There are even two new boys entering the fray: Darksiders and Dante’s Inferno. Both look agreeably pleasing to the eye, although the latter’s lead character appears to have an unfortunate case of Clive Owen. And whilst Darksiders would appear to borrow equally from the Zelda series, it’s still very much in the same camp. Unfortunately I don’t know a lot about Darksiders, so I’m going to concentrate on EA’s latest money-spinner instead.

The Dante’s Inferno demo hit the US store at the weekend, and I’ve given it about an hour’s play overall. The first thing that hits you is just how many gratuitous nipple shots there are, and not just female ones either. The second thing that hits you – at least after you look past all the boobs – is whether or not you’re actually playing God of War by mistake. You see, whilst some games may steal a little here and there, EA has effectively reverse-engineered Sony’s classic and reconstituted it with a slightly different set of textures.

I’m really not kidding. Five minutes with the demo ought to convince you. It doesn’t just look the same either, it even plays the same; it is uncannily familiar. Yet whilst it has taken considerable skill to achieve this level of mimicry, something got lost in translation.

After playing Dante’s Inferno the other night, and having previously spent some time in Bayonetta‘s company, I was jonesing for more high-velocity fighting action. It was at this point I remembered I still hadn’t finished Ninja Blade. Now, as anybody who follows my Twitter updates will know, I’m a bit of a Ninja Blade apologist. Despite being the very definition of a 7/10 game (Metacritic currently has it at 68), I absolutely love it. Most of that is down to video gaming’s ultimate badass Ken Ogawa. Frankly, you can keep your Dante’s and your Kratos’ and your Ryu Hayabusa’s – there’s only one man for me.

Yes, that really is a ninja on a motorcycle.

Ninja Blade is, by and large, a mix of Ninja Gaiden and God of War. It has combos, power-ups, QTEs, and massive end-of-level bosses. It even features bi-lingual dialogue so you can clearly see the team’s aims. But none of this comes across as cynical. In fact I get the impression that the team wanted to make a game in this genre because they fucking love it. The game is infused with utterly hatstand moments that can only be born out of love. From surfing a sidewinder missile to uppercutting a 747, Ken Ogawa is every doujin fantasy rolled into one. And then covered in awesome and set alight.

Contrast this with the aforementioned Dante’s Inferno. At no point during the hour I played it did I ever experience anything approaching pleasure. Sure, my gamer brain was being tickled by the pattern-matching and pretty lights, but like a MacDonald’s meal I was ultimately left unfulfilled.

So here’s my point for those of you in the cheap seats: if you’re going to copy something at least understand why you’re copying it in the first place. Visceral know how to make a compelling game – they proved as much with Dead Space – but the EA machine appears to have gotten the better of them. Instead of copying the underlying mechanics and re-purposing them, they have mathematically analysed God of War to the point where any potential joy has been replaced by a formula. It’s like taking a delicious meal and trying to replicate it chemically; what you’re left with may appear to be the same, but you’re missing the nuances the chef applied in the cooking.

And seriously, what’s with stitching fabric to his skin? At least Kratos had a pretty good reason to be covered in ash.

I am at least thankful that they have chosen to remove the good/evil swingometer from Dragon Age; this was a throwback to the light side/dark side gauge of Knights of the Old Republic, and an unnecessary contrivance. But they still want you to think that the choices you make allow you to be one or the other. In fact, it’s nothing of the sort. All of Bioware’s games – and Dragon Age is no exception – fall short of delivering on their promises. Their much-vaunted choices really only boil down to playing the part of the hero, or being a total prick.

Let’s go back to the plot of Dragon Age for a moment. At the end of the day, all I’m really in it for is to kill the Archdemon and prevent the Blight. That’s it. It’s one choice, and it seems to fall squarely under the ‘being a hero’ category. If I was able to be truly evil, I might have the option of joining with the ranks of Ogres and Hurlocks, perhaps even overthrowing the Archdemon and leading the Blight to the surface myself. That is real choice. Deciding between going ahead with the mission or totally subverting it is what I expect when Bioware make their bold claims. Deciding to insult someone’s sexuality instead of thanking them isn’t quite the pinnacle of player-driven storytelling. Perhaps laughing maniacally and twirling my mustache whilst saying it might improve things.

There are no shades of grey in Bioware’s world. Oh sure, the elves are oppressed and the dwarfs are embroiled in bitter in-fighting – there’s even a rape sub-plot. But honestly, it’s a pretty clear-cut traditional fantasy world straight out of Tolkien’s playbook. A superior and generally well-realised fantasy world, but generic nonetheless. Compare this to the world of Andrej Sapkowski’s The Witcher, a universe also cut from the same cloth, but a universe twisted and reshaped to mimic the author’s Eastern European homeland. The game, also created by a Polish team, is as ambiguous as its protagonist. There is no greater good, and there isn’t really any great evil. There is simply life and the choices of how you live it.

That’s not to say that CDProjekt got it totally right – there are still times when you get rail-roaded as with every other RPG on the market. But – and it’s a crucial but – at least they make their choices meaningful. I literally sat for 20 minutes staring at my dialogue options during one protracted encounter. I could not easily discern where each option would take me, and it totally blindsided me. Bioware take note: when my dialogue options are ‘tell him he’s awesome’ or ‘kick him in the nuts’, and both of them progress the plot in exactly the same way, I’m not really being presented with much of a choice.

It’s not just dialogue either; I simply chose this as the most obvious way of presenting my argument. For me, if we want to give the player real and meaningful choices, the absolute biggest change to RPGs (and gaming in general) must come from a flexibility in how the story plays out. You can keep the plot simple – kill the Archdemon, prevent the Blight – but if you really want to make players think, give them the option of doing the opposite. Could you imagine playing through a game and reaching the conclusion, only to start again and play through it all from the opposite side? How much richer would the experience be?

So, back to Dragon Age. Despite my criticisms I’m looking forward to playing through the game as a total prick. I know that I won’t be able to alter the story in any substantial way, and I already know how it ends, but there are subtle changes that I can experience along the way. I just wish somebody somewhere would give me more of a choice.

In tabletop news I’ve been putting together the rest of Mark’s Chaos for the Doubles Tournament next weekend. I reckon I’m about a third of the way through painting them, and I’m hoping to get all the base coats and shading done by the end of the weekend. I doubt I’ll have much chance to do any highlighting before Friday, but I’ll give it a go. Either way, they’ll be legal and hopefully above-average looking. I’ve used a lot of washes this time around, mainly for speed, but also because I have a lot of mounts to paint. Layering this way looks great on large swathes of flesh, especially Flesh Hounds. I’ll put up a picture of the finished pieces when I’m done.

Enjoy the long weekend, kids!

Right, onwards with the review.

Character Creation

The GUI is very pretty, well thought out, and the music suitably atmospheric. Your characters, once created, are arranged in the background in full 3D, and clicking on one brings it to the foreground. The actual creation side of things is a bit of a let-down though, being no more complex than World of WarCraft. After the masses of control Age of Conan gives you, this feels a little light. Still, the choices on offer are different enough and you can create some pretty cool looking avatars. Glad I get some extra options with my Collector’s Edition, though.

User Interface

The first thing that hits you is the sheer amount of stuff to look at. WAR features not one, but three experience tracks. The first at the top of the screen is your standard Experience bar; the one to the left and below is your Renown bar; the one to the far right is your Influence bar. There’s also the usual features like a Quest Tracker, Minimap, Hot Keys and so on.

The biggest and most welcome change is the Tome of Knowledge. This is a stroke of genius – and not the only one I encountered – as it combines all the disparate bits of information you get in an MMO into one easily-accessed database. It serves as your quest log, bestiary, reward and achievements list, history book, and plenty more besides. You’ll spend a lot of time looking at this, even if it’s just to read up the history of some beast you’ve just encountered for the first time.

One minor point about the interface: the GCD is listed as 1.5 seconds, but it’s more like 1.2 which is actually faster than WoW. This makes a massive difference to combat which I’ll talk about a bit later on.

Questing and Progression

Experience is gained through questing and mob killing and is tracked on your main Experience bar at the top of the screen. There are 40 Ranks to progress through – what WAR calls levels – and progress is at least comparable with other MMOs, at least to begin with. Quest icons are displayed as little books floating above the NPC’s head. They’re colour-coded to show whether quests are available or not, or whether you can hand anything in. The basic questing is pretty much standard fare for an MMO, which is no bad thing really, but it does do a few clever things with it. If you’ve been out in the woods killing Dark Sprites and you find an NPC that has a quest for you to kill Dark Sprites, they’ll already know what you’ve been doing and so grant you the quest completion rewards. It’s a simple touch, but it feels natural and cuts down on a lot of backtracking.

So far, so predictable. The real draw in terms of questing are the Public Quests. These are another stroke of genius; like the Tome of Knowledge they don’t really do anything revolutionary, but they really work well and serve again to cut down on the frustrations most people have with MMOs. Public Quests are scattered throughout each zone and bring the battles across each racial pairing to the fore. As a High Elf starting off in the Blighted Isle, my racial enemies are the Dark Elves. The first PQ I took part in involved storming a Dark Elf fortress, clearing the way for the High Elf army to set up Bolt Throwers, and then helping them take down an enormous War Hydra at the end.

You can take part in PQs at any point throughout the scenario, simply by being in the right area. Every time you enter a PQ area you get a little message to tell you so, and the current quest objective gets added to your Quest Tracker. The one I took part in came in three parts and is probably suitable for somewhere between 10 and 20 players. You all work together towards the objectives, gaining Influence as you progress. Once the quest has been completed you get a results table showing how everyone performed, with bonus points for the top three places. Then there’s a random roll out of 1000 which your score is added to, and this final total determines what rewards you get. A golden chest will spawn in the centre of the PQ area, and you get to loot different items from it depending on where you finished in the leaderboard. Pretty cool, really.

One other nice touch that helps with PQs, and questing in general, is that every party is created open with the option of locking it. What this means is that you can enter an area, click the Party button underneath your portrait, and browse the list of open parties to join. No need to spam the LFG channel or wait for an invite, just join the party and get stuck in.

The last part of progression I want to talk about is Renown. Basically, WAR is a PvP orientated game. You’re always in conflict with your racial enemy, whether NPC or player. There are open-world RvR areas which I’ve yet to encounter, but what I can talk about is PvP Scenarios. Basically, there’s a little Scenario button attached to your mini-map that you can click on at any time and view which Scenarios are available in your area. You can join the queue for one, then carry on questing, and when the time comes you get a little pop-up telling you the Scenario is about to start. You can choose to join it right away, join it in a bit (if you just want to hand in a quest first) or wait for another one to start.

The Scenarios are short PvP mini-games, a bit like Battlefield, where you have to hold control points in order to increase your score. The Scenario I played had a little twist, where the side who controlled all the points for at least 10 seconds unleashed the Fury of Khaine – a massive explosion that took out your opponents. Not played any other Scenarios yet, but this was good fun, and a pretty gentle introduction to PvP for newbies.

Combat and Abilities

Combat sits somewhere between the pointing and clicking of WoW and the visceral hands-on approach of AoC. Each Career in the game has it’s own mechanic, which basically involves a combo system of some description. For example, the Sword Master has Balances – each ability you activate requires a certain Balance and leads on to a different Balance. So, you’re creating combos by stringing together different abilities and planning a path through them so there’s as little downtime between attacks as possible. The Bright Wizard uses Combustion, were each spell you cast builds a certain amount of Combustion points, and the Meltdown ability ‘cashes in’ your Combustion for additional damage – a bit like a finisher.

As I mentioned above, the GCD is about 1.2 seconds, which is pretty quick. This means that combos can be strung together fairly rapidly and combat feels nice and immediate. The only downside I had was that the Sword Master’s Greatsword has a swing time of about 3 seconds, but that’s only for the standard auto-attack, so it’s not a big deal.

Summary

It’s hard not to get wrapped up in the world of Warhammer. Mythic have filled every second of the game with cool stuff. After the barren wasteland of Age of Conan, WAR feels refreshingly alive – you’re never short of something to do, and being thrust into the conflict from the moment you log in only reinforces this. My only critiscism of this is that it’s sometimes too much choice, but I know I’ll forgive it when I don’t have to grind another level just to open up a handful more quests.

In short, it’s everything I hoped it would be and more besides. Even in Open Beta it’s still way more polished and way more complete than AoC was when I stopped playing. They’ve taken all the good bits that Blizzard introduced with World of WarCraft, tweaked them were necesssary, added their own features, and really embraced everything that the license offered them.

In the words of Eurogamer: ladies and gentlemen, we have a contender.

At the moment it’s just the same people from WoW – plus a few new faces – but I’m hoping to open up recruitment once we get going. The guild forums are hosted right here, so if you want to join the guild please keep your eye on the Recruitment forum.

I hope to see you all in-game!

The Open Beta takes characters up to level 13, enough to see the opening single player section of the game and the first half of your Destiny quest in Tortage. Opening with your character washed up on the shore, you get the first 5 or so levels to yourself, getting to grips with your character class and the unique combat system.

The first thing you’ll need to be aware of is that all attacks are triggered; there’s no targeting an enemy and auto-attacking until they’re dead here. Each time you click a directional attack or cast a spell, you’ll do one hit. After a few levels you’ll get to play with combos which are special attacks that allow you to string together several swings with a proc at the end of it. As I was playing a Barbarian, most of my combos revolved around either stunning the opponent or opening up wounds (a DoT that makes your opponent bleed over time).

After escaping the jungle I finally got to enter the first multiplayer section of the game, the port of Tortage. The first thing that hits you is how detailed this world is – easily surpassing World of WarCraft, and this isn’t even a capital city. I filled my quest log and started exploring, taking in the dense jungle that surrounds the port, and the island of White Sands that lies just over the water.

Quests in Age of Conan are interesting, if not in structure then at least in flavour; I don’t think WoW would ever let you con a whore into deviant sexual activity so you can fill a vial with her blood. The dialogues are all fully voiced as well, and play out in mini cut-scenes that serve to focus the action around you, rather than the other players wandering about.

I’ll talk briefly about the Destiny quest line as well. This is the main single-player quest that opens up at level 5 and concludes at level 20. By speaking to your class trainer in Tortage, you can choose to uproot the corruption in the city by venturing out on your own at night. This spawns an instanced version of Tortage at night, and features much tighter quests with cut-scenes and scripted events – impossible in a multiplayer zone. The quest has a real epic feel to it, and because you’re on your own, you feel like you’re the first one to succeed rather than the endless queue of winners you get in other MMORPGs.

I think overall, Age of Conan is shaping up to be a fine way to spend the next 3-6 months. Despite the technical problems it has done enough for me to keep my pre-order open, and that’s without spellweaving, capital cities, raids, crafting, sieges, battle keeps… if it’s all as well thought-out as these first few levels, I’ll be a happy man.

Next for me is to try out the other class archetypes before launch so I can settle on my main for the full game. Barbarian has been fun, if a little one-dimensional, but I’m itching to try out a magic-user. Necromancer next I think, and then maybe Guardian. I’ll write up some additional thoughts on these classes, plus a comparison with the Rogue archetype, some time next week.

The character creation screen is excellent, giving you a massive amount of control over how your character looks and sounds. I decided I wanted to start with a Stygian Herald of Xotli, and after finally settling on her looks I hit the Play button.

Even though this was a PvP beta, FunCom decided to include a short tutorial to take you from level 1 to 5; this is ostensibly the opening single player section of the game. Short though it was, it was enough to introduce me to some of the subtleties of Age of Conan, in particular the real-time combat system.

Combat in Age of Conan uses full collision detection between characters and weapons, so you have to line your strikes up or you won’t connect. You can string combos together, either using the special combo abilities, or simply by manually chaining attack directions. You also get to dodge and block, and combining all of these together makes for a very intense fight.

I should point out that, even using DirectX9 (the DirectX10 client didn’t come with the beta), the game looks lovely. Its certainly leaps and bounds ahead of the competition – World of WarCraft included. Audio is also of a similar high standard, with plenty of bespoke incidental effects and a fantastic musical score.

Back to the game. After completing the tutorial, I was warped to the PvP lobby in the city of Tortage, and upgraded to level 20. From here you have a choice of which minigame to take part in, from a choice of 1 Deathmatch arena or 3 Capture the Flag maps. Both game types are fairly straightforward, and if anything a little limited, but it does give you a fair overview of the combat mechanics.

After a few games with my Herald, I decided it wasn’t quite what I was after and decided to roll up a close approximation to my old WarCraft Frost Mage. I decided to pick Tempest of Set, and had a much happier time staying out of combat and nuking from a distance. Complete with snares and burst damage, the Tempest is a pretty good match for the Mage, and plays similarly. There isn’t as much variety in spells, certainly at level 20, but you also get to wear medium armour and wave a polearm about.

Lastly, and itching to get a taste for proper melee combat, I decided to go for a Conqueror. This is where I had the most fun – whether through the class or simply because I understood more of the subtleties in the game mechanics. Either way, this class really clicked with me. The Conqueror is your classic off-tank, with two fighting stances (and attached Feat trees) to spec Defensive or Frenzy. You can really take a lot of punishment, particularly when you augment this with some of the buffs you get. Most of these buffs are command abilities which let you temporarily boost you and your allies’ abilities, although I found the cooldown a little harsh for their usefulness.

Although these were the only classes I played, I did get to have a look at the others as I fought. Your main tank seems to be the Gaurdian, with heavy armour and lots of hit points. Dark Templars seemed quite underpowered in the beta, but they look to be the main DPS warrior class, with magic-enhanced abilities.

The weakest class seemed to be the Priest of Mitra, largely because there are no point-and-click heals in this game. Whilst I’m on the subject of that, I should point out that healing works very differently in Age of Conan. Basically, healing isn’t some “get out of jail free” card; it isn’t powerful enough to change the course of a fight, but what it can do is keep your party alive long enough to out-DPS the enemy. Basically, the game seems less focused on having to have a healer in your party to succeed, but having one keeps you upright for longer. I quite like this approach in principle, but I need more PvE time with it.

The other priest classes are Tempest of Set, and the extremely popular Bear Shaman. These are arguably better all-rounders than the Priest of Mitra, with similar healing spells but better armour and DPS. The rogue classes round it out, with your traditional dual-wielding Assassin (no snares in Age of Conan though!), over-powered Ranger (which is getting a nerf – I got fed up of being 1-shotted) and the obvious Barbarian. Barbarians are DPS machines if spec’ed right, although they can only wear medium armour. Still, dual wielding a pair of axes whilst in Frenzy pumps out the damage, so hopefully you’ll get them before they get you.

All in all, I had great fun, and I’m eagerly awaiting the full release. Despite some niggles with the combat initially, it really started to click towards the end of the weekend, and I think I can start to understand how it all works. Having said that, PvE is always going to be my favourite way to play, so hopefully I’ll get accepted onto the open beta. See you in Hyborea!

I printed out my little returns label and I’ll be making use of it on Saturday. Microsoft will kindly pay your shipping and repair costs, but God knows how long its going to take. Luckily I’ve developed a moderate addiction to Everybody’s Golf on the PS3, so that should keep me in clover until the white one returns. Although I’d much prefer it if they returned a black one to me. Probably too much to hope for, but you never know…

It was always going to get compared to Gears Of War, and its true that the basic premise remains broadly similar. Basically, humans have attempted to colonise a seemingly empty planet, only to discover that it isn’t really empty at all. The aliens that have remained buried under the ground have now burst forth to wipe these cheeky human invaders from their world. So far, so similar. Even the viewpoint is the same; its a third-person shooter, but the pacing and gameplay is very different.

For starters, there’s no cover system. Sure, there’s plenty of cover in the game, but there’s no actual mechanism to utilise it other than just standing behind whatever’s available. The pacing is also quite different, being much slower but also more free-flowing than Gears Of War. Whereas Epic’s game is a series of high-tempo gun-battles punctuated by staccato movement in and out of cover, Lost Planet flows much more freely but at a slower pace.

The big “feature” I suppose, or at least the central plot device, is the notion of T-ENG, or Thermal Energy. This is the reason mankind didn’t just up and leave once the giant bugs showed up; they want to harvest this energy, much like they did with oil in the Midd- snip! Getting a bit too political here. Suffice to say they have no intention of negotiating a trade for this energy with the bugs, unless said trade involves mass genocide.

The character you play – the tremendously-named Wayne [Note: I think if you're going to call your lead character Wayne you might as well go the whole hog and use Keith instead] – has an in-built “Harmoniser” suit that consumes T-ENG in order to heal him. This basically has the same effect as Master Chief’s Spartan armour; stay out of trouble and the T-ENG will refill your energy bar. What the Chief never had to worry about was a constantly-falling energy supply, hence the dire need to harvest this precious juice.

One of my main concerns from the demo was that this added time-pressure would detract from the desire to explore the game world, but in practice you usually have so much T-ENG available that it doesn’t really factor. The only time it starts to become a worry is if you’re getting pelted on all sides, and all your lovely energy is being expended to keep you alive. But then, if you’re running low on energy through being shot at that’s likely to be the least of your worries.

So, I’m only two missions in so far, but it really is quite enjoyable. The story is lovably hokey, replete with Capcom’s usual clumsy dialogue and bargain-basement voice actors. That’s perhaps being a bit unfair – its not as bad as Resident Evil 4 for example – but its still miles away from something like Dragon Quest VIII. Having said that, the dialogue doesn’t grate quite as much as Gears Of War‘s macho posturing, but then neither does the delivery of those lines match it. Slightly tighter script, slightly worse delivery.

One other thing I will point out is that the explosions are truly lovely. Go on, have a look.

How pretty is that? And trust me, you’ll be blowing up a lot of stuff in this game, so its just as well that everything looks better when on fire. There’s two other features that stand it apart from Gears Of War as well: one of them is the grappling hook, which allows you to swing up to ledges, or abseil down to the ground; the other is the use of VSs – mechs for those of you not concerned by copyright – which take up about 40% of the gameplay. These are great, temporarily increasing your firepower and the pace of the game, and feeding your desire for vengeance on the bugs that have been kicking your ass for five minutes. Even cooler is the ability to detach one of the massive weapons from a VS and carry it around with you! Ah, nothing like hot gatling death.

I’ll be on this till the end I suspect, if only to harvest what Achievement Points I can from it. But I reckon it will more than likely be a desire to finish what promises to be a very solid game indeed.