Dragon Nest, A New F2P game on the horizon

Dragon Nest is a "new" (currently out in Korea) F2P game developed by EYEDENTITY GAMES and published by Nexon. Essentially, it's an Action MMORPG with a combo system. There isn't too much info on this game yet, but we do have a general gist of what it's about. Essentially, it's a dungeoned, fully instanced Action MMORPG similar to Vindictus, but apparently has a greater emphasis on PvP since they have stated that they'll have support for 16 players and such.

There will also be 4 classes, an archer, cleric, warrior and sorceress which are pretty self explanatory of how they'll design those characters. There isn't too much info on the level designs either. However, from the videos and other info, it feels more like a 3D version of Dungeon Fighter Online, which is a pretty decent beat 'em up and F2P.

Also, you can apply for the closed beta now at this link here. Sign up and hope you get in :)

Vindictus, A Closer Look

In my previous blog entry, I stated that Vindictus was the best F2P Action/Adventure RPG. However, I didn't really go too much in depth of what makes this game really good and at the same time, didn't go over it's flaws. In this entry, I'll delve much deeper into what are the highlights as well as what can be improved upon and the kinks that it need to be ironed out.

The best way to fully analyze this game is to break it up into parts and then recombine it at the end to see how well each piece complements each other. Since I have only played this game recently, I have not seen how this game progressed at each stage of its evolution, thus this is a fairly current analysis of the game. Here are the categories in which I'll break up this game:

1. Aesthetics
2. Narrative
3. Game Mechanics
4. Gameplay Design

Free to Play Rundown

There are so many F2P games out there that it's hard to pick out the game you want to devote your precious time, bandwidth and hard drive space to.  So, I have already done that for you.  Of course, I haven't played EVERY F2P game out there, but I'll list which ones stand out the most out of what I have played.

First things first though, most of these games are considered to be "MMO", but that is such a generic term that  essentially, anything with some kind of online multiplayer support falls under this category.  I'll go into the terminology of this more in depth in a future blog, but for now, do NOT assume when a game is a MMO, it's a WoW or EverQuest clone unless stated otherwise.  This mode of thinking is like saying every FPS game is a Quake or Doom clone.

Probably the best way to list the best F2P games I have played so far is in terms of their respective categories. The categories will be the following:

1. Best Action/Adventure RPG
2. Best RTS
3. Best Anime Inspired MMORPG
4. Best General MMORPG
5. Best Shooter

I'm Back!!!!

After about half a year, I'm finally back to do gaming news and reviews.  However, I'll be focusing more on free gaming or f2p games, and of course anything Warhammer 40k related.  I also did a slight interface update and will cover these following games in the future:

• Vindictus
• League of Legends
• Runes of Magic
• Allods Online
• Grand Fantasia
• Iris Online
• Aika Online
• Dungeons and Dragons Online
• DOMO
• CABAL Online
• Dragon Age 2

DoW 2: Retribution Campaign 3rd Playable Race; Tyranids

Yup, that's right, Tyranids have been confirmed as the third playable race for the single player campaign of the upcoming Dawn of War 2 expansion Retribution.  This is relatively big news since in all the previous Dawn of War games, Tyranids haven't been a playable race in any of its campaigns.

Currently, Retribution has 3 confirmed playable races: Orks, Eldar and now the Tyranids.  I would assume that this expansion will also include the Space Marines since the story at the end of Chaos Rising was more of a "to be continued" than any sort of conclusion. 

However, this stand-alone expansion is looking to have much more content than I anticipated since each of these races will have a full story with 15 missions each.  I guess once you have the engine and units in place, all there's left is to make more maps and campaigns.

DotA 2 is announced

Thus, it has happened.  An official DotA 2 will be available sometime in 2011 created by Valve since Icefrog joined them not too long ago.

If you've been keeping up on the whole Dota-ish games, you know that 2 other games came out recently that are essentially "DotA 2's": League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth.  This is mainly why I'm not too excited about this game.  It'll probably cost $30-50 and the gameplay will be essentially exactly the same as DotA.  Project lead Erik Johnson states, "our first reaction is to assume that [the design elements are] there for a reason... IceFrog is one of the smartest designers we've ever met. He's made so many good decisions over the years in building the product. He virtually never makes a decision that doesn't have some reasoning behind it and a way to pick apart the logic behind it."  Thus the main changes you will see is with Source Engine and that it'll be on Steam; both are major upgrades from the pitiful battle.net and dated WC3 engine.

The game will most likely have voice chat, matchmaking, achievements, skins, etc, but will it address the problem that DotA had since day one?  This problem is the ridiculous learning curve which is more like a stepwise function than an actual curve.  I say probably not, but you never know.  Valve is a great company with many talented people on board, thus they might work around this issue.  Otherwise, this game should be called DotA Source instead of DotA 2.

Medal of Honor Open Beta Almost Done!

If you haven't been playing on the MoH open beta, what have you been doing?  No... Halo Reach is not an excuse nor is a job, life etc.  This beta ends on October 7th, which is 2 days from now.  So, drop whatever you are doing now and play this game before you actually have to buy it!