Older players of the Korean version will remember the days before jumping in Mabinogi. It was added two years ago and brought it’s own share of bugs. Of course many people would continue to exploit them, that’s how it goes with games!

Some games benefit from bugs, GunZ is a perfect example and a personal favourite. In this case the developers disagree, it’s being patched out so things like certain boss fights will go more as intended.

I can’t blame them for wanting to take it out. I’m always one for trying to find bugs in games, but it doesn’t always benefit the game to keep them in. It will be interesting to see how many people quit after the bugs are gone, I don’t think it will hurt the Mabinogi player population much.

Source.

If you don’t already know about it, Hearthstone is a collectible card game based on the Warcraft lore. Fans of the series will recognise characters from the games in many cards.

Hearthstone is currently in open beta but Blizzard have already updated their rules and guidelines for official tournaments, particularly for those offering prizes of $10,000 or more. Anyone interested will need to apply for an official community licence, you can find out more about that here.

I’ve been playing the beta myself and it’s really good fun, check it out at the official site.

An example of a duel:
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The SKARA team have released a new Alpha video featuring game play in the new Lava Coliseum arena. The playable demo is set in a lava-filled arena deep inside the Rhozha Mountains—the home of the barbarian Khärn tribe.

With eight solid months of development under its belt, SKARA is now focusing its efforts on completing their playable demo to be released on STEAM early access within the next few weeks.

“Players will finally be able to get a feeling for SKARA game play,” said Pablo Rodriguez, CEO and Creative Director of Skara, talking about the release. “The character control will feel like that in a versus game”

“After a lot of thought, we decided the best way for people to think about SKARA was as: A versus fighting game…for sixteen players” he said. “The team and I have been playing it for a few weeks now—and we are very addicted so get ready for the early access!”

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Official site.

Tower defence games are super popular now, and have been since flash games were first popping up on the net, it’s a genre I can’t seem to stop playing!

Royal Revolt 2 is different because not only do you play defensively by building up the protection en-route to your base, you can also attack other players in the game! Lead the charge and take down defences set by real players. The game has been out for a week on iOS and has just been released today for Android.

“Royal Revolt 2 launched strongly on iOS last week; we hope to repeat the success with our Android version. We’re happy to hit Google Play on its second birthday and are proud to celebrate this great platform with extra birthday- and Android-themed ingame art.” said Klaas Kersting, Founder and CEO of flaregames.

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Webzen have released a new class for Continent of the ninth seal (C9). The new class is the Nightstalker, they have powerful summoning abilities and can absorb their own summons for special attacks. This new advanced class for is a progression for the Witchblade class and is now available for all players.

The Nightstalker is a mid-range class that utilises powerful summoning and absorbing attacks whilst wielding a two handed chain blade. With combinations of the skills summon and absorb, they allow you to summon powerful servants to fight for you during the battle and absorb the servants to improve your status and allow you to cause tons of damage.

Whenever a Nighstalker absorbs a servant, they will be able to temporarily use a powerful and unique ability, this changes with each summon.

Anyone who gets their Nightstalker to level 50 or higher before March 26th will receive special prizes. All details about the award can be found via the official website.

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Aeria Games have just signed an agreement to sell its worldwide PC games business including its subsidiary Aeria Games Europe GmbH to ProSiebenSat.1 Games. Aeria Games have said that they will now be able to focus exclusively on its global mobile games development and publishing business.

“As one of the pioneers in the Western markets for free-to-play PC games, we have successfully built a global publishing business with 50+ million users. The company is extremely proud of our team’s accomplishment and the transaction will give the business the requisite scale for continued growth,” said Lan Hoang, CEO and co-founder of Aeria Games. “With the additional capital, we will invest exclusively in the mobile business with additional game launches. We have already proven ourselves as a strong publisher and developer of mobile games, and we look forward to exponential growth in the mobile business for years to come.”

Aeria will continue to develop mobile games for global launches, such as X-Men: Battle of the Atom, as well as use its expertise in operating and publishing mobile games to work with Asian partners to bring titles to the Western markets and vice versa.

The great news for existing Aeria gamers is that the transaction with ProSiebenSat.1 Games will not impact the Aeria Games player community. The entire Aeria Games brand and platform will be acquired and further expanded by ProSiebenSat.1 Games, and users will continue to enjoy their accounts and all the games that they have been playing.

It’s another era in gaming, it makes me think of the many hours I racked up playing mostly GunZ, good times.

Lifeless is an up and coming Zombie MMO FPS due for beta release at the end of the year. We at RaGEZONE have teamed up with the developers Rigid-Soft to bring you this exclusive video tech demonstration and screenshots from the current pre alpha build. The video showcases several new and interesting factors including harvesting, crafting and fortification. Each new addition is set to rejuvenate the genre and give the fans of zombie based survival the experience they deserve.

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For more information on Lifeless, visit the official website here.

Albion Online is a sandbox MMORPG with a medieval theme. There are two main things that interest me here, all in-game items and buildings are player made and the MMO is cross platform, Linux, Android, Mac, iOS, and Windows players altogether.

Sandbox Interactive recently had a live Q&A to confirm player questions about the Alpha testing and the future of the game.

Regarding the world, will there be different themes such as winter/desert/lava/etc?
-Jantin, Reddit

Yes! Currently the world in Albion Online is under development but we do plan on featuring several different kinds of areas.

Do you use tab targeting or do you have to click to select targets?
-Zarf, Alpha forum

Currently the system is very similar to other top down RPG games where you click your target to attack them, however tab targeting is on our backlog.

Are all spells target-and-heal? or are there also aimed shots?
-Khor, Alpha Forum

Aimed shots such as Skillshots may be a bit of ambitious endeavor for a MMORPG game, they work wonderful in a small scale setting but in a MMORPG setting they can become problematic.

Currently there are no similar skills however we do plan to implement ground based AoE attacks.

How are hit points derived, does every new character have the same amount say 100 hp?
-Zarf, Alpha Forum

Currently a ungeared character got 1000 health points, a lot of gear has health bonuses and some gear has the option to specialize for increased health points.

How is character speed determined ? Being ‘over weight’ slows you down but do you have the same speed between 0% and 99% limit ? Does being in combat lower your speed ?
-Khor, Alpha Forum

Yes up until around 100% carrying weight you move at your ordinary speed, above that your movement speed will be gradually decreased, you can craft backpacks which increase your carrying capacity.

And being in or out of combat will not change your movement speed, however there are spells and attacks that can slow your opponent’s movement speed as well as skills that can boost your own or allies’ movement speed.

Hello I was wondering how you guys will address world population and available resources. Will it just be one big server or different servers with a player cap? If it’s one server will resources re-spawn quicker depending on how many players are online at a given time? I can see this game being played by the thousands at any given time so I am curious on your game plan to absorb that.
-Skytea, Alpha Forum

We will aim for one large world, similar to Eve. Whether we will succeed with that is to been seen Having different servers would be a fall back solution. What would definitely be the case is that we would have different starting zones, such that not everybody starts in the same place. We will find a good balance.

Also, keep in mind that the better the resources are, the more dangerous the zone will become.
Current plans are:
Safe Zones have at most T4.
Zones with strong crime debuff have at most T5.
Zones with weak crime debuff have at most T6.
Fully open zones have up to T7.

Also, it goes without saying that the strongest boss mobs etc will also be in the more dangerous zones.

So tools have durability, but do weapons and armor have it too ? Can it be repaired when its weak, so it can basically last forever? If so, how is equipment eventually removed from the game ? If its not, wont ‘rare’ items eventually become common, as the materials are farmed and the items are crafted, more will be in circulation all the time.
-Khor, Alpha Forum

Everything will break eventually. Only thing that you can repair is player made houses.

Check out the Albion introduction video below.

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Reborn in oak and thorn, Atomic Poison Ivy, fights for an Earth wreathed in toxic forest as the latest Champion addition to Infinite Crisis.

As nuclear fallout withered the old world’s flora, a psychic scream plunged Pamela Isley into darkness. She awoke in a mutated forest, shocked to discover her own transformation. The forest mind spoke to hers, calling itself the Green. Their powerful telepathic link, forged in nuclear fire, gave Ivy renewed purpose. She would use her new from to protect herself, the Green, and to strike fear into a weakened humanity’s heart.

Using exotic powers to protect and entrap, few enemies escape this villain’s grasp. Ivy uses plants to protect from damage and also to control her enemies with roots and walls of brush. Check her out in the video release below.

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Aeria Games has announced the start of Open Beta testing for Aura Kingdom, their new massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) with a gorgeous anime art style.

The open beta comes right after several closed testing periods in which thousands of players were able to get a first taste of Aura Kingdom’s rich world and styled gameplay. During the course of Founder’s Beta, Closed Beta, and Stress Test, players collectively created over 170,000 characters and logged nearly 1,000,000 hours in the game, that’s pretty impressive. Now the gates are opening to everyone to help finish testing before Aura Kingdom goes live.

“We’ve seen an incredibly positive response and outpouring of enthusiasm from our community after Aura Kingdom’s Closed Beta,” said Tom Nichols, Vice President of PC Games, Aeria Games. “Now we’re happy to finally announce that players all over the world can experience for themselves this great game from our fan-favorite developer X-Legend.”

Game Masters will be on hand to run in-game events every day throughout Open Beta. These events will range from huge monster and boss spawns, to contests to snap a screenshot of a GM running at superhuman speed. The events offer valuable in-game items and currency as prizes. For new players, there will be welcome sessions during which GMs focus on answering player questions, as well as live tutorials on their Twitch.tv.

Aura Kingdom is free to download, and play. Players can enter Azuria now at the official site.