Ultra Drop!

Looks like Carbine Studios is setting up some high expectations for its players by announcing a massive content patch due out before the end of the month.  This begins a trend Carbine hopes to continue, dropping in a “huge amount of gameplay” each month, according to executive producer Jeremy Gaffney. These content updates are called “drops” by the team, and will vary in size from Ultra Drops, such as this one, to Epic Drops to Regular Drops.

The update is called “The Strain”, themed around an alien infestation that will mutate existing creatures in game and add two new zones to explore. Blighthaven is a level 50 zone, starting a solo area and progressing into group content. It ends with an open-world, multi-wing dungeon, the last boss of which will evolve based on how much of the dungeon has been cleared to that point. The second zone, Northern Wastes, will be a re-skinned and updated version of the Northern Wilds tutorial zone, with tougher enemies, quests and challenges aimed at end game players.

According to Gaffney, at any given time one-thirds of the team is working updates such as this while two-thirds are working bug stomping, reactive changing and tweaking. We can expect new gear, mounts and player housing options from this drop as well, with housing a key point for a June 26^th patch.

“The Strain” hits nexus on June 24^th, ideally (testing may change this), and though I won’t be ready to tackle it now, I look forward to seeing more about the drop. The goal is to build in elements for all player types, solo, group, raid and PvP with these drops. July’s will contain content design for PvP, so keep your eyes open for it!

Thanks for following! 

-Mac

If Mac played WildStar, turn to page 32....

Ok – E3 is over, I didn’t get as much of it covered last week as I would have liked, but it gives me something to strive to improve on next year. I will get at least a wrap-up done within the next week with games that sparked my interest most. For now back to my usual ramblings.

WildStar

I am taking my time with WildStar, partly due to a busy life lately and partly so I don’t burn out on it in one binge. Made it to level 15 over the weekend and after getting my skills settled, buying my mount, and exploring my housing a bit…I went to bed. The next day however, I set myself up for a bit of game time and entered the queue for my first adventure – The Hycrest Insurrection. Adventures are instances for 5 group members that follow a “choose your own adventure” format. At each junction, you are given three paths to choose from, and the choice that obtains the highest number of votes wins for the group’s choice. There is a final boss to fight, and everyone gets rewarded for their efforts, plus reputation to spend at the vender at the instance entrance. A major difference between this and a dungeon is the lack of exp awarded for monster kills here. And that I have heard dungeons are far more difficult.

The fact that dungeons are more difficult both excites and scares me, because the adventure wasn’t a walk in the park. Starting off in a hover-copter, we listened to a briefing and then jet-packed down to Hycrest, a territory currently heavily under Dominion control. Our job was to help them successfully rebel and throw out the oppressing forces. We hunkered down with a leader of the insurgency and were presented with our first choice. The choices range from outright rebellion and target elimination to collection and destruction of resources.

My group went with the latter, and we set out killing the guards and destroying their property as smooth as can be. The only stumbling blocks we came upon were the constant artillery barrage as a group member carelessly stepped into the warning reticules scattered about and the annoyance of the snipers knocking us down as we ran around.

At our next juncture, we set out to free some prisoners, and were presented with some heftier enemies to take down. At this point I let my enthusiasm get the better of me, forgot to watch my threat level, and bit the dust. Up on my feet again, we pressed on and finished the objective smoothly. We did encounter a bug of not being able to see one another until we met at the rendezvous point, but it cleared itself up. We finished our last mini quest and went on to tackle the adventure boss. Here we wiped a few times, all new to the experience and not knowing the tactics. These aren’t the hardest bosses in the world, but they still require a fine level of tactics and finesse.

Overall, I love the idea of adventures. As I understand it, your story sculpts visually depending on the paths you choose, including more or less friendly NPCs, destruction, etc. I am excited to grab another group and try again, choosing different paths this time. I love the change of pace from normal exp grinding without the insane challenge I have heard the dungeons present, though I look forward to those just as anxiously. It’s definitely a unique take on group content, and it helps keep you engaged in the world’s storyline in a fun new way.

Carbine Studios is doing awesome so far, and though we are plagued with gold spammers, what MMO isn’t? Patches are coming rapid-fire, fixing bugs and rebalancing what needs rebalancing. I love where the game is, and can’t wait to see where it goes.

Don’t forget to follow me on Facebook, Google+, Twitter @Driachan or via Email or RSS to the right!

If you still haven't jumped on the WildStar bandwagon, get on board!

-Mac

There's Nothing Here For You But Death....

To survive.
In Rust, an indie game by the maker of Garry’s Mod, that’s the seemingly simple objective. You are plopped down stark naked in all your 3d modeled glory with nothing but a rock and a couple bandages and told to achieve this simple objective. Also plopped down in this world are other players, some just as naked as you. However, other players arrived long before you and now have clothes. And pickaxes. And fortresses. And body armor. And military grade rifles. And in a world where resources are limited and you are told to survive at all costs, those players with rifles are rarely friendly.

I logged in for the first time to a generic, unmodded server with over 100 other players. I wandered around trying to find a rock node or wood pile to hit with my rock for crafting materials so I could start carving my little place out of the hell that was the world. My first romp through the forest returned little for my efforts and as soon as I found a rock to harvest, I was greeted by another player stone axe blade first. My first death in Rust. I stopped counting at this point, which was good, because my current death toll is higher than I can count. I can honestly say my adrenaline was pumping fast as I wandered through the dark forests, constantly listening carefully for player footsteps, running and hiding scared when I heard them. When you die in Rust, you lose everything. The other player can loot you and that’s that. This makes creating a defendable fortress essential in which to store spare gear that you can retrieve after your many, many deaths. This game has provided me with some of my most terrifying moments in a video game, all thanks to the other psychopaths on the servers with me.

A quick overview of the progression. You harvest stone nodes and trees or wood piles for wood, stone, sulfur, and metal ore. You build a stone axe to increase your harvest rate, and then a hut in which to hide come night time…when the world gets near pitch black. You have a torch, but by lighting it you essentially just paint a target on your back. You need to build a door in addition to just the hut, and then you have a semblance of safety. You gradually increase your raw material stockpile, make a furnace, a larger hut, metal harvesting tools, a bow and arrow, and then you need to go from hunted to hunter. When I started, there were zombies in main hubs. Now they have transitioned to temporary mutated animals with an as of yet unannounced replacement for those in the future. These special monsters drop blueprints you need to progress further, making things such as handguns, ammo, Kevlar armor, military grade weaponry and plastic explosives.

I never made it this far on a standard server. Hell, I never made it past the making a little hut phase. The servers were too overpopulated, the harvest nodes had yet to be optimized to account for this and the map was too small to handle this many people in any way but absolute chaos. Once I gave up on the main servers and found my way over to the modded servers, my enjoyment factor climbed quickly. The servers went from having 100+ people on at all times to hovering around 50 at most, for the servers I chose. I feel with the current map, 50 is about all it can support without requiring all out war 24/7.

Once on a new server a friend and I had carved out our little nook in the world, created an ever growing fortress and started stockpiling blueprints, gunpowder, ammo, food, and weapons in a way that would make the best doom day preppers proud. Now violence is always enhanced in video games, but something I have learned from Rust is that given a situation where a few pieces of wood can mean the difference between surviving and not surviving, I am totally willing to beat another player’s head in with a rock to make sure I walk away with that piece of wood. I’m also willing to hold players at gunpoint if they approach too quickly or try to move in a way I don’t like. I am also willing to take shots from on top of a tower with a rudimentary sniper rifle at a near naked player who came too close to the field in which my heavily fortified house was built. My sociopath switch may or may not be triggered by this game.

The game is early in alpha and has met an extremely high success rate for being in such an early build. The game keeps getting better with every update, although we are currently experience a drought of updates because of a MASSIVE rebuild in the works, rewriting most of the code from the ground up. I can’t wait to see the re-release in the next few months, the game has good bones to build on and I expect great things for its future.

There have been teases of upcoming additions, ranging from attack helicopters to electricity to alarm systems…it’s extremely ambitious to put it lightly. Personally, my friends and I have simpler wish lists. We feel the game plays its best at the primitive level, and should at least start with that. I’d like to see different bows available, improvised clubs, swords and shields. The ability to dig would make moats a valid option for home defense, and the ability to take out metal doors and walls without the use of high explosives would make it less of a yes/no as to whether someone can get into your house. This would also mean we need more building materials to supplement the current wood or metal, different strengths to make it so the battering ram may get through the wall, but is an hour of playtime clicking the button worth it?

Being in early alpha, the game definitely has its bugs. They fix them, but some online players, being the fine human beings that they are, decide to break them and create workarounds and hacks as fast as the bugs can be fixed. On a lot of servers, hackers that can phase through walls, insta-lock for headshots, steal possessions out of your pack and a plethora of other cheap moves run rampant. They are fighting them and constantly looking for new, better systems with which to fight them. Generally when I run across hackers I either try to enjoy the game elsewhere, or I find a new server. It’s a short term fix until they can build in their long term fixes.

I hope the game continues to get better and better, and I will keep dropping by as the updates come. If you are looking for a great game that brings out the inner mass murderer and recluse, Rust is definitely for you. It’s definitely worth the $20 asking price, and I anticipate with their newest patch in the next few months, it will go from feeling like an early alpha to a well polished beta.

Rust can currently be found HERE on Steam.

Thanks for following!

-Mac

--Sociopathic Score--

In a world where you are naked, scared, and without anything to your name…your inner sociopath shines brightly.

--Sophomoric Score--

You do start stark naked, 3d modeled junk and all

--Strategic Score--

It’s survival of the fittest and most creative. Coming up with new ways to build given the limited options that prevent others from breaking in and stealing your stuff…it’s kept me up at nights.

It's all fun and games until a friend takes an arrow in the stomach.

Wildstar Update...AKA My newest Addiction

As you could probably guess from my initial write-up forWildstar, it has captured my interest just a bit. This past weekend marked the start of the head-start event and the official launch. I had a busy weekend away from my computer, but I managed to set aside a decent chunk of time to enjoy the comic goodness on Nexus.

My first instinct was to roll a different class than I had in beta, so I rolled a Granok Engineer. Huge difference from my Stalker, and I definitely was enjoying it. Made it through the first ship teaching grounds before deciding I like to hit things hard and fast when playing a game, so I knew that my main should be a Stalker. I have my Engineer waiting for me, and I look forward to his hard hitting, slow deliberate, bot enhanced game-play, but for now, I will explore with my fast DPS Stalker.

I rolled human this time. I usually don’t like rolling humans because well, that’s what I am in real life, why play that in an RPG? But aesthetically I like their look and it seemed to fit this world well, and I’m pretty happy with the results.
I put a bit of thought into which path to choose this time, and decided to embrace the hitting hard and fast aspect fully, choosing Soldier. I definitely enjoyed Explorer back in beta and will be choosing it on an alt before too long, but I really do feel that the Soldier path fits my “Kill Everything in sight” mentality as a Stalker.

Character rerolled and decisions made, I was ready to play. I hopped in and burned through the starter ship as quickly as I could; having enjoyed the flavor text in Beta already. I was sad to see gold spamming had already begun. I knew it was coming, but day one of head-start seems a bit ridiculous. I went to report the spammer and was greeted by my desktop. Seems that tool crashed the client. By now, I am very used to MMO launches so this didn’t surprise nor bother me, though I did find the irony amusing. What did surprise me was that a customer service rep was in the general chat replying to early complaints and that a patch hit the next day to remove this and several other bugs. There are still a good number of bugs to squish, but they definitely are doing well inspiring confidence in their commitment to getting gameplay perfect.

I still haven’t done much research into the game on the “greater internet”, just enough to build up my anticipation a bit. Upon leaving the ship, I expected to wind up back in the Northern Wilds but instead was pleased to find there were in fact multiple (2 per faction) leveling paths for the different races. I landed in Everstar Grove and was greeted with brand new quests to enjoy; an unforeseen bonus to rolling a different race. The ship every character starts in is great. It teaches some essential skills for newcomers to the genre, but I can see getting very tired of it if you are an alt’o’holic. The variety in leveling paths will lend itself well to keeping the early levels at least a bit fresher.

I have been paying attention to most of the quest dialogue as I play, wanting to take my time and to appreciate the humor and beauty that is the game, but I admit to being guilty of burning through some of the text just to keep chugging forward. I’ve made it up to level 10 so far; though I logged to go to bed as soon as hitting the level so I haven’t touched trade-skills yet. That’s this evening’s goal. So far, I am still in love with the game. The only danger I have come across is that time seems to slip by as I play it, and suddenly its 2 AM. I blame the wizards at Carbine for this sorcerous trick…..

Quests are categorized as Regional Stories and Tasks, so you can easily differentiate the ones you need to focus on to progress and the ones there for loot, experience and general fun. There are also challenges that pop up as you enter different areas, or kill different mobs. Some people find this obnoxious; I find them to be a nice flavor addition. They generally involve requiring you to kill X mobs or jump through X objectives or something similar within the given time limit. I’m not always in the mood to indulge in their demands, but when I am, the added time limit gives me a fun sense of urgency to not only beat the timer, but to do so in such a time that it makes the time given seem like an eternity. I don’t always succeed. I have heard tell that completing these can yield some pretty awesome rewards, so I will have to focus in on them a bit more in the coming days.

The other carrot that keeps the game-play fresh is the Path quests. There are eight different types of these that appear for Soldiers. Four are just simple variations of each other; given a starting point, defend the point/people around the point/against a LOT of attackers/quickly. There is also Assassination, Rescue, Demolition (which are all exactly what they sound like) and then S.W.A.T. This last mode gives you a shiny new weapon to go test out on the surrounding enemies. It’s basically just another kill quest, but the addition of a usable item as a new way to do it makes it a blast.

The last thing I got to experience this weekend was the basics of a guild. I hopped on board a community based guild as soon as I got word it was active, knowing that a big difference between MMOs I have stuck with and loved and those I have dropped quickly is the community immersion I experience. The interface seems good, from a member’s standpoint, though I haven’t had the chance to pick it apart just yet. It’s been a while since I have really participated in a guild and paid attention, so a feature like the Guild Tax is new to me.  I like it and think it can be a good help for end game guild play, especially with the PVP options offered. The one thing that weirded me out at first but I grew quickly to like was the way your guild crest was displayed. Some games just tag your name-plate and some add a cape or something of the like. Wildstar adds a set of projections from your shoulders and back. You can turn them on and off individually and toggle between near projection and far. I love it. I think that it fits the style perfectly.

The game has its bugs, and it has its faults, but for an MMO in 2014, I think it hits its mark quite strongly. The art design is beautiful, the character fluidity is up to par for modern game-play, the attention to detail is amazing, and the game is just downright fun. I can’t wait to delve into the content I have yet to see including, but not exclusive to, trade-skills, dungeons, furthering the Amp tree. I also anticipate my Stalker and Soldier class progressions will keep me plenty entertained for months to come.

I truly love the game, and highly recommend it for anyone looking for a new MMO, or just a good, fun, cartoon-y, over the top humor game.

I plan to keep up with the Wildstar posts approximately weekly as long as I play the game, and will have more focus in future posts. Check back in, and let me know in the comments if you think I should focus on anything in particular! I’ll happily tailor at least a portion of my playtime to explore what the community is interested in!

(Servers are currently down, and I did not think ahead to get screenshots of my own…so enjoy some more stock ones until servers are up!)

-Mac

--Sociopathic Score--

It only rates this high because it verbally rewards you for killing multiple mobs in rapid succession. I can see using this as a challenge to see how many I can kill how fast in the coming months.

--Sophomoric Score--

More cartoon-y humor; Ratchet and Clank style as I have mentioned. Haven’t encountered them yet, but fully expect actual poop jokes…

--Strategic Score--

So far, haven’t completed dungeons, raids, or upper level content, but judging off of the build structure of classes, and knowing how detail oriented the game is up to this point, I foresee upgrading this greatly as I reach end game.