Hitting the Slots
The City of Heroes purchasable add-ons appears to be doing well, a third Super Booster pack has been recently released and additional Architect slots are available to buy, for those Level designers among us.
Ask anyone that has played CoX and you’ll tend to get the same story, one of the most enjoyable parts of the game is tweaking and fiddling with your character at the tailors, or even just using the character creation screens. With Paragon studios embracing the use of RMTs in other areas, wouldn’t they want to add another potential revenue source by allowing player to purchase more costume slots? I certainly hope so.
The problem is that with each new release and booster pack, players get a stack of new costume parts, yet we are still limited to a maximum of five slots per character. I can buy (and have) new character slots that can be added to a server with relative ease, so why would adding more costume space be a bad thing?
Ideally new slots could purchased in packs like the Architect and character slot add-ons and each slot redeemed against a single character of your choosing, up to a maximum (10?) per character of course.
With Issue 16: Power Spectrum heading our way later this year the yearning for an increased number costume slot can only grow and hopefully us players that want a bigger wardrobe may get our wishes granted with the introduction of some form of slot increase.
Would you buy extra costume slots if they became available?
wow-killers killer
I know I’m not the only person that thinks labelling a game as a “WOW-killer” is anything but hype-mongering, but I’ve being wondering if these claims are having other effects.
Naturally game companies aren’t using the term, they can be found in articles that feel MMOs should all be judged in a similar way and what better method than comparing it against the market leader.
These questions have been floating around my head for a while now:
- With the vast numbers playing Warcraft, who would really want their game to be measured against that yardstick?
- Is a single unreleased game likely to poach a large number of players from World of Warcraft (permanently) at launch?
- Is this branding poisoning the game it is labelled against, doing more harm than good for a game?
Back in my days playing SOE’s Planetside there was very little room for other games , I was a loyal player through and through. Every now and again a title would appear labelled “Planetside 2″ or “Planetside-ish”, Huxley was one of these and I recall at the time rubbishing the game straight away, based on the blurbs on their site and the fact that my game was threatened.
You see by naming a game an equivalent or successor of “my” current favourite game instantly made me dislike it instantly, without even seeing any gameplay.
A similar thing is going around in my head regarding Champions Online (City of heroes 2 /all the things that were missing from CoH), comparing yourselves against a game I’ve invested over two years on isn’t the way to get me to leave one for the other.
I’m not saying that there aren’t people out there that will switch games when the game launches, but claims and statements such as these combined with the fact of the game being more action focused, don’t do much to promote the game to the prime demographic.
So then next time you see a big named MMO project labelled as a WOW-killer the likelihood of that becoming reality has possibly been hampered by that very term.
Imagesource: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/613463PC: Blood Bowl
Over the past few weeks I have been playing the recently released Blood Bowl game from Cyanide Studios. For those of you that aren’t aware Blood Bowl (BB) is a Games Workshop title that started life as a board game. Of all the GW titles I found Blood Bowl to be one of the more exciting envrionments they offered. I enjoyed playing the game thanks to the small amount of time needed to setup and play a match.
Based on the Warhammer fantasy universe the teams compete in a Ultra-violent sport similar in some ways to rugby and American football, teams of 11 players face off, attempting to score touchdowns and generally doing as much damage to the opposing team (of course without being sent off). The most common Warhammer world races can be found in the game and you can name, colour and brand your team to your liking, of course each race has their own strengths and weaknesses, which you’ll need to learn and play to in-order to
The game boasts two game modes blitz and standard, blitz acts more like a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game but includes a unique slow-down feature that allows you to order and direct your players around without being overrun by the computer AI. Standard mode plays much like the original board-game version with each team taking it in turns to move.
The standard game mode is played over 16 turns (8 per half), there is a timer for each players turn ensuring that your opponent doesn’t spend too long planning their next move. You can play a match in about 15 to 20 minutes.
This game is certainly well polished, delivering exciting gameplay that doesn’t depend too much on highly detailed graphics. The game is very heavily set it the Warhammer/Games Workshop world, but I don’t think that would be much of the turn off for anyone that is interested in playing a strategy game based on a playing field.
In an interesting twist of news, the developers of the game had a run-in with Games Workshop when they produced a game named Chaos League in 2004 which was similar to the BB brand. One of the terms of the settlement was that Cyanide would receive a license to develop a new title using the official Blood Bowl property and GW took ownership of the Chaos League name. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Bowl_(2009_video_game)
