Player Preview - Nosgoth

Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a look at the multiplayer shooter, Nosgoth, developed by Psyonix, who have actually assisted in quite a lot of games creation like Xcom: Enemy Uknown, Mass Effect 3 and Gears of War as Unreal Engine experts. Games that they have solely developed include Rocket League and Arc Squadron. Nosgoth is set in the Legacy of Kain universe and has the two factions, humans and vampires, battling it out during the human rebellion.

The two factions available play very differently with humans relying on ranged weapons against the vampires up close and personal combat style. Each character in the separate factions also play differently and almost fit into certain roles, for example the scout acts as a long range sniper class while the prophet acts as a short range mage. Similarly on the vampire side, the Tyrant acts as the tank and the Deciever acts as a stealth backstabbing class. There are currently 4 differnet characters for each faction with 1 more character being worked on for each faction, the shield bearer for humans and the Summoner for Vampires. With all these different play styles it’ll hard not to find a character that you like playing and once you do find your favourite character you can start customizing them with new weapons and ability sets.

Each character in the game has 3 attacks or abilities with humans having one of the 3 slots taken up with their weapon as their default attack. These abilities and weapons can be changed with alternatives that can cater to different play styles for example if you don’t want to get up close as the glass cannon sentinel you can change out your aerial dive for a throw able bomb that deals a little bit less damage. As for weapon alternatives, they usually have 1 stat boosted in exchange for another lowered, so say this particular weapon has more damage but it also fires slower than this other weapon. While you can purchase these abilities and weapons you can also receive mysterious weapons and abilities as random drops while playing. These mysterious items have added bonus stats like faster move speed and shorter reload times. They come in 3 different rarities with each higher tier adding one more set of bonuses.

Character movement is fairly typical but does have some oddities. Instead of being able to jump you instead dodge roll as both classes. Crouch is also disabled and for a game like this is somewhat odd as sometimes you need to get slightly lower to get of your shot or to hide behind something to get away from enemy fire. Sprint is still in there though and for vampires it also acts as a way to climb walls. With the climbable walls does come sticky walls though and by that I mean you can be sprinting down an alley and suddenly jump up onto one of the side walls, a minor annoyance that can be somewhat avoided if your careful enough or by just not sprinting.

The game currently has 2 game modes with one being an experimental mode. The main game mode is a simple Team Death Match were each team takes turns playing as humans and vampires with each halfs scores tallied together to determine the winners. The game mode currently in testing, called FlashPoint, is basically a capture the point mode with a couple of slight changes. Only humans can capture points with only 2 points being capturable of the 6 at any given time. The 2 game modes play fairly similarly and is probably the largest part of the game that needs some work. Game mode alternatives are going to be hard to come by however due to humans having to stick together to be any competition to vampires. The maps currently in the game are all vastly different going from sea docks to inner city palaces with very little asset re-use and all maps having memorable landmarks, the art in the game is fantastic too especially for a free to play game.

Speaking of free to play, let’s now take a look at the free to play model behind the game. Starting on a brand new account you will only have access to 2 characters from each faction, you’ll be able to unlock the others by receiving special gems from reaching milestone account levels. As for character skins, they are only unlocked via the premium currency and cost around $7 to $12. Thay havn’t gone too crazy with skins either sticking close to the games lore. For weapons and abilities, they can both be bought with the in-game currency and the premium currency. It takes about 12 games to be able to unlock something permanently or only 2 games to unlock something for a day with the in-game currency accumulation. Due to the small line-up of characters, pysonix has also made character packs available to buy that contain 4 skins, all of that characters abilities and weapons and a special banner used while in the lobby all for $50, which is a little pricey considering you will probably only be using your favourite abilities, weapons and skin but it’s nice to have none the less.

Nosgoth is a fun melee verse ranged combat game that caters to a range of different play styles with its line-up of unique characters and abilities. The game does still need an alternate game mode with the Flashpoint mode not being that different from the Team Death match mode but the maps however are all unique and high quality keeping things fresh. I would also like to see some sort of competitive match-making or leader boards for those of us that like to be a little bit more competitive in these types of games. There are still some issues with servers synching data and connecting to your Steam account but hopefully that sorts itself out before the games official release.

That’s been my player preview for Nosgoth, the game is currently in open beta and available to play now via Steam. If you want to find out more about the game check out the links below and if you want to SEE more the game check out twitch.tv/serpentine19 this weekend. Thanks for watching, I’ll see you guys next time.

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Title: Nosgoth
Developer: Psyonix
Status: Open Beta

Official Site: http://bit.ly/1yYkkV7
Steam Page: http://bit.ly/15Oz1in