Eden Eternal: Not Sure How to Feel About It

Yeah, it’s another one of those Anime inspired MMORPG’s. Anime is pretty popular so why would it ever stop? Me, I don’t care if the game is made based off an Anime or Western culture. I’m only concerned about two things. Is the gameplay enjoyable and how big of a grind-fest it is before you can do the awesome stuff.

My associate Aron wanted to try this game so I decided to try it myself. MMO’s aren’t exactly keen on story (there are exceptions, but this isn’t one of them) so I skipped mentioning it. This one is especially generic, so more reason not to touch it on these grounds. Let’s see if it’s worth picking up in terms of game play, shall we?

Gameplay: The controls are the standard WASD movement and or point and click. Combat it click and watch your character beat the crap out of the enemy, so nothing new there, then again it’s not exactly bad, for all we know the developers wanted to keep accessibility high so they made it like that.

One thing I have to say is that I’m surprised by (and impressed with) the fact that you don’t need to make multiple characters (of the same race) because of the way the games class system works. You pick between Warrior and Mage to start with, but from there you can change classes as you level up on the fly. So you could become EVERY CLASS IN THE GAME! As of writing this the game has 15 classes available for us to fool around with, so yeah this aspect I REALLY ENJOY. But it takes more than that to keep me amused/committed.

The combat is the standard “click and enjoy” prevalent in the genre, so nothing more to say on that. Weapons and Armor have durability and speaking of which this game, like any douche bag does will ruin this for you at the worse possible moment. When you die everything on you loses 10% of its current durability and if that wasn’t bad enough death is also murder on the experience points front. I have no clue what the industry standard norm is for these matters (quite frankly I would like this to be listed under the constitution under Cruel and Unusual punishment on games with lots of grind), but you lose 50% of you experience points. No matter how you come back from the dead (except if you get one of those leaves from the Item Mall, AND the death was not in a Dungeon (nice to know Areia Games aren’t complete dicks, but who knows how long that will remain true)) you will always lose these. Some of you might think that it’s part of the challenge and if I don’t like it then I’m a scrub, but to you who think like that I would like to state I’m not fond of masochism and fear to see how you plan on disciplining your children. Here’s hoping that it’s not possible to actually level down as an end result.

Speaking of grind, it does start to feel like a drag around Level 30. I will say that this is the first MMORPG I have ever played that I managed to get over Level 20 in under a week, so congrats on that, but I’m really starting to feel it after beating the Vile Shark HQ (a five player Dungeon) after dying who knows how many times and spending three days stuck on it, going through several groups until I found one that I could work well with. I did find it funny that an Illusionist could use Mind Control on a boss and have it work, so it was worth every single misshape in between to see it.

The game has Guilds, but as it seems to be the norm the cost to make one is fairly large. I’m part of one on the Emerald server called Kaze (it means wind), all part of the reviewing experience, also I was curious how it would be, so I went what the hell and accepted the random invite. When I did most quests part of my reward would be given to the Guild, and no I had no say in it, but I would have liked one. They give you an option to donate Silver & Gold to the Guild so this feels like overkill. To expand on the Guild feature, you can have Guild Towns for the low, low price of 5000 Gold (or 5000000 Silver since 1000 Silver coins equals 1 Gold coin)! While the guild town can give you a place to buy & sell stuff and other functions I’m not sure of, it’s really only a good investment for a Guild that has zero life. The Guild town only sticks around as long as people are active and if something unforeseeable happens in real life (like a relative dying, house on fire or choosing to simply take a break from the game for a period of time) they take the town from you. All that Gold, all that grinding gone, for nothing which why I would never start a Guild in this game.

Speaking of grind, there is a lot more of it than in most MMO’s I’ve played. You grind for your character level and grind for your class level. In order to use some classes you have to have a class level in one or two other classes AND your class level can never exceed your character level, which makes a lot of sense but just serves to make the grind even more…grindy.

The interface can be quite cumbersome at times, especially if in a Raid and if you need to click on a person to target them it could be somewhat of a delay, or if you have a sizeable quest screen (not sure if they can be adjusted) it gets bothersome moving it out of the way to click on those alerts like Legend Acquired, and when you click on a quest to go to its location your character seems to go all over the place.

Land mass can also be an issue like the Vile Shark HQ run. Sometimes a pile of bones got in my way (that my character could walk over easily in any other game) and I couldn’t Oni Rush the enemy, or intercept a foe soon enough to get the mobs off our Healers. Here’s hoping they address these issues.

One thing did bother me that seems to enforce grinding and pressure you into going into the cash shop is that you cannot Power Level anyone. If someone in your party is more than five levels higher than you then you get no experience points or drops. This means I can’t help a friend level up fast and I’m stuck waiting or they can’t catch up, get discouraged and quit.

If that doesn’t make you quit then the limited bag space sure will. Those slots fill up fast, and the storage house/bank isn’t any better. You can buy other packs to give yourself more room, but the gold they take to get makes things more grindy, but you could purchase from the cash shop for about $3 if you wanted to add 10 more slots to it. Bank is far worse since its extra slots are temporary AND CAN COST REAL LIFE CASH AND IS ABOUT $1 A SLOT.

Judgment: This game to me is rather luke warm. I don’t exactly hate it but I don’t exactly like it either. While I love the ability to become any class the grind and death penalties really suck that out. If you want to check it out, be my guest. If you like it that’s fine, if not that’s fine too. I just feel so neutral on this game. Who knows, something will probably come along sooner or later and make me go one way or the other.

Coming Attractions!

Hello, Kawaiido here.

I’ve been digging around for a bit and found some games that will make interesting review fodder. They will be reviewed in no particular order:

Eden Eternal

Hello Kitty Online

Allods

Mortal Online

Ederon

I’m just posting this up since I can’t sleep (again) so I can let you all know what to expect down the pipe.

Musing: Fun Should NEVER be Sacrificed For “Balance”

As some of you might know, I have been playing League of Legends for about two months now. In those months I haven’t been playing ranked games (for those who don’t know to play in Ranked matches you must be Level 30 and as of this post I’m Level 15) but I have been feeling the overall effect of the changes made to them for the sake of “balance”. Why do I use “balance” in such a condescending way? I do so because it’s very hard to do no matter how you set the game up from the beginning.

Let’s take Pokémon for example. Sure, I would LOVE to see my Jigglypuff stomp the face of Legendary Pokémon but statistics state that it’s impossible in higher levels of play because the numbers don’t support it because they just have too great a curb in power between them. Sure there are some examples where true balance can be attained, but these are so few they are pretty much the stuff of legends (Chess and Go are the best example I can think of, and from what I hear Starcraft 2, but since I never played that game I cannot comment on that facet). Gamefreak wouldn’t want to put in the work, otherwise we would be talking about another programming change so drastic that our Pokémon couldn’t be transferred to the next game (or so I hear, don’t quote me on that) thus alienating a large batch of its player base, so Weedle will NEVER be able to defeat Zapdos, but let’s get back to the point I was trying to make.

As I was saying earlier I felt the effect of these changes even though I had not played in the upper levels in League of Legends and have no desire to play at such a level because I hear they can ban Champions, and God help me if the three the opposing team bans are the only once I feel I’m really good with, then I become a liability to my team! I felt the effects with the re-works of Champions I had gotten the hang of (it was a SLOW process). Annie’s damage was nerfed all around, Sona won’t really be healing much after the next patch and the Support role is becoming more “action packed” while still leaving them too squishy for this to work. So in a short amount of time, Riot has basically told me to go fuck myself three times in two months while wearing a shit eating grin (Annie & Sona were the first Champions I felt good with and I liked playing the Support role), and I found out WHY Riot had decided to do this. I would like to quote a Summoner named Quantumprophecy because he or she said it in a way that hit me.

“Before I begin let me say, this will be fairly long and there will not be a TLDR. If you aren't here to read a well thought critique of Riot's design philosophy then go somewhere else please.


The Normalization of Champion Power Curves

In the last few months we have seen a fast growing trend in Riot's champ design. We can see it in both the new champs released and the reworks and/or buffs of old champs. What is this design philosophy? It's the normalization of champion power curves. And believe it or not, this philosophy is one of the contributers to many of the other problems we are seeing in the game at the moment. Junglers being to strong in lane, support+AD bot, and many other problems are either directly or indirectly being caused by this.

Now before I go further, let me clarify what a champion's power curve is. A champion's power curve is a term to decide how strong a champion is at different points in the game. Champion's such as pre-rework Tryn would have a low power curve early game, and a much higher one late game. Leblanc on the other hand would have a very high curve early game, and lower later. It's important to realize though that this is all very general. It's not like there are power levels or numbers associated with it. It's all very general and relative.

So where's the problem you may be asking? Well Riot seems to be moving away from varying power curves on champs and normalizing them across the board, with copious amounts of proof to support this. Consider practically all new champs released, regardless of OP or UP. Yorick, Leona, Wukong, Skarner, all incredibly normalized curves. They don't excel at any point in the game, or blow at any other. Now consider champs such as Vayne. Her primary role is meant to be that of a carry, a role characterized by having a bad early game in exchange for much stronger late game scaling. Vayne doesn't fit that definition at all. Vayne is incredibly easy to do well with early game, while being an extremely viable carry come late game.

We can see even more evidence in many of the reworks Riot has put out. Looking back at Annie's rework, one of the reason's given for having it in the first place was to make Annie more viable late game. Look at Allistar and Gangplank. Do either of them have weak points throughout the game? Consider Kayle's rework as well. Another case where one reason given for the rework was to strengthen her early game in exchange for less power early game. Similar reason's were given for Tryn's rework. Even looking into the future, there has been minor talk about Poppy getting nerfs, with reasons behind it being that her late game carrying ability is to high, and in exchange (again) she will have her early game buffed some.

So you might be asking, how is this philosophy destroying the game? Well beyond the obvious fact that it's creating less interesting features between champions, it's also part of the reason we are seeing support+AD bot all over the place. Ranged AD champs will almost always be necessary. But what lane are we to put them in? They can't solo top. They will get demolished by a whole slew of tanky dps with normalized curves, excellent early games coupled with fairly high carry potential late game, such as Jarvin and Irelia. Mid? Nope, can't do that either because of AP carries all with normalized curves. Brand and Annie? Incredible lane presence early, monster burst late game. So that leaves 1 place. Bot lane. But how do you keep the enemy team from sending a strong duo lane against them? Conveniently enough, you make their lane mate a support champ, in a sense helping to strengthen the Ad champs early game.

Another thing this philosophy has brought about, is the laning of great jungle champs. The need for strong laners has become so great that people have started bringing junglers out to lanes in an attempt to dominate early game.

So the final question to ask ourselves is, why is Riot doing this? Well, Riot is actively seeking to make the game more action packed(!) and in their eyes, playing a carry who doesn't start to do anything till late game, or an AP champ that dies off late game, isn't very fun. Okay, I can understand that. Maybe not agree with it, but understand it.


So that it's. My own personal critique on Riot's new favorite design philosophy. I'm not looking for upvotes. I'm not looking for red responses. I'm not even looking to start a discussion. I just like writing things like this up and getting them out to the community to hopefully open peoples eyes a bit about where this game is actually going.

Enjoy and thanks for reading.”

Click here if you want to see the entire thread (assuming it’s still there)

Homogenization (third meaning) is the word of the day, readers. While I can understand the need for it I can’t help but feel that “balance” wants to kill my fun to death. In Chess, it works because all the pieces are the same and it comes down to who’s smatter/luckier/more arrogant/short sighted, but in games like League of Legends or fighting games PEROID the characters are designed differently because they all fight differently, they effect the game differently. Some cases can be so outrageous that they MUST be bought into line somehow (Akuma, anyone?) while others stem from bad choices, ignorance of the character or just plain vindictive nature of people (Example: “I hate Annie, so I’m going to convince the Riot staff that she’s busted so I can stomp her more easily because I can’t suck she’s just busted! Never mind the fact she’s designed to be able to hit like a truck yet be squishy enough to die in under three seconds!”).

So because of the completive set I and those like me have to suffer for it. But they don’t care, and they never will because to a good deal of them think the “casual player” is a subspecies that doesn’t matter. Then you have the vocal minority that sounds louder than it is complaining on the forums about these things, and the egomaniacs on the site who flash drag there high ELO rating into the mess or your low or non-existent ELO rating into things in an attempt to discredit you just because you don’t spend as much time as he does trying to make his ELO rating big to compensate for his small dick. Even if you got a valid point it gets washed away in the mess produced by the circle jerking.

This is not helped by how Riot plans to just club Support to death. My idea of fun in this game is not to get killed repeatedly (but it tends to happen anyway if my Tank gets killed), so I pick support mostly so I can affect the tide of battle WITHOUT having to start fights, but my role is being made obsolete because of homicidal, psychopathic easily bored sociopaths that get pissed off if what they attack doesn’t die in less than five seconds. You want that kind of instant death gratification where Healers can’t stave death? Join the Army. I assure you that no Healer can sustain someone who got there head blown off by a sniper round.

I’m sorry if this seemed all over the place but it just came to me tonight after browsing the League of Legends forums. Anyway, feel free to post your thoughts on this.

First Impression: Remnant Knights

Oh my God! I never thought I would meet a game that would piss me the fuck off before I barely even started playing it. Just a warning this is going to be more angry rant than review since the game wouldn’t stop acting retarded! Remnant Knights is another Anime inspired MMO (surprise, surprise). This one is hosted at Game Samba about two schools that fight one another for one reason or the other.

The first thing that got me mad was the start up time for the game. It took nearly 15 seconds after starting it up before I could play, while more reasonable ones might only eat up about six at most telling me who made it and had rights to it. When I finally got it started I logged in and went to create my character. Turns out the games character customization is even more poor than a third world country. That’s right, AFRICA sends aid to THIS GAME!

It’s bad enough that I can’t adjust the skin tone of the character (I guess only white people play video games, right?) but the eyes were locked as well, attached to each face change. The hair was okay through, I will grant them points for letting me change the color of it to such a finite point but that’s pretty much where it ends. They have two different costumes for each school at the base level, but as I looked into what the more advance class would look like in each school THE RIVAL SCHOOLS SHARE THE SAME COSTUMES FOR THE ADVANCE CLASSES! WHAT THE FUCK IS WITH THAT!? THESE ARE RIVAL SCHOOLS! ARE YOU TELLING ME THE PEOPLE WHO DESIGNED THIS GAME COULDN’T BE BOTHERED TO MAKE THE ART TEAM DRAW UP DIFFERENT ADVANCED CLASS UNIFORMS FOR EACH FACTITION!?

I guess they got lessons from Valve on making non repeating character design (looking at YOU Team Fortress 2, you lazy bastards who couldn’t fucking bother to make the Red and Blu characters different from one another other than sticking them in different colored shirts). This really bothers me since lack of customization means I can’t really get involved with the character I’m creating, so for me these things you might consider petty really bother me (but I would like to state on the record if the gameplay is solid enough I could look passed it). The nail on the coffin is that you can only create characters for one school per SERVER!

But the bitchfest doesn’t end there. When I logged in I went through the tutorial and as I was navigating different menu screens, closing them or clicking on some things in them would cause my character to act brain dead and run into walls (repeatedly), or move to places before I was ready. Also combat. It seems rather slippery. My attacks didn’t respond too well. When I clicked on an enemy my character didn’t attack dead on, and clicking on things sometimes required repeated clicking to get stuff to work. NO WONDER THE GAME HAS LITTLE TO NO PLAYERS ON IT!

So, if you want to piss yourself off or are looking for a game to recommend to someone you hate, I highly recommend Remnant Knights. Maybe you can look passed these things, but I can’t. I was hoping to try something that would amuse me and cheer me up after having such a long a stressful week, but now I’m more pissed off than I was before.

Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes

I randomly throw darts at the internet and hit a target without looking. I'll be trying this game IF I'm selected for the Beta coming up. Check this out!

First Impression: Elsword

I’ve seen advertisements all over for this, so I decided to give it a shot. For those of you who are new, a First Impression is a review that’s done off the cuff based on the information gained in playing it for one day. Elsword is a side scrolling, semi-3D beat-em-up. There are four characters to choose from, each having their own methods of attack. For this I choose the Magic character, Aisha.

At first, I thought I would have a good time. The buttons were a standard attack, a special attack and four skills that could be set to hotkeys. As you level up you can allocate skill points to strengthen or acquire new Passive or Active abilities for your character to give them new tricks.

What MMO is complete without quests? I forgot to mention this had some RPG elements, but just like any game with grinding, your “quests” consist of repeating the same dungeon, just on a higher difficulty setting and it gets OLD REALLY QUICK! It’s just go in and go out (At least in Rusty Hearts your quests might have you repeating a dungeon but they added a twist like “finish without getting hit over 20 times or beat it with a certain rank”).

So I thought I’d take the magical girl into PvP, turns out she’s CRAP in the arena! Elsword (the character the game is named after) is supposed to be weak to magic (see: Informed Flaw) but I noticed no significant advantage to unleashing my magic on him but Elsword could tear me up nicely (then again he IS the main character, so he has to be superior to my character by default, right?). My next complaint is the mana system in the game. Apparently, your maximum Mana doesn’t increase as you level up (Aisha is supposed to be a genius mage) and you don’t start off dungeons or in PvP with max Mana either, not to mention the mana gets eaten up so fast when you use a spell, along with cool down time on the spells. WHAT FUCKING SENSE DOES IT MAKE TO HAVE A DAMN COOLDOWN ON THE FUCKING MOVES IF THE GODDAMN MANA GAUGE DOESN’T GET OVER 300 MP AND MOSTLY GETS CHEWED UP AFTER USING A SINGLE FUCKING SPELL!? Needless to say I certainly wasn’t feeling like a magic user at all, just some little girl beating people down with a stick. This would be a non-issue if only the spells hit harder in PvP (seriously, there seems to be no damage advantage to hitting anyone (I might as well spam the standard attacks) with them in PvP (outside of disruption to bail my team out if need be), ESECIALLY ELSWORD!

The boxes I find now and then are also asinine. They’re locked and you need to buy something to break the lock. Let me get this straight…the characters are too retarded to bust open the lock, or melt it off (Aisha, the Genius Magician MY ASS! NOTHING IN THE DISCRIPTION SAYS ITS HEXED AGAINST ALTERNATE METHODS OF OPENING)?

The next thing that led me to this tirade was the controls. Yeah, they were easy to grasp, but I got some seriously aching hands playing it for just an hour. If only this game had a setting for controller use. I took some serious points off for that. Speaking of controls, the game lacks a block button. You are limited to just sticking and moving and God help you if the opponents moves have higher priority than yours (in my case I could barely get in a hit without getting seriously pummeled). Part of the learning curb, so…yeah. To support how much Aisha sucks (as of this post) THERE ISN’T A SINGLE AISHA USER IN THE PVP TOP 10! The Elf is up there at the top, but nothing can beat Elves, right? Not even Elsword.

The final nails in the coffin were the cash shop and the stamina system. The costumes are asinine in price. Let’s say you find an awesome bundle to dress your character up in. The ones I’ve seen cost $13. It gets worse. The clothing goes away after a set period of time. They do have an option for you to keep it I believe (some of the text comes off weird in the Item Mall) all for DOUBLE THE PRICE! The stamina system keeps you from playing as long as you’d like (not like you’re missing much) and can be gone through QUICK with repeating the same dungeon over and over.

It’s all a pretty, pretty lie! I’m fond of Anime, but even my love for it couldn’t shield me from the suck that is this game. All I know is with all the factors I mentioned I can’t be bothered to go back into it to do a more in depth review, nor make a video to demo it because it frustrated and bored me too much. If you want, you can play it here, but you won’t be seeing me in game (if you love it, then good for you).

Sorry for another negative review so soon. I’m disappointed too because I feel like I’m coming of as a caustic critic.

Revenge of the Titans

Today Aron here to Review Revenge of the Titans, an indie tower defense game.
Before I continue on I want to say I’m a lover of TD games and am quite good at them, I installed and started this up thinking, I’ll blitz through it like I do other TD games…boy was I wrong.

There are about six kinds of offensive towers in this game, The Blaster, which is your standard gun nothing special, The heavy blaster, an upgraded blaster that can pierce through armor, the Rapid blaster, a stronger version of the blaster, not as strong as the heavy blaster, but has rapid fire,
The Blaster cannon, which is a stronger version of the Heavy Blaster and has higher armor piercing, the other two I don’t know about because I have yet to get them.

The Turrets run on an ammo system and after a cretin amount of shots they need to reload so be careful where and how you place the turrets.

There are special buildings you can place for buffs on the Turrets, such as a Cooling tower to increase fire rate, and a battery to increase Max ammo on each turret, see which combos work well for what situation.
Threes also the classic barricade to slow done the titans, which can be helpful

The Aliens or, Titans, the enemies of this game, all range from tiny, medium, large, and OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL IS THAT! Size. The size of the titan seems to tell how much damage the thing will do to your turrets or base, which means the OMGWTHT size titans, will one shot everything in it’s path including your base.
The turrets are placed anywhere you wish by the way, the base is in a fixed location on the map.

Money is required to build theses turrets, and money is gotten by refining crystals with a refinery another building you can place next to crystals, it has no defenses so make sure you protect it if anything gets near it

Speaking of Defenses the turrets and other things that can be built require you to go into research branches, some of them give bonuses to your turrets and others just help you get farther in researching.

Now onto my experience with this game, the first few levels were a breeze, it did a nice job trying to ease me into the research and game mechanics, when I hit about level Five it started to pick up in difficulty which made me have to kick into a higher gear sooner then I normally do when I play a TD which was a pleasant surprise, but when I got to the first boss, oh god did it hit me! It took me about Seven times to figure out, I needed to think less defensively and more offensively then I normally do the Difficulty of the game takes a HUGE jump when it comes to a boss level I’ve only taken down two bosses, and looking forward to the others because of this massive jump

I would Recommend getting this game, in the Humble game 3 pack if you enjoy a hard TD game, this will have you coming back for more Now excuse me, I need to get back to defending the mars base! Did I mention each stage is on different planets as you progress, if I didn’t, I did now that’s right your fighting to protect the solar system! Now I got to dash more titans are approaching on my location general Aron out!

A Planned Article: Cash Shop Influence

Hello, readers. As you know I tend to not really bother with premium content in MMORPG’s on the grounds on I’m afraid I might find that I do not like the game…that and I don’t have much in the way of disposable income. My silent partner will not always support me and I’m what you might call working class poor and being a professional student makes things tighter.

I wanted to do something on the true effects of cash shops on performance by playing two characters in one game. One that will have the full benefits of a cash shop at her beck and call and one who will have to slog his way through the length of the game as just the average grinding freeloader (not meant to be taken as an insult). I already have a game in mind to fully explore this. One Eden Eternal to be exact. It would be written in by the perspective of each character. Each character would be played through for a week each, so it would be a two week project before my findings get posted.

While the character that is using the Cash shop will bare my name the other character will only be revealed by the time the experiment is done.

To do this at its absolute fullest I require around $50 (since that’s the most AP you can get in one sitting) to get this started. I don’t expect it all to come from one person, in fact if 50 people contributed $1 that would be great.

The donation button is at your right. If I don’t get enough to do this than no big deal, I’ll just fill it with something else. I’m in the process of reviewing the game as we speak anyway. Just me going on about a possible follow up to my cash shop musing, you know putting my money where my mouth is.