Rants and ramblings about games, life, and other stuff.
Archive for the ‘News’ Category.
I found out via Project Aon that Atlantyca, an Italian entertainment company, is developing a Lone Wolf game. Unfortunately that’s about all the detail I have about it besides the fact that it’s intended to release in 2013. I wasn’t sure what to think of it but the interview (see below) with Joe Dever make me hopeful it’ll be good.
Teaser for the game:
Interview with Lone Wolf creator Joe Dever:
Starfleet Academy was up on Tribble yesterday and is now live on Holodeck. Just warp to Earth and then you can beam down to San Francisco.
The map is gorgeous. There’s tailor, exchange, and mail services on the map right now. According to Dan Stahl (here) there are plans to use the map for a ground Fleet Action and as a starting zone for neighborhood missions. Eventually it will also be the starting point for the new tutorial.
Part of the fun when I was on Tribble last night was the party happening on the roof of Building Two. There’s a glitch where if you log out while standing on top of the plaque over looking San Francisco, then when you log back in you’re on the other side of the fence and can literally get behind the scenes. It takes a little running, but it’s possible to get around the edge of the map and up onto the roofs of the building.
Cryptic and CBS unveiled the new Odyssey-class Enterprise-F design today on StarTrek.com in a blog post written by STO Executive Producer, Dan Stahl. I still like the design, but I have mixed feelings about how the reveal was done.
I like seeing the ship textured as I finally have an idea of the scale of the ship and it does indeed seem massive. I also like that the ship’s class name references journeys and exploration over combat.
I don’t like the angle chosen for the initial screenshot. It makes the ship look whale-like by over-emphasizing the secondary hull and dish and marginalizing the dual necks. Were this the only image I’d seen of the new ship I wouldn’t event realize how different the overall design if from the Sovereign. Besides the bad angle, the image itself is not very large and I’ve found no links to higher resolution images, or to additional images from other angles.
My guess as to why they did the photo this way is that they want to keep the ship still partially under wraps until it’s revealed in-game for the first time. That’s understandable but it doesn’t give a good first impression. Fortunately we still have this image.
I missed posting about the second Dev Diary regarding the new Enterprise, as it came out during my Android obsessive period a few weeks ago. It’s worth reading though if you have any interest in Trek starship design. Part three is out now though and features a beautiful in-game model draft of the ship. She’s going to be a cruiser, as expected, and a Vice Admiral level ship. I now have quite a bit of motivation to get my Engineer Nal working hard for promotion (he’s only Lieutenant Commander now).
Star Trek Online is coming down for maintenance tomorrow morning:
We will be bringing down Holodeck on 7.7.2011 from 6:30 AM to 9:00 AM PDT (2330 – 0200 UTC) in order to perform maintenance and apply the Season 4 patch. We will provide an update once the maintenance has been completed.
Patch notes for Season 4 are significant. There’s a few surprises on there too (my comments in blue):
There’s a lot more in Season 4 and I highly recommend checking out the section on ground combat changes so you understand what the new keybindings are. Even if you don’t intend to use shooter mode, you’ll want to know how to toggle it off if you accidentally engage it (press B).
I’ve actually been holding off on doing anything with my two alts since I saw the ground combat upgrades on Tribble, and I’ve been itching lately to get back to them. Hopefully I get a chance to check in with them tomorrow.
I just saw the news via PC Gamer that City of Heroes is going free-to-play. I can’t say I’m surprised. I’m sure that NCSoft and Paragon Studios have been looking for ways to renew interest in the game and saw Champions Online’s renewed success. I’m just glad that NCSoft didn’t shutdown the game as they’ve never been shy about that before, although admittedly for much younger games.
Free or not, I’m not planning on going to go back to the game. Just like with Age of Conan, the subscription isn’t what keeps me from playing. It’s time.
Unlike Conan though, I do like the Paragon City setting and lore. I played back when a comic came in the mail every month and I enjoyed the two books that were released. But the lore doesn’t offset the aging character models and combat system. I prefer the combat pacing and mechanics better in Champions Online, as well as the open power system and newer graphics. The only reasons I’ve gone back to CoH in recent months have been for nostalgia during free reactivation weekends.
The F2P plan itself is a pretty standard hybrid subscription model with an in-game store, VIP members getting point stipends monthly, and separate tiers for free players, those who’ve spent some money in the store and subscribers. The most interesting feature is that they are creating a VIP only server and giving VIPs one free transfer a month.
Hopefully the new model works just as well for Paragon Studios and NCSoft as it has for Cryptic and Turbine.
The first Season 4 build is up on Tribble (see the patch notes here and here). There are a lot of improvements, but the biggest one is the new ground combat update.
My expectations for ground combat have gone through a complete cycle from apathy to excitement. At first, I didn’t really care that it was being revamped. I’ve preferred space combat since the very first time I played the game and always treated ground combat as just a delay before getting back to my ship. As I started to get an idea of what Cryptic was doing from listening to interviews, reading the forums, and seeing sneak peaks on Twitter, I started to get more and more excited. The duty roster is still the main feature I’m looking forward to in Season 4, but ground combat has become a close second.
So I’ve spent a couple of hours playing on Tribble tonight, and I have to say that ground combat is a lot of fun now. Switching from RPG mode to FPS mode is smooth and easy to do. Opening my crew screen automatically switches to RPG mode so I can use my mouse to switch equipment around, I can tell this is a beta feature though since opening the map doesn’t do the same. The FPS aiming takes a little bit to adjust to, and it’s a little weird that your beam doesn’t hit exactly where you point since really what the aiming is doing is selecting a target not actually pinpointing where you’re firing. But it is a vast improvement over the current system.
Combat is much much faster and more exciting. Changes to shield and health stats as well as weapons, mean that battles are over in one or two minutes instead of five or ten. There’s also much less of the goofy backpedaling to deal with melee enemies.
The guns are also much more interesting and varied. In taking my main to Vice Admiral 1, I only ever used two weapons: a stun pistol and a sniper rifle. The only variation was what beam type I used. The new weapons are really fun though and I forsee a lot of swapping between the different rilfes, pistols, and assault weapons.
The only downside is, I don’t think I’ll be able to tolerate ground combat on the live server anymore.
Besides the big combat update, there’s also a neat new animated loading screen as well as a really cool new interface for ship requisition (not the C-store).
I took a few Fraps videos while playing tonight, I should have some up tomorrow to share for anyone who doesn’t have an active sub right now or doesn’t like to mess with the test server.
Want to see me talk about MMOs? I’m on Episode 49 of This Week in MMO on Gamebreaker.tv.
If you haven’t heard of it before, the Gamebreaker network is hosted by Gary Gannon (one of the founders of GAX Online) and TWIMMO is their weekly MMO news show.
While I’ve done guest spots on a couple of podcasts, they were all audio only. Doing a video show was new, exciting, and a bit scary for me. There’s a big difference between being able to talk and not worry about people seeing your reactions or fidgets, than being on camera. Plus this was the first time I’d done a show with a live chat room.
I ended up having a really good time. It’s always surprising to me how fast an hour goes when recording a show.
I’ve watched this trailer more than a dozen times today and I’m still not sick of it yet.
Ironically, I haven’t actually finished Arkham Asylum yet even though I keep planning to. Maybe this’ll provide the missing incentive?
When Catwoman was originally announced I didn’t really care. She’s an interesting side character but Batman is always the main attraction of Gotham City. The gameplay footage in this trailer looks amazing though, it almost seems like she could carry the whole game. Almost.
Champions
I was totally surprised to see Issue 1 of the first Comic Series announced on Twitter today. The initial series is called Aftershock and issue one is Dead Air. UNTIL’s Camp Lantern in North Africa is not responding to communications and scouts dispatched to investigate have not returned.
The new series is scalable so any heroes level 11 or higher can experience the new content. There are supposed to be five more weekly issues in this series.
Despite how quickly the first issue snuck up on me, I’m very excited to get in and check it out. I started playing through the second Adventure Pack Demonflame this last weekend (more on that when I finish it) and it’s not quite the experience I was hoping for. From everything I’ve read, the Comic Series are intended to be more like the excellent Featured Episodes in STO, if they turn out to be even half as good then I’ll be spending a lot more time in Champions on a regular basis again.
Star Trek
The first Dev Diary about designing the Enterprise-F is up. Most of the controversy that surrounded the winning design has subsided now based on the dev diary forum thread (or I’m just no frequenting the right parts of the forum). The current clay model is interesting. I like how close the saucer and engineering hull are to one another and the dual neck looks much more substantial now that it did in the initial sketches. My only nit to pick is the saucer is a bit too pointy.
