Player Preview - Paladins

Title: Paladins

Developer: Hi-Rez Studios

Status: Closed Beta

Official Website: http://bit.ly/1kVpHkw

Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a look at the multiplayer first person shooter, Paladins, developed by Hi-Rez Studios the same guys behind Smite and Tribes Ascend. Paladins combines first person shooting with MOBA like skills as well as a collectable card system that can increase your effectiveness out on the battlefield.

Paladins Title

The main game mode currently available in the beta has 10 players divided into 2 teams going head to head, trying to destroy the opponents Vault to win. Attacking an enemy’s vault directly is a poor decision though as there are 2 gates and multiple turrets preventing anyone getting to it. Instead you’ll need to recruit a siege engine to your cause, to weaken their defenses and finally get to destroying their vault. Enlisting one of these siege engines isn’t easy though, requiring you to capture a highly contested point as payment. There are 3 points spread across the map but only one point will be active at a time and both teams will be fighting for the capture to get that siege engine on their side.

Ruckus at the Gate

These capture points will be where most of the fighting will occur between the two teams, that and their respective bases when a siege engine is spawned. While outside of these points the map is quite open and mostly level, the structures and environment surrounding the capture points is a lot more interesting with buildings to take cover in, catwalks to get height advantages with and various environmental obstacles to work around. Newer players will be tempted to rush the point as that’s their main objective but splitting up and using the environment to your advantage is definitely the way to go, preventing any mass aoe damage to all champions and just keeping the enemy on their toes. Plus the point captures at the exact same speed with 1 champion on it as it does with all 5 members of your team so there really isn’t a reason to group up like that anyway. The distance between all the points and the bases is actually quite significant and if you were to just run back and forth it would take a long time, thankfully Paladins has taken a mechanic from Blizzard Heroes of the Storm with mounts, allowing you to get to places extremely fast, getting you straight back into the action rather than having long extended lulls as everyone tries to get back in the fight. These mounts work exactly the same as they do in Heroes of the Storm with you taking any damage automatically dismounting you and when you do dismount you won’t be able to mount again for a short period of time.

Fernando Charge

Once you or your opponent has managed to recruit the assistance of the Siege Engine the losing team will have a short passage of time to deal damage to it before it reaches their base and the first of their destroyable gates. If things go to plan the siege tank will only get through one of the gates before being destroyed however it is possible to destroy the engine before it reaches the gate while also possible for it to destroy the second gate as well depending on how well each team plays. The vault basically acts as another gate but destroying this one will win you the game, you are able to attack all the gates and the vault, at least as long as the siege engine is there, so it’s a good idea to focus fire on these objectives as opposed to enemy team members as you will usually spawn in time to contest the next capture point.

Pip Long Bombs

There are currently 7 champions in the game including Buck, armed with a shotgun, Barick, a Dwarven engineer, Cassie, and elven archer, Ruckus, a golbin operated robot, Grohk, a lightning shaman, Fernando a flamethrower wielding knight, Pip a potion lobbing fox and finally Skye a stealthy assassin. 2 more champions have been confirmed for the game with eevie being an ice mage and Androxus being a sort of military merc with a pistol and sword as well as a couple champions that have been data mined showing that Paladins plans to have an extensive champions list to pick from, all of which have been stated as being completely free to play.

The shooting mechanics of the game are what you would expect with machineguns instantly hit registering and arrows taking their time to glide across the battlefield. All the weapons in the game however have an effective range at which the projectile will simply despawn instead of just losing accuracy the further they go. It’s a mechanic feels a little odd especially as some champions have extremely short ranges with enemies health bar turning from orange to red once in range. I would have preferred that this kind of balancing stuck with a falling off accuracy style rather than the hard despawn but you do get used to it and allows for easier balancing of champions. Another shooting mechanic that Hi-Rez has stated they will be testing out is alternate fires for champions, to add a little bit more depth to what champions can do in fights, but that’s not expected for another month or so.

Buck Trapped

On the ability front, each champion has 3 activatables they can use from the very start, no levelling up required, one of these abilities will almost always be dedicated to movement weather that’s a dodge roll, a dash or a jump to help make the game a little bit more fast paced. At their base level with no card modifications applied to them, abilities act how you would expect them to act, a shield blocks damage, a turret fires on enemies and a healing totem heals allies, but with the card system in play you can actually apply quite a lot of additional effects onto these standard abilities along with your champion and their weapon, adding things like a burning effect to any enemies walking through your shield wall, increasing the damage output to allies standing near your turret or reducing incoming damage for any allies standing near your healing totem. These cards are also your only source of increasing your damage and health, if you look towards the bottom of the card you will see on the left hand side a percentage in red, this percentage is how much your damage will be increased if you pick this card and to the right is a number in green that is the amount your health will be increased. 3 of these cards will pop-up each time you level, being able to select only one of them to use so you have to decide how you want to build your character and hope that the cards you get later on support the build you’re going for. You only level 5 times during a game so your selection is extremely important especially as it’s your only source of gaining any kind of power or upgrades.

Card Selection

You only start off with a small selection of these cards that you can actually draw from for each champion, about 5 or so each, and there all basic common rarity cards. To get more cards you can use a purely free to play approach by winning games that will reward you with a basic 1 card chest as well as levelling up your account that will reward you with a radiant chest containing 5 random cards. You’ll be able to speed up this process by buying these card chests with real world money as well as using the in game currency of gold. With over 220 cards to collect too it is going to take quite a while and you will end up with a lot of duplicate cards, but you will be able to combine 3 of into a brand new card that you don’t already own. This card system however does bring paladins a lot of imbalance and, to a point, a pay to win business model similar to Hearthstone as legendary cards are just purely better than other cards both in their base stat increases and their bonus effects. Hi Rez has already tried to balance this somewhat with legendries not being a part of the first level card drops but I don’t think that will be enough, atleast not for competitive play. We still haven’t seen the constructed mode though, what will be the main competitive mode so they could be working on some more card balancing mechanics for that mode but as the casual mode stands now it’s kind of broken. Non damaging abilities can gain damaging effects, tanks can get more health and health regen and damage dealers can get more damage compared to another player playing the same character giving them an absolute advantage during a game. 

Card Comparison

Other features of the game not currently fully implemented include purchasable cosmetics for both your champions and for your mount with a founders pack mount skin already in the game and champions skins soon to be released. There is also account levelling as stated before that rewards you with card chests but this may be of more importance later on, maybe as a level requirement to participate in the competitive game mode.

Mount Skin

All together Paladins is an interesting and fun combination of the moba and first person shooter genre. It’s a game that carries that “Just one more game” competitive feeling of wanting to do better and perform more awesome plays. The card system is definitely a part of the game that needs some improvement particularly on the balance side and I can’t imagine it will be something easy to balance but it does add a lot of variety to the game and too how each champion can be played. I’d also like to see more player involvement with the siege engine like it only being able to move when champions are around it or something to increase the engines effectiveness based on how many players are escorting it, basically I wouldn’t mind seeing it turned into more of a payload. If you like Team Fortress styled fps’s, or like the ground level style of Smite, or simply just a really compelling and fun competeive FPS, then Paladins may be of interest to you.

Cassie Protecting the Point

Anyway, that’s been my player preview for Paladins. The game is currently in closed beta with access granted via the purchase of a founders pack for $20 or your regional equivalent. The game will also be coming to Mac, Linux, Xbox One and Playstation 4 at a later date. If you want to find out more about the game check out the links below. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you guys next time.

Player Preview - Dungeon Defenders 2

Title: Dungeon Defenders 2
Developer: Trendy Entertainment
Status: Open Alpha

Official Site: http://bit.ly/1kX02ao
Steam Page: http://bit.ly/1kWZZLK

Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a look at the Co-Op action tower defence game, Dungeon Defenders 2, developed by Trendy Entertainment there 2^nd major PC release after the original. Dungeon Defenders 2 has you and 3 others defending the kingdom against an onslaught of various enemies and bad guys that have just recently been freed from their prison inside gems. In your arsenal to push back the waves you have 4 towers at your disposal along with 4 abilities and offcourse an auto attack to thin out the masses.

The maps that you’ll be setting up your defences consist of 3 or more lanes with differing units and amounts coming down each one. For the early maps holding off 3 lanes as a team of 4 is pretty easy, able to get around 3 or 4 turrets and structures in each lane from wave 1. The later maps however provide extremely tricky situations with some having 6 different lanes that need to be defended spreading your defences thin not to mention that there are side objectives that need to be defended that if they are destroyed, open up even more lanes for enemies to spawn from and travel down. For the last wave of every new map you’ll be introduced to a new enemy as a more powerful boss form of itself that will head down the main lane and require focus fire from your team to defeat before it does any real damage to the objectives you’re trying to defend. These new enemies will then appear as a part of the usual waves in the later on levels only a little bit less powerful but still carrying over its special mechanics like dealing extra damage to defences or being able to soak up a ton of damage. To help you in your tower placement and lane focus the game does devote 1 of the lanes to be the lane that a majority of enemies or just the most powerful enemies will travel down. Simply holding down shift will show you the enemy spawn locations and how many enemies will be spawned from that point for the wave.

Dungeon Defenders 2 is a class based game providing 4 unique character classes to play as, each with their own unique towers, abilities, attacks and roles. These characters include a mage that focuses on damage and slowing enemies, a soldier that aims to get into the thick of it with taunts and increasing damage with each attack, a monk that buffs allies and their towers and finally an archer. As team composition is extremely important especially when you can load into a game that could have all monks for example, you can actually change your character anytime during a game, keeping any towers you placed beforehand. This feature actually also makes the game completely playable solo and for some people this may be there preferred method of getting through some of the earlier levels as if you are pubbing it there are players that like to spam all their turrets and placeables in excess filling the levels maximum defense structure limit, preventing you from placing any of your own turrets.

To increase you damage output there are also some environmental weapons you can use to help out if things do get a little bit dicey including things like ballista’s, arcane turrets and high pressure water that will deal high amounts of damage or just completely wipe out any enemies caught in the effect. You will have to take advantage of them in the later levels especially if you aren’t levelled and I imagine they will become invaluable assets in the harder difficulties. They are pretty easy to use as well, being activatable by simply hitting them with a projectile or going up to them and hitting E. Your character levels up in the game gaining skill points that you can put towards numerous different stats like tower damage, character health and a lot more. These skills can be upgraded to crazy amounts too with you earning only a couple skill points for every level up and skills able to be raised all the way up to 200 each. You also have equip able gear that will help you out with your base stats allowing you to build your character toward things like pure turret damage or build your character tanky, like the soldier, so you can go into the thick of it without getting instantly killed.

Equipment drops from enemies when they die as well as being obtainable from these end of game loot chests that will first randomly generate its contents rarity indicated by the colour on the front, then drops items and gold corresponding to that rarity grade. The item system in the game is one part of the game that does need a little bit more tweaking as you are continually inundated with items, exiting a game with around 20 or so new items most of which are downgrades. There’s even a hub world character that holds onto all the items that couldn’t fit in your 4, 16 slot bags. It kind of takes away from the excitement of getting a new item drop and becomes more of a hassle to go through each one looking for a possible upgrade. If you don’t want the cash from selling these items though and are just purely after upgrades you can set up your inventory bags to auto collect only certain rarities at the end of each wave however gold can buy some nice things back at the Tavern. 

Outside of the main game you have a bunch of merchants available to you via this Tavern that acts as a sort of hub world with other players running around doing their thing. The items that each of these different shops offer refreshes every so often so if you can’t find anything good the first time around it’s worth checking back later on plus it gives you something to spend all that extra gold on, the most important being character passive orbs that increase the effectiveness of your turrets with things like radius and damage increases as well as increasing your own stats with 8 slots available to fill once you unlock them all at higher levels. Other vendors available in the tavern to take note of are the hatchery that latter on will allow you to hatch a pet that will aid you on missions, attacking enemies and increasing your stats. There is also an equipment upgrade station that also unlocks later on in the game that allows you to upgrade your equipment to get as much out of them as possible.

Other features of the game include the ability to customize your characters look with multiple different outfits that can be mixed and matched but do cost real world money and is the main free to play cash shop purchasable. There are character lockboxes that randomly drop during missions that can be unlocked with keys, purchasable with Wyvern tokens that are obtainable by completing quests. Once unlocked you will receive a piece of the customizable outfits to use. You can have multiple characters running at the same time with enough character slots to have every class in the game plus some. If you want to play purely with people you know or perhaps even just on your own you can set-up a private lobby so that only people invited can join your group.

Altogether Dungeon Defenders 2 provided a somewhat middling experience with no real draw that had me wanting to play more. The difficulty is almost purely based on your statistics rather than any kind of skill or advanced strategies requiring you to grind out levels to deal the damage needed for certain missions. The solo experience for me was also a lot more fun as I could actually set-up various turrets in effective ways, taking advantage of certain effects and bonuses, I imagine this gets better though as you move up the difficulty ranking with players learning optimal turret positioning and cohesion between them all. If you’re after a casual wave based tower defence game that doesn’t require too much strategy or skill then Dungeon Defenders 2 may be of interest to you.

Anyway, that’s been my player preview for Dungeon Defenders 2. The game is currently in open alpha and will most likely be releasing sometime in 2016 but it is currently available to download for free on Steams Early Access. If you want to find out more about the game check out the links below. Thanks for reading and I’ll see you guys next time.