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 - Heroes of the Storm

Title: Heroes of the Storm
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Status: Open Beta
Release Date: June 2nd, 2015

Official Site: http://blizz.ly/1Kw95Gk

Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a look at the free to play MOBA, Heroes of the Storm, developed by Blizzard Interactive. Blizzard has collected all its existing IP’s and put them all together in a faster, objective based take on the MOBA genre.

The core of the gameplay still remains true to the MOBA genre with lanes that you can push down alongside creeps that continuously spawn. You still have an average of 4 abilities to work with and the character roles are split into fairly common groups like Assassin, Warrior, Support and Specialist. The first team to destroy the enemies home base wins, the usual. But Heroes has made some small changes here and there that have made quite a significant difference, shaking up the formula to give us a more action packed game that lasts around 15 – 20 minutes rather than 30 minute to an hour. The biggest difference from other mobas is the addition of objective based maps, you’re not restricted to the one map, instead there are currently seven different maps with 7 different objectives tied to them. In a couple of the maps you don’t even have to touch the enemies’ base to be able to destroy it and win, purely by playing the objective.

The gamemodes in Heroes can pretty much be split into 2 groups. There are the collection game modes where you have to collect tokens, skulls, seeds or what have you and turn them in to gain a boss creature that in some cases you can take direct control over or have a pirates cannons rain down on your enemies base. This game mode equates for 4 of the 7 maps, the other 3 maps however are based around capturing points to gain a similar kind of reward. The power or bonus that you receive from completing a main objective is extremely important and turns the focus away from winning a lane or getting as many kills as you can to a more team fight focused strategy that has players leaving lanes as soon as an objective becomes available. All of the maps include monster camps situated in what could be considered the jungle. Once defeated you can capture the camp and have the monsters march on with your offensive in a lane. These monsters deal significantly more damage and have a bunch more health, when protected from enemy attacks they can deal a bunch of damage to your enemies structures, especially if you defeat and capture the boss monster of the map.

On the ability side of things you’re given all of your abilities except your ultimate straight of the bat. When you do level up you don’t decide what ability to gain or upgrade to the next level instead you are given numerous options to choose from via the trait system that can be a passive upgrade, for example life steal on attacks, or it can add effects to your existing abilities, for example adding a stun to an ability. Or it can be an addition of an activatable, for example an activatable shield. This gives some room to move and adapt to what would best suit your team and counter the enemy team. When it comes time to pick your ultimate ability you will have 2 choices that are usually vastly different in their functions. One can be an AOE damage dealer while the other can be a skillshot stun and allows you to specialise in the ability that will suit your team composition better.

Some of the more common mechanics that you would expect from a game in the MOBA genre have been tweaked and some just completely removed. Last hitting minions has been taken out and instead you just need to be near a minion when it dies to gain experience however this experience will be shared by your whole team and your team will level up as one unit as oppose to individual levels, so it’s a pretty good idea to have someone in each lane at all times. Purchasable items have been removed so you no longer have to worry about what item to buy next time you visit the store or have to worry about the items your enemy has purchased instead this decision making falls to the Trait system that only gives you 4-6 options each level milestone. Enemy fortifications have also been tweaked significantly with 2 ballistic towers and a gate that will need to be taken down to proceed onto a larger base like structure that has more health, ammo, range and a slow effect on its attacks. To help keep you in the fight there is also a fountain next to the base structure that provides healing and mana regeneration every minute or so making so you don’t have to recall back to your teams spawn every time you get low on health or mana.

Progression outside of the game has you leveling both your account level which rewards you with gold and boosters as well as access to the ranked mode and Team ranked mode. Then there is also hero levels for each individual hero that before you reach level 25 on your account will unlock more trait options for that hero. Later on you will also start unlocking re colours for your hero and your mount, a special Master Skin will also be unlocked for each hero at level 10 respectively.

Other features of the game include 6 alternate match making ques with ranked, ranked team, Quick match, Versus AI, Practice and Custom Matches. Being based off the Star Craft engine there is also a replay system that can save every match you play to watch later on and even import other player’s replays by just placing them in the replay folder. With the current quick play que not having a draft pick, getting a balanced pool of heroes for your team can be hard but there is an option to somewhat fix this in the Looking for Party option that will show you to all players currently online and hopefully get you into a 5 man party and be able to build a better team composition. Lastly, being a free to play game there is a shop where you can purchase heroes from $5 to $13. Skins are also available and offer information about what has been changed with the skin for example if it has new voice overs, new effects or new animations. These skins also come with 3 colour variations to play around with and range from $6.50 to the $19.50 legendary skins. Along with hero skins you can also purchase new mount skins that range from $13 to $26. Every skin for heroes and mounts also come with 3 alternate re-colours for you to choose from before going into battle. Bundles of heroes, skins and mounts are made available however there is no complete bundle that you can purchase that will unlock every character in the game which is a little unfortunate, the closest you can get is a bundle that unlocks 8 of the 37 heroes plus 4 hero skins and 2 mount skins for $52.

Altogether, Heroes of the Storm is a MOBA designed to be more action packed with very few dull moments, at least if you’re on the winning side. The overwhelment that can come from shop items and the focus needed to get every last hit on minions being removed makes Heroes a much easier game to get into and start playing. Traits can still be a little overwhelming to begin with especially due to the speed of the game and team fights happening every couple of minute, but 4 to 6 options is a lot easier to deal with then hundreds of items all at once. If you want to get into a MOBA but don’t want to dedicate too much time into learning item meta, find last hitting tedious or just don’t like 10 minute lanning phases then Heroes of the Storm may just be what you’re looking for especially if you are a fan of Blizzards numerous universes. I will say that anyone trying out the game, understand that Heroes is an objective based game and while kills are important, they aren’t as important as they are in other MOBAs.

Anyway, that’s been my player preview for Heroes of the Storm, the game is currently in Open Beta and will be officially releasing on the 2nd of June via Battle.net. If you want to find out more about the game check out the links below. Thanks for watching, I’ll see you guys next time.

Driftopia Boosting Its Way To PC and PS3

 

Namco Bandai has released the first free to play Ridge Racer into closed beta a few weeks ago and I thought I'd test it out. Ridge Racer: Driftopia locks you into a impenetrable machine that somehow fuels itself from smashing stuff up. Just don't hit that building head on, it isn't quite indestructible.

I haven't played any of the other Ridge Racers, so I can't compare this game to its predecessors. Instead I'll look at it as it is, a free to play racing game. Driftopia isn't a single player game nor is it a multiplayer game. The line gets blurred when the only game mode you can play is sort of like you vs your ghost only the ghosts are players that have previously raced on the course. Being an online racing game I was expecting to be racing with people, be able to crash into them, to just have that human element there as competition. Instead we are presented with an arcade time trial racer. 

So how does it all work? When you enter a race you get to decide which car you want to race. Your selection determines who your opponents ghosts will be and before the race starts you can give your car a slight advantage using the card system. Such advantages include 2Xboost and down force. The card is used up after the race. While the card system is nice, there are those cards that are obviously better than others. Perhaps the reason for not having true multiplayer in the game as you can clear the track with an early boost. This brings me to the boost system. You want boost and you want to boost all the time. It propels your car faster forward and can be combo'ed together to get the best results. To gain boost you have to either destroy stuff or perform manoeuvres. After playing the game for a while you soon learn what can and cannot be destroyed.

 

The cars in Driftopia feel good but in that arcade racer way. It is very easy to start sliding all over the place. You can upgrade your car when it levels up, your car levels up when you complete a number of races. When your car levels up your repair costs go up and here is where the free to play model starts to come into effect. While you can gain repair kits from winning races, some cars can use up 10 repair kits and more if you crash them. If you don't have enough repair kits or the cash for repair kits, remember those car levels you raced so hard for? Well there gone now. This is a part of the game that really annoyed me. I'm fine with being able to buy faster cars in the cash shop or better cards for performance but when you get your car up to a high level, which usually means it's going faster and that brick wall is a lot harder to avoid, the repair cost starts to tally up. This feature also starts to make the game grindy. You revert back to your starter car so you can gain more repair kits so you can then go and race your better cars.

To get cars in Driftopia you have to first destroy them in races. To destroy cars you can either hit them really hard, and I mean really hard, or you can ram into them while boosting which turns your car into a wrecking ball to all other racing cars. Once destroyed that car goes into the challenge line-up of cars. When your car levels up you can race a one off challenge race. You select the cars you want to race out of the line-up and you have to beat them to unlock the cars. As I said you only get one chance at this so if you crash, your challenge race is over and cannot be retried.

Moving on, the destruction in the game is great. The environment reacts with buildings collapsing and statues falling apart. There are shortcuts that require you to smash through shops and buildings which in turn give you more boost. It would seem that this is Driftopias focus, having almost everything destructible and the game encouraging you to take advantage of that. I would of liked to see something similar to Need for Speed: Most Wanted were you can drive through certain areas creating an unpassable obstacle, however I believe this wasn't done because of the time trial manner of the game and would end in countless amounts of rage every time you're tailing someone and you end up getting destroyed.

The free to play element of the game allows you access to 2 free garage slots, a free card booster pack every 24hrs and access to every racing mode currently available including the tracks. You can purchase garage slots, cars, cards and repair kits although not separately. They have to be bought in packs starting from $2.49 or your regional equivalent. While I am content with the model, there are some changes I would like to see such as unlockable garage slots through game play and more repair kits given for placing in the first 3 of a race. If you like arcade racers, like to compete for the best lap times and are satisfied with the free to play model then Ride Racer: Driftopia is a quality racing game. If you want to be able to race your friends or other people in a real multiplayer environment, have a large selection of cars and racetracks then maybe this isn't the game for you. Ridge Racer: Driftopia is coming to PC and PS3