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 - Call of Duty: Black Ops 3

Title: Call of Duty: Black Ops 3
Developer: Treyarch
Status: Open Beta
Release Date: 6/November/2015

Official Site: http://bit.ly/1UBiQfv
Steam Page: http://bit.ly/1OcOPxF

Hey what’s up, Serpentine here taking a look at the multiplayer portion of Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 developed by Treyarch. The series continues its setting in the near future with robotics and advanced weaponry with Black Ops 3 containing a couple of changes with new movement mechanics and the introduction of classes.

The classes aren’t the kind you would find in something like Battlefield or Team Fortress 2 were each class is locked to a certain loadout. Instead in Black Ops 3 the class that you pick only effects your special ability and each class has the option between 1 weapon ability or 1 utility ability. For example the Sharpshooter has an explosive arrow firing bow as her weapon and an enemy revealing pulse as her utility. These special abilities slowly recharge during the game enabling you to use them around twice a game however by using a certain perk this can be increase to around 4 times a match. There will be a total of 9 different classes available to play on release resulting in 18 different abilities that you can play around with. The most impressive abilities during the beta though definitely has to include the Outriders Bow because for some reason bows always feel good to use in these kinds of game plus the explosion is a nice little addition, and for the utility, Prophet has this one down with Glitch which allows you to teleport back to where you were a couple of seconds ago allowing you to get out of tricky situations or lead enemies into a trap.

 

Movement has been becoming more and more of a focus in the Call of Duty series and this time around there are a couple of new mechanics to help you get around the map faster and better. Wall running is by far the most noticeable change allowing you to get some height on your enemies or to avoid hotspots on the map like this bridge. The feature is implemented pretty solidly in terms of its usability, just jump into the side of a wall and you will attach and continue on your way. Most of the main walls you can run will be clearly indicated but after playing a map for a while you will find smaller lengths of walls that will give you that tactical height advantage as your enemies will expect you to come around a corner at floor level rather than a meter or 2 in the air. 

 

The other movement mechanic is the slide and is arguably the more important mechanic of the two to get a hang of. While wall running gives you height you are a pretty easy target with a predictable movement direction but with the slide it’s basically allowing players to dolphin dive while still moving extremely fast. Mastering this with the shotgun can be devastating and can confuse enemies when 1 second your standing in front of them and the next you are now firing at them from behind as you’ve slid straight past them. It also makes for a great way to cross open areas so you’re not such an easy target which is extremely important as you die extremely quickly once in an opponent’s sights.

Due to the extremely fast paced nature of Black Ops 3 non structured or non-objective based game modes are extremely chaotic and not it the good way. For instance in Team Deathmatch, while you are spawned into the game at opposite sides of the map you can get to the other side in a matter of seconds resulting in you constantly getting shot at from behind. The spawns in Team Deathmatch also change to prevent spawn camping but this also adds onto the problem of being shot from behind. This problem is somewhat corrected in the more objective based game modes like Search and Destroy and SafeGuard. Search and Destroy manages to slow the game down the game quite a bit due to the mode being 1 death and you’re out for the round. Safeguard however has continuous spawns as you try to either escort the robot to the point or prevent the robot from getting to the point but the gamemode plays so much better then Team Death Match while still maintaining that chaos factor. Safeguard was definitely my favourite mode of the beta providing really intense closing moments of the round as each team desperately fights for the win with the robot only a couple meters away from the point.

 

The available arsenal in Black Ops 3 while being slightly futuristic, still have the general form as weapons of today like the ark-7 is a futuristic AK-47, Kuda is a UMP and the Drakon is a Drakanov. Being set in a futuristic setting I would have liked to see more unique weapon designs and weapon mechanics however this seems to only be reserved for your characters special weapons and kill streaks. The different attachments for your weapons are all a bit the same as previous games in the series with basic scopes, grips and stocks that all effect your weapons stats. As for grenades there isn’t anything to innovative here either, you can equip both a damaging grenade like a frag, sticky or proximity mine and a utility grenade like a flashbang, concussion or EMP grenade. Equipping weapons, attachments, grenades and perks take up 1 slot each in the return of the 10 slot system were you can only have 10 items equipped at once so you will have to decide whether you want to run a full weapon accuracy set-up for instance or a multi primary and multi grenade set-up instead of being able to just have the best loadout your level can achieve.

Other features of the game include multiple customization options for your weapons, profile and tags. The most important customization feature being the paintshop, here you will be able to play around with different graphics, colours and gradients to customize the look of certain parts of your weapon. You will also be able to share your designs with others and use other player’s designs yourself. The gunsmith feature in the game will allow you to customize the physical appearance of your weapons via cosmetic variations of the weapons attachments which is rumoured to have 4 to 5 variants of each separate attatchment. You will also be able to name your weapon, apply your custom paint jobs and apply a camo for the parts of the weapon that the paint job doesn’t cover. As for your profile customization options you can create your own emblem or logo out of the same graphics, colours and gradients available in the paint shop feature. The end result will be displayed on your player card as well as being overlayed on your chosen calling card when you kill someone. Your calling card being a set graphic design that you select out of a big list. There is one final tab on this customization screen simply labelled classified but this maybe just the sharing feature for the paintshop.

 

Altogether Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 does do some interesting changes with the movement system and introduction of classes albeit in a small way. The game is extremely fast paced delving into the twitch shooter genre far more than any previous Call of Duty title before it but I feel the game is struggling with the combination of speed and movement while still trying to maintain its close quarters combat, something that another game called Titanfall managed to do a lot better. If you are looking for that kind of mix between open areas that you can move freely in and small enclosed spaces then Black Ops 3 may be of interest to you but if you are expecting a futuristic shooter with a unique arsenal to play around with, it doesn’t really offer that despite being based in the future.

Anyway, that’s been my player preview for Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. The game will be officially releasing on the 6^th of November for $60 or your regional equivalent. 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.