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MMO Rift went free-to-play in 2011, opening its gates to more players but also ushering in loot boxes and a store packed with items you could buy with real money to make the game a lot easier. After a long think (and no doubt influenced by player pushback against microtransactions), developer Trion Worlds is going back to its roots by introducing a paid subscription model for a server free of loot boxes.
The Rift Prime server will launch in Spring. We don’t yet know how much it’ll cost to join, but we do know that the in-game store will be “significantly reduced, with more of the current store-based items obtained through gameplay or removed entirely”. Sounds good to me.
Not all of Rift’s content will be available on the Prime server from the start—instead, players will start afresh and Trion Worlds will drip-feed existing content as players progress, almost like a new MMO, albeit with everything introduced at a much faster pace. The developer promises this progression will come “to an end in spectacular fashion”, too.
Prime servers will progress through content at a more rapid pace than that of the original launch
“dynamically matching characters to their current zone’s level”
“dungeons dropping loot specific to your character’s true level”
profession caps available to a single character
participation awards that are unlocked across your account, even to characters on other servers
PvP will also be undergoing some changes in 2018 after the launch of the Prime server. This will include a new game mode and allowing servers to go “full PvP”.
For PvE, players can look forward to the revamp of a classic raid and the 7th anniversary will feature some new activities for players.
As more info comes out about the new sub services, we’ll be sure to keep you upto date!
For now, check out the latest trailer for the game and follow the link to check it out!
Wolfenstein® II: The New Colossus™ is the highly anticipated sequel to the critically acclaimed, Wolfenstein®: The New Order™ developed by the award-winning studio MachineGames.
An exhilarating adventure brought to life by the industry-leading id Tech® 6, Wolfenstein® II sends players to Nazi-controlled America on a mission to recruit the boldest resistance leaders left. Fight the Nazis in iconic American locations, equip an arsenal of badass guns, and unleash new abilities to blast your way through legions of Nazi soldiers in this definitive first-person shooter.
STORY:
America, 1961. Your assassination of Nazi General Deathshead was a short-lived victory. Despite the setback, the Nazis maintain their stranglehold on the world. You are BJ Blazkowicz, aka “Terror-Billy,” member of the Resistance, scourge of the Nazi empire, and humanity’s last hope for liberty. Only you have the guts, guns, and gumption to return stateside, kill every Nazi in sight, and spark the second American Revolution.
It’s always an interesting conflict of events when a virtual product manages to resonate with current events. This was especially true in the advertising leading up to the release of Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, in which plays of presidential tag-lines were used to full effect: the desire to “Make America Nazi Free Again” by being a part of the revolution. Of course, this territory is nothing new for the Wolfenstein series, which made its mark by letting you shoot Nazis and take down Mecha-Hitler from as early as 1981 – so one could argue it’s nothing new, but holding a mirror to real life whether on purpose or just by the nature of the theme of their game series certainly helped create Wolfenstein 2 hype.
The reboot of Wolfenstein that came around in 2014 is still one of my favourite titles to revisit. It is, at its core, a hard-going tale of a soldier’s desire for revenge in a world that is falling apart. The gameplay is smooth in its combat – if not a little dull – but it had some genuinely amazing sequences and an ending that, coupled with great soundtrack choices, made me pretty emotional. We were also treated to The Old Blood as a DLC excerpt that was good, if not a little clunky with the way it transitioned from chapter to chapter.
This made Wolfenstein 2 a release day purchase for me. The Special Edition, no less – and regardless of any opinion I have formed on Wolfenstein 2, I can happily say I own a BJ Blazkowicz action man now. But gimmicks aside, I was most excited for the game itself. You are immediately treated to a recap of the events of the first game (sans The Old Blood, as it was a prelude) before diving into the current one. Where The New Order treated us to a jumble of flashforwards and time-skips, the second title manages to give us not only time-skips forward, but flashbacks as well. You hit the shock factor almost straight away with an introduction to BJ’s abusive Texan father and his caring Polish mother.
While not wholly unexpected of a game that centres around kicking the daylights out of Nazis, Wolfenstein 2 is not afraid of the shock factor. We are immediately set up to hate BJ’s father for the racist epithet throwing, domestic abuser that he is. We learn that BJ has obviously taken on more of his mother’s sentiments about life, but that the harsh treatment by his father is what pushed him to be resilient. It is also what sent him off to the army, ironically starting off the chain of events through the games series. It seems like a strange inclusion at the start of the game, though there are few loaded guns in this game that don’t go off eventually; your father does, eventually, get what’s coming to him, and the setup makes it worth it.
This is something I find Wolfenstein 2 succeeds at greater than its predecessor with only few exceptions. It is fantastic at build up, and at surprising you. There are some strong twists in the story, and unlike The New Order, the plot moves at a greater pace, allowing it to feel like more of a rollercoaster and less of a log flume. It certainly lacks in some of the huge set piece boss fights of The New Order or, to compare it to its sister title, DOOM. But the spectacle is made up for in some equally impressive visual sequences. To not say too much of spoilers: this is a game that you get to control robots; fly into space; and fall from the sky. You also get to shoot Nazis while wheelchair bound, and – as someone with limited mobility – I found that bit particularly gratifying.
It does miss the mark in some parts. We get to know the characters that BJ works with more, and they seem to have become caricatures of themselves since The New Order. This isn’t necessarily bad, either, as it fits with the changing tone of the game. You find yourself in the midst of an underground rebellion that is finding its purpose and is driven on by loss early on in the story. It has gone from being a story about one man’s revenge to BJ becoming a figurehead of revolution. You want a cast of NPCs that you remember the personalities of. There are some great new additions to the cast, too.
From this is one of my greatest criticisms of the game: you need to play the first one. You might say that’s not a real criticism, but you may have noticed that I am greatly comparing the two titles to one another. It’s fairly necessary, in my eyes, because to understand why Frau Engel (the main villain of Wolfenstein 2) hates BJ quite so much, you need to see what happened in The New Order. To fathom why Anya, his partner, is so important, you need to see what happened to the pair of them in the first title to fathom the bond between them both. While the recap at the start of the game is efficient enough in laying out baseline events it doesn’t help grasp the emotional side of the storyline.
One of my other gripes is connected to this, and is in the form of the “Wyatt or Fergus” dilemma. In The New Order, you have to make a very crushing decision about one of your team-mates early on in the campaign. It shapes who you have around you for the rest of the game; devices you can learn; weapons you can use and even one of the boss fights. It is a decision that shapes the narrative. In Wolfenstein 2, you have to choose again through a flashback of Deathshead – a villain is criminally missing in references in the newer game otherwise – so there can be a chronological order to things. You are given back the gun relevant to whichever team-mate you choose, and that’s more or less it. There are some minor story points relating to either Fergus or Wyatt, but it feels like a missed opportunity.
All in all, I would definitely recommend picking up a copy of Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. It has faults, but they are compensated for by the flow of combat, an effective storyline and the additional content. There is more to do after the plot ends, as you begin to build your revolution on the back of your pains and your triumphs. And, being true to Wolfenstein as a series, there is a ton of stuff to collect, giving it appeal to any of you out there with a desire for completion. However, if you haven’t picked up the first title, or its DLC yet, I would put Wolfenstein 2 to one side until you get to do so.
This is a game that is best experienced when you know BJ as he has come to be now, along with his comrades at arms against the Nazi menace. It is best experienced knowing why you are fighting and what you’re fighting for. While the hype train was strong with its brilliant and topical viral advertising, Wolfenstein 2 has its story at its core. The New Order taught us about revenge; The New Colossus sings of revolution. It would be easy to get swept up on Nazi killing alone – and that is important within the game, obviously – but this is a title that needs to be known to really hit home.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus gets a facist bashing 4 out of 5
~Vamp
When I heard “Rogue-like platformer” and upon seeing the screenshots in the style of Spelunky, Cave Story, and Rogue Legacy, I was quite excited to play this title. Loading up the game, I was greeted with a friendly “Best Played With a Controller”, showing a cute and bubbly graphic of the same Xbox 360 controller I was holding in my hand. I rolled my analog sticks with excitement!
Upon checking the Settings (one of the first things I do whenever starting a new game), my gaze immediate found that the analog control setup was very much like Terraria’s console/mobile twin-stick design: The left analog was for moving around and the right analog was for attacking in the direction you point the stick. Combat looked like it’d be a breeze since it was something I was quite familiar with.
Then came my first slight disappointment: I found out the right analog stick was used for shooting your secondary weapon (which tend to be the bow and arrows, but can be switched out in your inventory menu for other items). This disappointment was greater compounded when I found that the jump button required the use of the right thumb: the same thumb used for shooting. At this point, I thought to myself, “It’s okay. I’m sure the developers intended for this design and compensated.” I then came across my first blessing (random bonuses normally acquired by touching various ghost-like icons found in the game). The blessing was a bonus for shooting something while in mid-air…
Let that sink in for a moment.
An action game where one of your two main attacks require pressing one button to jump, then quickly using that same thumb to shoot an arrow in one of 8 compass in a somewhat hectic environment. Testing this out, I found that some directions are easier to flick than others, which immediately put a limitation on how well I can fight in tight spaces that require distance.
So, why not just use melee? How about re-mapping the buttons? Git gud?
I thought about just skipping the shooting part. Being able to shoot in 8 directions requires the player to time their shots against aerial targets or standing in one spot while holding the shoot stick in their general direction and hope the enemies walk/fly/jump into your stream. Forget about trying to perform this maneuver flawlessly while airborne yourself. So, I began just hacking and slashing around with my current melee weapon. Being a rogue-like, this game is chock-full of different weapons of varying stats, like damage and swinging speed. I could just forget about shooting stuff and create a swathe of corpses with just my trusty melee weapons!
Then came an exploding aerial slime that comes crashing at you at high-speed, blowing up a giant hole in the level, as well as your life points.
Slightly frustrated that I couldn’t be the bouncing archer that I’d hoped to be. I was determined to find a control scheme that would allow me to wall-jump like a pro and aim with precision. I even tried a button setup that I used in Terraria (using the trigger buttons to jump). Then I learned the problem wasn’t in the controls. It was the fact that I could only shoot in 8 directions on an analog stick. This might not seem like something troublesome, but intuition and muscle memory likes to think that when you point a stick in a direction, something will happen in THAT direction. Not 5-10 degrees away from it. It just felt awkward.
At this point, I’ve managed to examine the main areas of the game. The game’s introductory level is like a hub. You are greeted by what resembles an old man/merchant that strikes up a casual conversation about how to press buttons. As casual as the conversation was, I felt like I was in a tutorial and not having a conversation with what would most likely be the last human I see. I found the sounds used to represent NPC speech to be most amusing and nostalgic. It took me back to the days of old JRPG’s where there was a high-pitched warbling sound whenever somebody talked. Fortunately, the old man had a deeper voice and instead of the traditional repeated beep/warble, the developers used repeated voices in the style of the warble. Imagine somebody saying varying tonal versions of “Hey” or “Meh” repeatedly. The old man gives you a quick tutorial into the basics of movement, shooting, attacking, and activating doors/shrines/dialogue and tells you to go away.
Looking more closely at this hub area, I found a place to change my appearance as well as an obelisk that granted me Perks; Much akin to the random blessings, but you have the option of manually changing what perk you receive in the hub area.
After that, the hand-holding ends. True to rogue-like games that came before it, the player is left to experiment, learn, and die… A LOT. In my first couple hours of experimenting I learned that you can walk through spikes, but jump up just a little bit and land on the spikes…you die. I kind of expected that. I just like being sure. I discovered that aside from humanoid green creatures, there were humanoid non-green creatures. They happened to be AI adventurers that run around jumping, slaying, and generally performing better than you. They seem useful in getting enemies dispatched, but I found them to be a nuisance since I often think I’m being attacked when they’re just leaping about, mocking me.
Most everything you discover in the game is recorded in a Journal for easy reference. The only thing I could tell that isn’t recorded are the potions. Much like the scrolls/potions/wands of the rogue-likes before it, Caveblazers randomized their potions and you have about as much chance as consuming a harmful potion as a useful one. After the initial discovery, however, you’ll always know the quality of that potion…until you die, that is. At that point, all the random potions will reset. Fortunately, anything recorded in the Journal stays that way.
The developers were forgiving in one part of traversal, because you take absolutely no fall damage! This is especially useful when I tried out my first Daily Run (which refreshes every 24 hours). It dropped me into a familiar area as it looked exactly like the previous caves I’ve died in previously. It took me about 30 seconds of general bumbling around to realize that there was an odd miasma drifting downwards from the top of the screen. Gamer-senses on high-alert, I began to move downwards as fast as possible. The scientist in me wanted to touch the miasma to see what it’d do, but the flight-or-flight response has already kicked in. I began barreling through as many enemies as my feeble sword-swinging arms could dispatch. Jumping and dropping and quickly learning that I could perform a downward thrust attack while trying to avoid flying, exploding, grunting, and swinging. Every once in a while looking up to the miasma creeping.
Long story short, I died. Fortunately, I felt a bit of accomplishment because upon dying I was given the opportunity to see how well I fared in the Leaderboards. In that one daily run, I was ranked #432. The pessimist would see that there are 431 people that could obviously perform better than I can. The optimist in me showed that there were at least 5 people that performed worse. That was good enough for me.
There is also another sense of progression since every death adds to a progress bar that unlocks cosmetics. You are to change the cosmetics at the hub, but I was perfectly happy with my pixelated Bob Ross lookalike (I like putting fros on my players at every opportunity). After many deaths and few progress bars filled, another npc arrived at my hub and told me that my pumice stone needed fixing. Not one to argue with a professional pumice stone repair-man, I let him get to work and re-entered the caves. I eventually learned that the pumice stone could be activated to keep adventurers from coming into the caves behind me. I didn’t even know they could do that in the first place, but I was glad I have the option to shut them out.
Determined to finish this review by at least reaching the first procedural boss, I spent my next few rounds playing as close to the vest as possible; keeping far away and shooting a steady stream of arrows and hope the enemies walk into it repeatedly until dead. The tactic works well as long as you aren’t overwhelmed by more than one enemy in close quarters.
Environmental puzzles became apparent when I activated a glyph of some sort hidden in one of the rocks making up the ceiling. Finding all of them in a level rewarded me with a portal, which I quickly learned led to wave after wave of enemies in an enclosed space which seemed to only stop when I died, ending my run. Didn’t seem like much of a reward, but I’m confident that if I killed them all, something great would have happened. It’s a shame that I’d rather see what levels are behind Door #2 than taking a chance at seeing what’s in the Mystery Box.
The sense of progression also occurs after the completion of each floor. Despite the levels looking different each run, the title of the two levels I kept repeating were always the same (Caves and Temple Approach). After many (many many many) deaths, I realized that my life is actually easier if I just avoid the enemies I don’t have to kill. By purposely skipping whole sections of the levels, I could bee-line for the exit with the most health possible, only killing when required.
This tactic seemed to work, until the green humanoid AI kicked in and began chasing me. Changing up the tactic and killing every green humanoid that I’m forced to encounter, I finally reached past the second floor. Not seeing the familiar centerscreen title of the level and instead welcomed with a foyer into a large open space, my tingling gamer-senses told me I finally have reached my destination: The first boss.
Armed with a random magical weapon that felt kind of like a pity prize for dying so much (the stats of this particular item was about 3 times as effective as anything I’ve picked up in any of my runs). It also allowed for charged arrow shots. To add icing on this jazzy cake, the arrow’s hit boxes were about 5 times the size when fully charged. At this point I wondered to myself, “The developers should really just start players with THIS weapon”.
So, I’m not entirely sure if the boss is procedural as well, but my first boss experience gave me a flashback to the top of this article. The boss was a giant spider and the boss’s body was floating just above horizontal arrow range, requiring me to jump-shoot. The health bar was massive, but the bosses moves were quick to predict. If it wasn’t for the pity-bow (the pet name I gave my new weapon), this fight would’ve taken considerably longer.
The boss-spider dispatched, loot gotten, and random blessings received, I entered the far door to see if a pattern would emerge. The level was appropriately titled “The Temple”. I’d love to have admired the new layout, but I was quickly killed and sent back to the beginning of the game. At least I have a few perks unlocked and can finally wear that chef’s hat I’ve wanted to rock my whole life.
Despite the gripes I have regarding awkward controls and the punishing AI, I feel Caveblazers shows promise in the realm of rogue-likes. I’m confident that the progression system for Perks will eventually make me feel like I can blaze through the first few levels with ease, but the frustration that it leaves me with makes me think this is a game I should pick up once in awhile to get a feel for something different; a palate-cleanser. To me, Caveblazers is not something I’ll be grinding at for days on end like I have with many rogue-likes before it.
For these reasons, I’m giving Caveblazers a promising 7/10.
So, the Steam Summer Sale might have just had its dates leaked out ahead of time. All thanks to Steamworks users, going against some of the rules that they’re supposed to read before signing up. Oops.
The dates say that the sale will run from June 22 to July 5, and were originally shown off in screenshots to the Steam subreddit by deliteplays and later backed up by fellow user Jelman21. Valve contacted Steamworks developers to let them know so they could prepare deals and bundles ahead of time, and the dates were meant to be confidential. Users were then added to Developer groups after gaining access to alpha and betas of games via Kickstarter and it seems that the ‘confidential’ part was unheard by the users who have leaked the screenshots. Whether this will have consequences is yet unknown.
Other than the dates though, it’s far to say we’re in the dark about the Summer Sale. We can only guess at what games could be discounted and by how much, but until we’re in the thick of it (or Valve themselves give us official information) it’s far to say we just don’t know what to expect.
