Although the officials keep saying that Neverwinter just hit open beta, it really is marketing language for ‘you can sink your money into our item shop, but we have an excuse if things go wrong’. This is common genre behavior, especially in the free to play market and I am not blaming Cryptic or PWE for that. Because they delivered a solid game and they do a hell of a job when it comes to fixing things.

I went out of my usual pattern though and rolled a tank character instead of a pure dps class. Controlling the battle field via defensive means instead of just beating the living crap out of everything is not new to me, but it has never been my main role in any game. And I honestly still don’t know if I will stick to it in the long run.

Read more

The third beta weekend passed by and judging by the fact that almost everything else out there is not really what I would consider long-term entertainment, I decided to ask my guild mates at www.matukal.de to consider the game as the main guild title. It took some tinkering, but we finally made that step and I feel good about it. The next few big hitters are months, if not years away (WildStar, Elder Scrolls Online) and I hate just sitting around, masturbating.

So what is Neverwinter, now that the Beta Weekends are over and what does it mean for this site? Additionally, something broke when I moved to a new webspace, so I am currently trying to get my uploader back to work again – which means that this blog post comes without any screenshots or the like. Next one will come with media as usual.

Read more

Since I wasn’t able to playtest Neverwinter in the past, Beta Weekend 2 happened to fall in a few days of vacation, I ‘accidently’ took for my first hands-on with the game. And I am not regretting anything. The game still has some points I’d rather see worked on until the game goes into open beta/release, while the biggest question for me was: If Cryptic was to release the game today, would I play it?

Let’s find out.

Read more

Sometimes, a game completely vanishes from your radar, pops up a few months later and you are all like ‘What? Why did I miss that one?’. Of course, there are the obvious titles you can’t miss, because they facehump you even before you have seen long and stable alpha footage (The Elder Scrolls Online anyone..). I still can remember that Neverwinter was first announced as some coop/singleplayer action combat RPG. Well, guess what: It has become a full fledged MMO published by PerfectWorld.

Yes, Perfect World. They weren’t really famous for outstanding titles in the western MMO market, but they really did a great job with STO and developed themselves along with Cryptic to a force to be reckoned with in the competitive market of online gaming.

Read more

Achievements. This type of feature suddenly popped up a long time ago and pretty much any game that came after World of Warcraft implemented very extensive achievement systems to the point where getting achievements became completely silly.

Not only that the games of today reward you for literally doing nothing, the whole system defies its very own name nowadays, because the least thing you do, when earning achievements is actually ‘achieving’ something.

Read more

After completing the Tutorial, something I found quite refreshing after returning to the game and popping up in the MC5 area, I headed directly to the Gen-Rep. I slightly remember some kind of newbie quest in this region, but I also recall that it wasn’t worth doing. Neocron is waiting.

My first steps in the kind of aged gameworld reveal that a lot has changed regarding the population. Plaza 1 and even the rest of the city looks like its pulsating with life once again and it even felt great to see the first PvP between some people in Plaza 2. Although I’ve never really played the game for more than a few days before, it instantly felt great to be back.

Read more

Happy new year to whoever is checking the feed on this blog. Stunningly, I retained at least some readers even when I didn’t update this page for ages. I was quite shocked though, when I saw that my last post was something I wrote back in the time I played Guild Wars 2 and I didn’t even started doing some of the tournament coverage I was planning. Too bad though, since I had some fine footage resting on my hard-drive. Anyways! No good MMO in the year of 2012, it seems. Which brought me back to Neocron: After KK went bankrupt (sadly), a team of voluntary helpers got permission to keep the game up and running and even managed to push out a quite big patch recently.

The game really feels quite alive and after some toying with different starter-characters, I finally managed to make contact with the guys of The Green Machine, who I know back from my days in Earthrise. This is the story of my character within the vast world of Neocron and its player, more of a newb to this game than not.

Read more

The hype hammer has been swung wildly and valiantly – even more in the last hours before headstart and the official Guild Wars 2 release. To date, the game has surpassed my personal expectations, especially since they were gradually low on the PvE side. The original Guild Wars wasn’t a game that had the best PvE experiences out there, in fact it was quite the opposite. Seems that Arenanet upped their MMO forging skills in every aspect.

Of course, the release wasn’t smooth as in ‘comletely flawless, no login problems at all’ but considering the massive hype that may have been quite bigger than the one created for SWTOR, one could argue that their communication and speed in which problems have been adressed, evens all the thechnical issues out. At least for me – and since most players out there have been to at least one MMO release somewhere before, expecting a flawless experience on launch day would have been kind of delusional anyways.

Read more

One of the Guild Wars 2 features that deserves more attention than most of the stuff people are constantly talking about right now is how they set up their server architecture. Because they really pushed the genre forward and out of a stupid and inflexible system. With Guild Wars 2, the server technology breaks the chains of the past and gives players a lot more freedom when it comes down to server choice and every consequence that follows that decision.

 

Playing with people of your native language in a competitive environment but got casual friends on another world? No problem, Guild Wars 2 has you covered. Disclaimer: For the sake of terminology, I will use ‘world’ as the term that describes game servers or realms in other games.

Read more

Dear summer, thank you for finally arriving in Germany when I am locked into my place, recovering from a recent knee injury. I didn’t want to go swimming or participate in the upcoming Airborn Fit Run and Strongman Holland anyways. That effectively reduces the extreme/event runs I participated in this year to … one. There are effectively no words to describe how fucked up that is. And to top it all off, I am massively proven wrong regarding Guild Wars 2. Despite all my scepticism, the game might will be in charge of the upcoming cold months in my spare time.

 

In other related news, you probably heard that DayZ will become a standalone title. This is pretty awesome news because this could mean that all the current problems of the mod (Duping and Hacks) will maybe be a thing of the past when the game gets released. Smite is shaping up just nicely by the way, with some new gods and the game getting ready for ranked play. I really hope that Hi-Rez won’t dissapoint the competitive scene with this title, since it is a niche addition to the existing MOBA games.

Read more