) Dynasty Warriors series. Alongside news of the delay, Koei Tecmo also spilled a bit more information on the game's "Nightmare" mode. Though Bladestorm: Nightmare is based on real events, Nightmare mode takes a fantasy approach, creating a plotline where both English and French forces are under siege by demons. To fight back, players can enlist an army of mythical creatures, hence the otherwise inexplicable dragon in the screenshot above. [Image: Koei Tecmo]
Bladestorm: The Hundred Years' War charging back onto screens
Flanking us from left field, Koei Tecmo announced Bladestorm: The Hundred Years' War & Nightmare is currently in development. Going by Siliconera and Gematsu's translations, it's an enhanced remake of the 2007 real-time tactics PS3 and Xbox 360 game. As returning producer Akihiro Suzuki said in Famitsu, Koei's "looking to expand upon the foundation of the original game, but we also intend to introduce a load of new elements into the game." It's one of those "...wha?" announcements that means Koei Tecmo can get away with holding back platforms and release details for now. So even if a Western release is on the cards, we probably won't hear about it for a while.
Patch 3.3.3 PTR: Updated patch notes
It's that time again, ladies and gentlemen! The Patch 3.3.3 PTR has been given a brand new build, and with it comes a few changes to the patch notes. There aren't many changes, but the few that are there are rather significant to the classes they impact. The changes are as follows: Hunters Heart of the Phoenix: Cooldown reduced to 8 minutes, down from 10 minutes. Warriors Thunderclap: This ability now counts as a ranged attack, granting it double damage on critical strikes instead of 150% and ranged miss chance, and still cannot be dodged or parried. Bladestorm: Warriors can now be Disarmed while under the effects of this ability. Glyphs Glyph of Focus: Now increases the damage done by Starfall by 10%, down from 20%. We've updated our full patch 3.3.3 patch notes listing to include these additions. If you've missed any previous updates, make sure to check them out! Patch 3.3.3 brings about small but noteworthy changes to the World of Warcraft. From a faster CoT, to putting those old Frozen Orbs to better use, to changes to the auction house -- there's several things all WoW players need to know. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3.3 will keep you up to date!
How not to aggro your tank with AoE
Reader UnstØppable writes in with a question I thought would benefit others: "Does the Bladestorm aggro problem ever get better? What I mean is, I've seen it countless times, the arms warrior enters the dungeon, the tank lets out a sigh (sometimes it's me), we pull the first group and everything goes fine, until he hits that Bladestorm button. That's when somehow he manages to pull aggro from every mob and their mom and makes both the healer's and the tank's lives hell or usually ends up dying within seconds." Part of the problem here is that certain classes/specs have no aggro dump or reduction ability and as a result their big DPS moves generate a lot of threat. Arms warriors, most DPS death knights (at least the blood and unholy specs I've used) and retribution paladins have limited aggro reduction at best (pallies at least have Hand of Salvation but that's a band aid at best) and while tanking threat (especially AoE tanking threat) requires ramp up time, it's very easy to hit the Divine Storm, Death and Decay, Pestilence, Whirlwind or Bladestorm buttons. (Enhancement shamans with Spirit Weapons seem to be okay, I rarely pull aggro even when I go nuts with Fire Nova.)
Abilities I usually wish didn't exist in 5-mans
Most tanks are control freaks. As a matter of fact, you should hope that your tank is a control freak, because the ones who shrug off a mob running around loose are the ones you probably don't want tanking your run anyway. With that in mind, there are several player abilities that, while great for soloing or PvP, don't make the transition to a 5-man very well. Either they make life a real nuisance for your group members due to inherent design, or they tend to do so in the hands of a player who doesn't deploy them in a particularly helpful fashion. Not all tanks will have the same degree of irritation with all of the following skills (for example, I play a druid, and because bears don't have a ranged silence, a knockback on a caster mob is much more likely to annoy me than, say, a death knight tank), but I promise you that they've all been mentioned by my tanking colleagues as abilities with a high chance of blowing a pull.
Shifting Perspectives: 5 observations from a reluctant battleground healer
Every week, Shifting Perspectives examines issues affecting druids and those who group with them. Today we gingerly step back into battlegrounds and discover that the world can be a very unfriendly place. I love writing this column, but there's one thing that bugs me about it -- the druid class is tailor-made to defeat a sole writer's efforts to cover everything she can. No matter how hard I try, I'm never going to cover each spec and playstyle with up-to-the-minute and in-depth experience, because it would require the simultaneous mastery of ranged DPS PvE, ranged DPS PvP, tanking, off-tanking, melee DPS PvE, melee DPS PvP, healing PvE, and healing PvP. Even with all that, I'd be leaving out all the hybrid and kooky specs people dream up. This has been getting to me lately. Consequently I thought that, before we get to some end-of-year and patch 3.3 business, it might be a good idea to spend some time on topics that -- to be frank -- I haven't been that great about covering. Balance as a whole needs some love and so do our kitties, but before I do that, I'd like to address a topic that, in contrast to Balance and Cat, I've been willfully ignoring -- PvP. It occurred to me that roughly a year after Wrath's launch, it might be a good idea to pop back into battlegrounds and see how the class' most common PvP spec (Restoration) is faring in combat these days, so I dumped badges and gold into a PvP set and went for broke. And, well...a lot's changed.
WoW Patch 3.1 PTR: Warrior glyph and undocumented changes
We covered the changes (including the undocumented ones) to warriors on the PTR, including the new Titan's Grip 'damage tax' on fury warriors. Yeah, it sucks, I'm not happy about it, but it's probably not going to go away. The idea of Titan's Grip being too powerful is too entrenched in too many minds, so we basically have to hope that the damage penalty only comes into play while you're actually dual wielding and is not just a flat penalty on all of your abilities while you have the talent, which would make offtanking or tanking five man instances quite painful for fury. We'll see how bad it is. Dropping fury warrior DPS by a full 10% seems pretty extreme and it hurts those warriors doing their absolute best the most (if you're putting out 4.4k DPS now, you're losing 440 DPS with this change). I guess it's a good thing I specced my tauren Arms when I did.But enough grumbling. What about the changes to glyphs?
Warrior changes in patch 3.0.3
With 3.0.3 going to the live servers today, we have a nice batch of Warrior changes to look at. First and foremost on everyone's mind are the changes to Titan's Grip.Prior to patch 3.0.3 Titan's Grip had a 15% miss penalty. That penalty has been reduced to an astounding 5%. What does this mean? It means that you're pretty much going to hit 10% more then what you used to when you have Titan's Grip talented.10% more means 10% more crits and 10% more yellow damage. Of course, these numbers end up being a bit different in practice than in theory crafting (and some will even correctly say that 10% more chances for damage is an oversimplification - and they would be right, and that's another article), but they're still a good base to look at when talking theoretically about the class.The simple jist of it is Titan's Grip just became a whole lot sexier.Continue reading on after the break for more changes to the Warrior class in 3.0.3.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Wrath Beta Edition
Well, we were going to talk about other things, but with the Beta coming out I have to admit I've entirely forgotten what they were. There's really no point in pretending that we're not going to be talk about this, is there? I don't think so myself.We learn nothing about any new talents that don't directly replace older talents. Nothing about Bladestorm or Titan's Grip, and talents like Incite are only mentioned because they're directly replacing talents like Defiance. We also don't learn what the big new protection talent to replace Shield Slam is from these notes. (We do have other sources and we will be discussing those talents in more depth, I'm just pointing out what the notes don't specifically mention.) The notes focus more on protection spec than others although we do find out that mace spec and sword spec are being slightly nerfed while poleaxe spec is getting a nice little buff: these changes seem PvP related to my eyes, but I have no idea how effective they'll actually be. The juggling of talents and the alteration of their effects definitely seems to confirm the notion that crushing blows are a thing of the past. On the one hand, this is a huge change to warrior tanking mechanics, as we're noted for our ability to hit uncrushability while druid tanks simply soak the damage with higher armor and stamina (paladins use the same mechanic as we do for uncrushable, they just need more block rating but can stay uncrushable longer than we can due to how their abilities work vs. ours): we've yet to see how this is going to play out. With the addition of DK's as tanks, removing CB's keeps them from having to rely on a gimmicky high parry (since they won't use a shield to tank) to avoid being crushed, but it also means that warriors will need a means to stay competitive with other tanks. Threat seems to be getting entirely reworked, so for now I'm cautiously optimistic about where tanking is heading for protection spec warriors, and indeed, all warriors. I'll go so far as to say that arms and fury warriors will be tanking in Wrath. I don't expect them to be dedicated main tanks for raids, but I do expect to see them tanking in five mans without respeccing, and that is without taking the possible two talent spec idea into account.
Breakfast Topic: Silly, unconventional, and amazing dungeon runs
One of my favorite memories of WoW came from a year and a half or so back, when Alex and I were both leveling a pair of DPS Warriors as alts, mine a Gnome female, his a Night Elf male whom he RPed as being absolutely insane and having an unhealthy love of cheese. We had a friend who was leveling a Druid, another who was leveling a Shadow Priest and a third who was leveling a Warlock. So, it seemed on a lot of nights, all 5 of us would get together and take on whatever dungeon was in our level range. We conquered most of the mid-level dungeons once or twice this way, with no tank -- Alex would just charge ahead screaming and pull a bunch of mobs -- and somehow (we were never sure how) we generally killed them while staying alive. Often, neither of us Warriors made a special effort to tank, we just somehow DPSed them to death before they killed us.
PS3 Fanboy review: Bladestorm: The Hundred Years War
Koei has released a lot of games that play identically. It's true, we admit it, but for those who play Koei games, they don't mind. Look at Japan -- they love almost any of the Warriors games that see the light of day, nearly consistently topping sales charts upon each title's release. Koei took a different stab with their title Bladestorm: The Hundred Years War in that it plays like the old Kessen titles, but moves the game to an entirely different setting -- France, during the ... well, the Hundred Years War. Prince Edward, Joan of Arc, you know, the same war covered in the PSP title Jeanne D'Arc. It's a hot topic. How did Bladestorm pan out? There are a multitude of things to consider when reviewing this game, simply because there's so much in it that you can concentrate on. Read on, friends, as you might be surprised.
Shipping this week: war is hell edition
And so it begins, a November to end all Novembers. Within the next month, we will be positively assaulted with new and wonderful Xbox 360 games. The summer wasn't exactly thin, especially as summers tend to go for video games, but the sheer amount of games dropping this month alone -- good games, mind you -- is ridiculous. But let's not get ahead of ourselves thinking about the impending arrival of Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed, Kane & Lynch, and Rock Band (to name a few). No, let's concentrate on this week's titles. One thing at a time, as it were. So, this week we have: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare F.E.A.R. Files Bladestorm: The Hundred Years' War Scene-It LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga Cabela's Big Game Hunter We have something of a soft spot for Scene-It, but we imagine the majority of you are most excited for Call of Duty 4. We don't blame you either, all of us here at X3F were addicted to its online leveling system during the beta in earlier this year.Don't get too excited though. We've got three more weeks of high caliber releases to come. You might want to start your financial planning now.
Some 100 years later, Bladestorm goes gold
Today, KOEI made the announcement that Bladestorm: The Hundred Years' War has officially gone gold and will be on retail shelves November 6th. And just in case you've forgotten, there is a Bladestorm demo currently residing on the XBLM (available to all Xbox Live regions) if you're feeling the need to give the game a test drive before November comes. That's about all we've got for you as far as Bladestorm news goes, so now we think we're going to head off and try to perfect the ancient Chinese art of hacking and slashing. Stab, swing, duck, stab, stab, swing, duck. Repeat.
XBLM gets Bladestorm, ACME Arsenal demos
Today the Marketplace deities bless us with not one, but two demos. The first is Bladestorm, which has arrived a day late and hopefully not a dollar short. The second is the latest edition to the Looney Tunes franchise, Looney Tunes: ACME Arsenal (by the way, please check out the latest DS Looney Tunes iteration: Duck Amuck). As it turns out, both games have accurately descriptive titles, as Bladestorm will have you unleashing your armies on hundreds of foes, while ACME Arsenal employs the use of all kinds of "wacky" weapons. Our hopes were set impossibly high from the first moment we saw Daffy Duck wielding a pie. Why not grab both demos and see how they fare?
Simpsons, Bladestorm demos come to PSN tomorrow
The Official PlayStation blog has been updated to show tomorrow's updates to the PlayStation Network. We've got an arcade Ski game Go! Sports Ski for $2.99 and tutorial videos for Eye of Judgment and NBA 08. Most exciting, however, are the demos being served: Bladestorm: The Hundred Year War and The Simpsons. Bladestorm is a Koei-developed action title best described as "Kessen in Europe," but The Simpsons is a game we've been dying to play since E3. Tomorrow can't come soon enough. %Gallery-3045% [Via PS3 Fanboy]
Try your hand at an English Bladestorm demo tomorrow
Even though we've had a Japanese demo for Bladestorm for a while, some of us really need to play it in English before we can pass judgment on Koei's not-quite hack-n-slash title. So, Koei is doing just that, releasing a demo on the PSN and Xbox Live tomorrow, October 4th, so we can try to wrap our minds around the idea that you can only swing your sword every once in a while. No matter. The fact remains we're really starting to get some demos before the games are released. That's always a good thing!
Bladestorm demo storms XBLM Thursday [update]
[Update: It seems our cynicism got the best of us. Turns out that Bladestorm isn't the hundredth hack n' slash war game from KOEI. It's more akin to the Kingdom Under Fire series actually (which is now becoming a hack n' slash in a bizarre coincidence). While you do hack and slash your enemies, you have more direct control over your various troops. As punishment for our ignorance, we will subject ourselves to three days of Full House reruns.]No, it's not the long awaited console port of BloodStorm, it's Bladestorm, another hack n' slash fest from KOEI. According to CVG, a demo for the game should hit Marketplace on Thursday. Taking a break from the seemingly endless conflicts of ancient China, Bladestorm centers around the Hundred Years War of Europe and stars a few historical celebrities like Jeanne D'Arc. Lest you are unfamiliar with KOEI's war games, you'd best prepare yourself to hit the X button a lot. Every once in a while you may be expected to hit the Y button as well. So, um, start practicing.[Via Joystiq]
Bladestorm demo coming to Xbox Live, PSN on Thursday
This is one of those times we're happy that demos exist. Because honestly, if we just heard the name Bladestorm, we're not sure we'd be able to remember it. It is, in fact, so generic, that we've had difficulty completing this post, so convinced were we at various moments that we were writing about Blade Runner, Onimusha Blade Warriors, Motorstorm and, of course, Blade.But with a demo, like the one set to appear on PSN and Xbox Live on Thursday, the game has an identity all it's own. "Oh yes, Bladestorm," you'll say with confidence, "that's the one about flying a helicopter during Vietnam." You will, of course, be wrong, Bladestorm is an action game about English succession to the French throne. But you'll be confident in your answer, and isn't that the important thing?
Bladestorm bundle to invade Japan later this month
Yet another PS3 bundle is heading to Japan. This time, it's for Motorstorm Bladestorm. For 61,886 yen ($536), Japanese gamers (and importers) will be able to get a 60GB system, game and soundtrack. For those that already have a PS3, they might be interested in the much-too-expensive Bladestorm limited edition bundle, which includes the game, soundtrack CD, art book, and calendar. All for a whopping 9,980 yen ($86).Previous PS3 bundles included Koei and Namco's Gundam Musou, and Sony's Minna no Golf 5.
Europe gets Fatal Inertia demo soon, others to follow
Today, KOEI announced that demos for upcoming games Fatal Inertia, Dynasty Warriors: GUNDAM and Bladestorm: The Hundred Years' War will be releasing to Europe's XBLM in the coming months. Yes, it's true that both Fatal Inertia and DW: GUNDAM demos are available on the XBLM right now, but (for unknown reasons) they are not available to European Xbox Live members. So, KOEI is announcing that the Fatal Inertia demo will be available to European Xbox Live members on August 14th with DW: GUNDAM and Bladestorm demos releasing sometime in October. And be sure not to get too angry fellow European fanboys about receiving delayed demos, because everyone is getting to play the BioShock demo at the same time (except Japan). See, you feel better already.
