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Solstice Arena is an inventive mobile MOBA from a surprising source
This is Portabliss, a column about downloadable games that can be played on the go. Solstice Arena appeared on the App Store last week. It's a MOBA (multiplayer online battle arena) game in which you choose a hero and play a top-down 3v3 match. Using various spells and abilities, you attack the opposing heroes and try to take out their towers before they do the same to yours. It's deep, well-balanced, and it's an inventive take on the burgeoning genre, designed from the ground up for mobile platforms and touchscreens. And oh yeah, it was published by Zynga. The mention of Zynga may conjure up more thoughts of smarmy farm animals and dessicated drawing games than it does words like "deep" and "inventive," but that's kind of the point. Zynga picked up the developer A Bit Lucky last year, and then immediately put them to work on something that could change the company's reputation, a "mid-core" title that did more right than it did wrong. And though you may be surprised, Solstice Arena succeeds at that task. It's probably not the next League of Legends (though Zynga wouldn't mind if it was), but it does represent the inklings of a new leaf for a huge casual game publisher on the wane.
Total War: Rome 2 is a 'completely reworked vision' from The Creative Assembly
Rome: Total War is one of those games that a certain, very dedicated audience loves, while the rest of the gaming world is left outside admiring the craft but not quite understanding the dedication. The first Rome: Total War was critically acclaimed and spawned a line of expansions and updates, and now strategy giants The Creative Assembly are returning to the game with a full sequel, not to mention switching around the title to Total War: Rome 2. What's different? "Just about everything, really," says lead battle designer Jamie Ferguson during an interview at E3 2013. "In the ten years since we did Rome 1, we've completely overhauled the game. The game engine isn't even the same." TCA has released a number of Total War sequels and spinoffs throughout periods of history, and updated the original title with new features and systems already. But even despite those improvements, Ferguson says the new game has even more updates and improvements. "When we call it Rome 2, it might be a bit of a misnomer in a way," he says. "We might call it Rome Redux, I guess. It's a completely reworked vision of the game."%Gallery-191377%
Daily iPhone App: Scurvy Scallywags is great fun for landlubbers or first mates
Ron Gilbert is the great game designer mind behind popular series like Monkey Island, Maniac Mansion, and the recent Deathspank games. His latest project is called Scurvy Scallywags, and arrived on iOS last week. The game is great -- it's a match-3 title that makes use of some excellent RPG and combat mechanics. While it's not the most polished thing on the App Store, there's a whole lot of piratey fun to be had. Gilbert (and his fellow developers) are obviously big pirate fans -- you may remember the great shanty scene from Monkey Island -- and this game has no lack of nice piratey touches, including hats, faces, and clothing to unlock, ships to build through a crafting system, and a whole lot of great music. The main goal of your match three adventures is to re-discover a lost pirate shanty. Whenever you come across a new verse, the gang of scabby buccaneers will happily sing it for you. There's also a fun twist in moving your pirate around the board. Whenever you match pieces, new ones will come in from the direction that you moved to match. Your pirate and enemy pirates are all in tile spots on the board, which means that with some nimble matching, you can keep your pirate away from the bad guys until you're ready to throw down in each stage. Scurvy Scallywags is great fun. I do wish the game was a little more full-featured -- most of the pieces you'll be matching are actually meaningless garbage pieces, and it would have been nice to give those some kind of function. But otherwise, the design is great, and the game has an excellent "just one more stage" feeling to keep you playing for a long time. Scurvy Scallywags is available on the App Store now for just 99 cents.
The Art of Wushu: Offense is the best defense
Previously in The Art of Wushu, we discussed the basic combat mechanics in Age of Wushu. If you have played the game for more than a week or so, you are likely familiar with most of it. A basic RPS mechanic is the simplest type of combat design, and many other games, especially those with "robust" melee combat, tend to have some RPS as the basis of its complexity. However, Age of Wushu focuses a lot on uneven risk and reward. It is not enough to simply have RPS elements. A combat design built around mixups should also have many different options between these mixups that create an inter-RPS. Let me explain broadly: Some rocks beat other rocks, but the other rocks provide better rewards when used against scissors. Some rocks might even provide benefits when used against paper! The series of mindgames interwoven into your attack choice are the focus for this week.
Daily iPhone App: Solara stands out from the clash of clones
Clash of Clans is one of the freemium sim titles making lots of money on the App Store, and so it's no surprise that the market has been flooded with clones lately; games where you build up a town Farmville-style, and then send troops from that town out into the world to complete quests. Solara is one of these: You use gold earned by building shops in town to create more buildings and unlock heroes, and then you can use those heroes to defeat monsters and earn more gold. But what sets Solara off from the rest of games like this on the App Store is its design and charm. This isn't just a generic freemium title. First time iOS developer Esper Labs has put plenty of heart into the different facilities you build and the heroes you level up, and that extra effort makes the game's familiar cycle shine. Unfortunately, Solara still leans a bit too much towards the casual side for some hardcore fans -- personally, I'd like a little more action in the battles. As it is now, they essentially just play out without any input from the player, which can be frustrating when you've made a mistake lining up your team. Most of the depth comes from choosing your heroes to fight, which all have different skills and strengths. But it'd be nice to see a developer try to really make the periodic fights in these games actual tests of skill or game knowledge, rather than just animations (which are skippable, even) playing out as they go. Still, Esper Labs is looking for that huge Clash of Clans audience, and that audience is completely fine with just letting the game play itself. If you haven't tried one of these games yet, or maybe have gotten tired of just playing CoC all the time, Solara's worth a look. It's a well-made game with a cycle that's just as addictive as always, and of course it's free to play. I do wish, however, that instead of just adding its design talent to the standard formula, Esper Labs had tried to add a little bit more.
The Art of Wushu: Learning the basics of combat
Many readers balked when I said Age of Wushu had the best combat in an MMO ever back when I did my first impressions piece. I admit, it was a bold claim. However, even after playing Guild Wars 2, TERA, and numerous other games with "deep MMO combat," I stand by what I said back then. Age of Wushu's PvP combat is the best in any MMO. If you're coming from a mostly MMO background, combat in Age of Wushu is a bit daunting at first. It's really nothing like combat in any other MMO. It has a bit slower pace than a typical action-MMO, but it is the first to really employ tempo control. Attacking recklessly is a patch to a quick defeat, forcing players to make tough tactical decisions. If you're like me and came to MMOs from a fighting game background, things readily click into place. Baiting common reactions and punishing them, punishing actions on reaction, and getting in the head of your opponent is better-rewarded than in any other MMO combat system. I don't want to badmouth games like GW2 that have great combat, so don't get me wrong; many other games have excellent combat. Age of Wushu's battle system is just even more fantastic. When I win a fight against an even-leveled opponent (or higher level, though that's rare) without taking an unblocked hit, I feel like a total beast.
The Daily Grind: Do you like the increasing trend of active combat in MMOs?
Back in the day, combat in MMOs was nice and sedate. You had a weapon, the other guy had a weapon, and you both walked up and hit one another with weapons until one of you died. To ensure that you succeeded at that goal, you had huge bars of abilities filled with various tricks to make the other guy die a little more than you did. It was a bit passive, is what we're getting at. Recent MMOs have been swinging to the other extreme, with players having a handful of abilities and a mandate to dance around the screen like a hyperactive rabbit. Titles like WildStar and The Elder Scrolls Online are previewing themselves partly on the strength of active combat. Do you like the increasing trend of active combat in MMOs? Or do you wish that we could go back to more sedate combat systems, possibly with those darn kids getting off our lawns in the process? 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!
Daily iPad App: Leviathan Warships features sweet, turn-based boat warfare
First of all, go enjoy the wonderful trailer for this game. If you're not sold on Leviathan Warships (US$4.99 on the App Store) after watching that, then I'm not exactly sure what else you want. Leviathan Warships is a turn-based naval strategy game. Your job is to guide a series of ships through watery battlegrounds, leading them turn by turn against your opponents. The game is similar to Bungie's Crimson: Steam Pirates, in that you guide ships around by dragging them, but it's much more complicated. You can aim each ship's guns separately, upgrade your ships as you see fit and take on co-op and multiplayer battles in addition to the main campaign. The whole package is impressively thorough, and in that sense, the trailer is dead on. In fact, there might be a little bit too much here to play with. Those looking for a casual title will find Leviathan Warships overwhelming. But the $4.99 price is fitting -- enough to signify the game is substantial, but still cheap enough for anyone interested to jump right in. Leviathan Warships is highly recommended for sure.
The Daily Grind: Should MMOs keep the gore on the down-low?
If there's one staple that MMOs share with other video games, it's that fighting tends to be a mostly bloodless and gore-free affair. Sure, sometimes a daring game might throw in blood fireworks that erupt in the air to signify that you're doing some damage, but you and your enemy will appear in model health until one of you keels over from invisible wounds. Of course, as time progresses and technology gives us terrific marvels, there's the potential for games to start showing more and more wounds on our characters. It kind of reminds me how there used to be action figures with the main selling point that you could transform them into disfigured, gory versions as they took "battle damage." What do you think? Should MMOs continue to keep combat gore on the down-low or have you had enough of these abstract, bloodless brawls? 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!
The Mog Log: Final Fantasy XIV beta phase 1 and 2 - combat
I've mentioned in the past that sometimes plans get changed dramatically between when I plan my next column and when I actually write it. This week, it turned out that I could stop being mum about the Final Fantasy XIV beta. So that meant throwing out plans and starting back over. In fact, it meant starting way over, since I found myself with so many things that I wanted to talk about it was difficult to figure out where to start. So I'm starting with the obvious. I'm going to talk about aspects of the first two beta phases in as much detail as I can realistically fit into a column starting with one of those obvious cornerstones of video games: combat. This isn't meant to be about impressions so much as dissecting and analyzing what I've played to this point, what is working, and what isn't. If you want to know my more in-depth impressions of killing things in Final Fantasy XIV's early test version, read on.
Black Desert interview talks active combat and the big picture
Black Desert is not a game that can be faulted for lack of ambition. A recent interview with the design staff helps show off just how big the game aims to be, which includes territory control, building relationships with NPCs, and an open-world housing system with a limited number of houses. It also discusses the game's combat, which is meant to be realistic active combat with an emphasis on skill and momentum. The game's combat system will include combat on foot or while mounted, with mounted combat having several obvious advantages -- charging while mounted can be incredibly damaging, and you have an easier time knocking down targets on foot. Combat is meant to be slightly loose rather than forcing characters to have perfect timing, but the emphasis is on "realistic" combat over a string of abilities. For more details, take a look at the full interview (scroll down to see the English version).
Vendetta Online now available on the iPad
Vendetta Online was officially released for the PC back in 2004 -- it's a space combat-based massively multiplayer online game that has been updated and developed almost constantly since it first went online in 2002. A few years ago, the game went mobile on Windows tablets, and today, Vendetta Online has made its way over to iOS. It's now available for the iPad. There are a few interesting things about this one. First of all, unlike the great Galaxy on Fire 2, which also features space-based combat and trading, Vendetta Online is a real MMO, which means you'll see hundreds if not thousands of other players flying around the game's universe with you. Vendetta's been updated many, many times over the years, and all of the core game's features have made it over to the iPad, along with iOS-specific features like achievements on Game Center. There's also cross-platform integration, so you can play on iPad alongside players also playing on Windows, Mac, and Linux. And finally, because this is a full MMO, it requires an extra cost to keep the servers going. Buying the app for just 99 cents gets you a month of service for free, but the app will cost another dollar per month after that. $12 a year isn't bad at all for a subscription (WoW still charges more than that per month), but it may be more than most iOS gamers are willing to pay. Still, Vendetta Online is a classic title at this point with a dedicated audience, and it's nice to finally have it available and running on the iPad.
Steve Jackson's Sorcery! gamebook coming to the App Store
Steve Jackson's Sorcery! is an old series back from the early 1980s where you "played" through a sort of Choose Your Own Adventure-style story, except that instead of just flipping pages, you actually cast spells, fight in combat and do other fantasy-based activities. These books were reprinted back in 2002, but it's been announced that they're coming to iOS soon, as fully interactive books to play with. Most interactive books on the App Store are either meant for children or show off only a limited amount of interactivity, but these seem different -- they're heavily dependent on text, but they do offer some nice interactive touches from the original books. There's even some fun procedural stuff: When you do combat in the game, the book creates custom-made text for you to read about the outcome of the battle. It all looks very cool, and it's a nice throwback for those of us who played with these books all those years ago. Steve Jackson's Sorcery! is set to be submitted to the App Store right away, so we should see it for ourselves very soon.
The Elder Scrolls Online answers more fan questions about combat
How do you keep character skills interesting and relevant when you've only got six slots to equip them? According to the latest series of community answers for The Elder Scrolls Online, the key is what kind of abilities are relevant. The skills on those slots are meant to serve as utility rather than raw damage, with your main attacks serving as your primary means of doing damage. Although a few skills will have added damage under certain circumstances, that's not the overall goal. Beyond that, the answers also address the issue of charging attacks and moving, which is both allowed and encouraged. Crowd control can be reliably broken out of with Stamina, but if your Stamina bar is low you can be caught and held for a while. You can also rest easy knowing that there will be no ammunition in the game, freeing archers from the tedious process of acquiring arrows at the worst possible time. Check out all of these answers and more in the full rundown.
The Elder Scrolls Online serves up a stack of answers about combat
The Elder Scrolls Online is going to feature combat, which should come as a shock to precisely no one. But how is that combat going to work? How important will the holy trinity be in practice? How ornate will your attacks and counterattacks be? These and more are all excellent questions, and they're also questions that have been answered in the latest installment of community answers over on the official site. And that's only a small fraction of the information. At the moment, the trinity setup is not vital but is certainly helpful, as tester groups without a dedicated tank have managed to clear content (albeit with some difficulties). The soft lock system is based more around offense than defense, as healing abilities are not targeted. Players can also feel free to join in when they see other players fighting things, as all players who participate gain the rewards of fighting as in Guild Wars 2. For more information about the particulars of combat, check out the full set of answers.
The Daily Grind: What game makes the best use of positioning in combat?
Guild Wars 2, The Secret World, and WildStar all have something in common: They all ask characters to jump around. Or roll around or dash around or just generally get out of clearly marked fields that indicate Something Bad Happens Here. Unlike some older games, none of these titles allows you to just fight by staying in place and swinging until your opponent drops. Of course, positioning has always played a role in MMO combat. Final Fantasy XI had Bards splitting effects between party regions and Rangers jockeying for the ideal range. World of Warcraft loves having damage fields in raid fights. TERA pretty much expects all players to be moving constantly. Then you have Star Trek Online's ship combat, where damage is almost entirely based on where you hit consistently. So what game do you think makes the best use of positioning in combat? Is it a system that would work in other games, or is it unique to one setting? 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!
Murder by numbers: A closer look at Pathfinder Online's combat mathematics
If you like granular detail on still-in-progress systems for a game that hasn't been released yet, boy are you in luck! A new dev post from the Goblinworks team turns a microscope on the hows and whys of combat in Pathfinder Online. This is obviously an important thing, as Pathfinder itself has a well-established combat system that's awesome for pen-and-paper gameplay but probably significantly less awesome for online combat. The system is being modified so that there will be fewer chances for epic failures and so that epic successes won't completely imbalance the game. Combat is being built to make even small numerical differences important (it'll be way cooler to have +10 against Immobilize than nothing), to emphasize the importance of different weapon types, and to keep luck from being a more important factor than player skill. Read the whole blog post for the nitty-gritties of how the numbers work out.
Neverwinter Days: Beta blitz
Welcome to Neverwinter Days, a fresh new column that will be pulling on our +1 boots of game exploring while we go tramping through dungeons and fantastic locales. I'm fairly excited about this game and wanted to explore it from top to bottom while bringing you along for company. Neverwinter is a Cryptic title, and with that comes a laundry list of expectations: Players will be pretty divided on it, it'll skew toward "fun" and "buggy," there'll be a lot of visual customization, and "F" always, always interacts with the world. And it's a Dungeons & Dragons title, so there are even more genre expectations. For example, we're going to be laying the smackdown on Kobolds early and often. Poor buggers. Usually we begin a column by showcasing the community resources out there, but we're going to put that off until next time in favor of discussing this past weekend's beta event. Yours truly and several other Massively staffers were on the scene to chow through Neverwinter and see how it's shaping up in these final months prior to release. So what did I get out of it? It's going to cost you one click to find out!
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter will be combat-free, focus on exploration
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is the recently announced (and kind of creepy) new game from creative lead Adrian Chmielarz, formerly of People Can Fly, where he worked on violence-ridden games like Bulletstorm and Gears of War: Judgement. But while those games celebrated a proliferation of firearms, Chmielarz says his new title will be quite the opposite: There won't be any shooting at all.There will be some death, however. "Take Dear Esther, add gameplay, murder and corpses," Chmielarz said to Eurogamer this week. "That's the closest to what The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is." Dear Esther was a first person exploration game more than anything, but Chmielarz added to expect slightly more interactivity in the new title. Players will play as a detective (presumably researching the titular mystery), and will find clues as the game goes on. Chmielarz said that "the focus is not on mind bending puzzles, but on unsettling discoveries."He also said he was considering supporting the Oculus Rift, and other 3D displays and devices. The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is set to launch on the PC later this year.
Gorgeous Black Desert trailer shows off combat, classes, and weather
Pearl Abyss has released seven minutes of stunning new footage from its Black Desert MMORPG. The clip features an eyeful of the game's unique weather and climate systems (which are specific to each region) as well as plenty of fly-through shots featuring varied environments. We also get a good look at mounts, combat, and closeups of various classes like the Valkyrie, Wizard, and more. Steparu has posted a brief write-up on the game as well as a couple of additional videos covering housing and the trade map. Combat is described as a hybrid between third-person action titles like TERA and Vindictus and FPS-style systems like those in the Elder Scrolls series. Head past the cut for the full trailer.
