Category: Mmorpg

New DLC Announced for Trion’s MMORPG Defiance to Launch in December

Marion Burke Mmorpg
New DLC Announced for Trion’s MMORPG Defiance to Launch in December

Trion has already launched the Castithan Downloadable content pack (or DLC for short), back in August (2013) for their latest MMORPG shooter game Defiance. The Castithan DLC pack included a ton of new side missions, new story missions for the Castithan race, the combat Arena, a new four player vehicle, and as the DLC pack suggests you also get the option to create a Castithan playable character.

The new update also included a large variety of new charged weapons such as the lightsaber style swords, shotguns, sniper rifles and pistols. The charged weapons work similar to the charged plasma pistol from the popular video game Halo, so that players can do a bit more damage with their weapons by holding down the fire button to charge up attacks.

Defiance has gone through a lot of changes over the past several months as the developers updated how items drop and how stats stack with higher ego level weapons to help make the game a bit more fun and balanced. So far, I really like where the game is going with its updates. There is still a minor problem with the new quick chat function, but hopefully they will change it back to the way the old one worked so that you can communicate with your teammates without leaving the action, but other than that they have fixed majority of the flaws that the game had during launch.

The official Defiance website has announced that the new DLC pack “Arkbreaker” is planned to launch on December 10 to add more content to the game, such as the ability to call down Arkfalls to explore inside them, which sounds a lot like raid missions to me. They will also be adding Cold fire weapons, new monsters, and new abilities. The development team has also announced that they will be opening up the main campaign missions for cooperative play so that you can now play them with up to four players instead of them being locked to single player. All of the Arkbreaker content can be found on the Official Defiance Arkbreaker blog pos t.

The Castithan DLC pack is priced at $9.99 USD, and although the new DLC isn’t out yet I think that it is safe to guess that the second DLC pack will be listed around the same price. If you buy the season pass you can get all five DLC packs for a cheaper price.

If you would like to read more about the DLC packs and all of their content, please visit Trion worlds and Defiance official website.

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Marion Burke Mmorpg
Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning – the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

As an avid MMORPG player, I have heard about Warhammer Online being released for a number of months until recently it was finally released. I purchased and downloaded the game directly online from Direct2Drive and got to playing.

The first thing I noticed was the excessive and completely unnecessary bombardment of introductory graphics amp; sounds. Having to go through three or four of these five-second company logo clips is extremely irritating, especially in the midst of a conversation in Ventrilo or Teamspeak. Obviously this is expected since most companies want to boast about their creation but the addition of extraneous sound effects and low key music really makes starting up the game a minor annoyance.

Anyways, as we continue to venture into Warhammer Online it becomes quite evident why it was so highly anticipated. The game revolves around this “Realm vs. Realm” concept which was a huge success in Mythic’s previous game “Dark Age of Camelot”. This RvR concept is quite interesting and EAMythic has every right to flaunt it considering how exciting attacking or defending a keep can be. Of course there is a downside to this. A player will not be exposed to this RvR concept until level 40 and even then, if your character isn’t properly geared then you can expect to be repeatedly killed – But before I jump this far ahead I feel it is fair to discuss some of the early level experiences.

The first thing I noticed is how much Warhammer Online follows the typical MMORPG cliché. The first thing you will notice is the main stream method of leveling is (you guessed it) questing. The quests are exactly as expected, kill 8 of this mob, find 5 spoiled mushrooms, slay this boss mob, and so on. Nothing out of the ordinary but Mythic did implement something never really seen before.

Public Quests is an alternate route of leveling which also gives you area influence experience, which at the end can be turned in for some decent items. This is cool but a major flaw with this is the oversaturation of public quests in a giant zone. You will quite frequently find yourself in a situation where there aren’t enough public at one public quest due to so many other ones. Public quests though should not be misconstrued as a good source of experience. It generally isn’t, the experience is just a benefit from gaining Area Influence XP at the same time.

Well – You will find yourself doing these quests and public quests for all the way to 40. Along the way you can join scenarios which can be basically compared to World of Warcraft’s battlegrounds. Scenarios are a great source of experience and can be enjoyable if you know what you are doing. This was a major annoyance to me, the fact that I didn’t know what our team was supposed to be doing. The only hint you receive is a extremely vague popup message which goes something along the lines of “The Troll has been Pacified” or similar depending on the scenario you are in. With enough time I finally figured out the extremely strange game concept Mythic implemented for scenarios. It goes along the line of grabbing a central object and taking it to grounded artifacts.

Well I would love to continue to rant about the game but I personally feel that there isn’t enough to rant about since the entire game is pretty much revolves around the concept of what I mentioned above. I purposely left out hardware / computer specification issues because it wasn’t an issue for me – although a few of my friends did have problems with it which indirectly effected me. Regardless, I don’t recommend diving into this game anytime soon. It has lots of issues and inconsistencies which need to be addressed by EAMythic. I am sure it will be a great game in a few months from now, but in the mean time there is no rush to buy this game other than for the experience.