Keyrock

Keeping in mind that I'm only scratching the surface (I'm level 7), it seems very solo-able. There are quests specifically made for a party, both official and community made, but the vast majority of the content I've seen is completely doable solo.

Neverwinter Open Beta Slicing punk *****es up in the Blacklake District: The reason everything is blurry is because I was in the middle of a wide sweeping special attack and it makes the background go blurry for a split second for "effects", I guess.

Pretty well so far. Keep in mind that I've only played a couple of hours and it's really early in the game, so grain of salt and all that jazz. The combat is pretty good. It plays like Tera, minus the creepy as **** loli/furry/almost completely naked fetish. It's action oriented with you having to actually hit your target physically to do damage, not just be withing 10 yards standing still and hitting hotkeys. The game encourages movement on the battlefield to avoid AoEs and heavy charge up attacks. So far all the quest givers have been fully voice acted. The voice acting ranges from mediocre to cringeworthy, but still, full voice acting in an MMO is pretty cool in itself. The quests have also been decent. They still boil down to "run through this dungeon" and fetch quests, but at least the game does a good job of dressing them up so they're not so bluntly generic. It's F2P and the client is only about 3 1/2 GB, try it out for yourself. If you do I play on the Mindflayer server, in case you want to group or whatever.

Neverwinter Open Beta Here's my Half-Orc Great Weapon Fighter Murzush Gro Ruhm in the marketplace: And here she is wearing casual clothing (who wants to walk around town wearing bulky armor?): I'm super early in the game so my gear is weak and generic right now. Sorry about the crappy picture quality, I should have saved at higher jpeg quality settings.

Playing some Neverwinter Open Beta as a Half-Orc Great Weapon Fighter. Pretty fun so far. The combat is more action oriented, like Tera, and not just the standard stand there and click buttons fare. So far there is full voice acting, for the quest givers, anyway. They have all the races you'd expect playable, Human, Elf, Half-Elf, Dwarf, Halfling, plus Drow, Tiefling, and Half-Orc, and there is promise of at least one more race in the future (full blooded orcs plz, and green ones, I'm okay with grey, but prefer green for orcs ). Five playable classes right now: Trickster Rogue, Great Weapon Fighter (2-handers), Guardian Fighter (sword & board), Cleric, and Control Wizard, with more classes to come.

Excellent. Cosigned.

If your name is "Allan" you can use the one I got (Whenever I try adding it, however, it says my post is too short...) EDIT: Fixed it. biehn2.png And yes, it is awesome that he told me to Stay Frosty. Okay, that's just ridiculously awesome. You are now my hero going forward... for at least the nest five minutes.

Mars: War Logs Beginning of Act 3 - Green Hope: Rocking technician's uniform fully upgraded for fluid regeneration (fluid = mana) and wielding steel bar crafted with a razor axe head and superconductor:

Have you tried to tap the casual simulation market yet? Something like Hibernation Simulator 2014?

You got to meet Michael Biehn? I am so ****ing jealous!

Well it looks to me like a crustacean exoskeleton... a sexy crustacean exoskeleton, hence me calling it carapace armor. But yeah, I see your point. Regardless of what we call it, it's freakin' ridiculous. Still, I'm willing to look past all that stuff (and the generic as can be quests) because the gameplay is just so much better than any other MMO I've tried. The game is creepy as ****, but it's also really fun. Now, if I see tentacles or chicks with ****s, I'm out. If only someone made a non creepy dude spankin' it in his mom's basement MMO that played this well.

The antropomorphic parts I can handle, the scary part of terra is the loli contingent, thats just really creepy. Yeah, the whole 9 year old looking girls with rabbit ears in teenie-weenie dresses is pretty creepy, as is the prevalence for super sexualized carapace armor. But at the same time, the combat in the game is so much better than any other MMO I've ever played. It's frustrating that the only MMO I've played where the combat doesn't bore me to tears is also a playground for creepy dudes with weird fetishes.

Played a bit of TERA, started up an Amani Berserker. So far that game is full of about as standard and generic kill X monsters and fetch quests as it gets. On the positive side, the game has the best combat I've experienced in my (albeit extremely limited) MMO experience, it's miles better than most run of the mill MMOs. Also, ridiculous furry fetish characters and impossibly gargantuan weapons aside, it's also the prettiest MMO I've ever played. I'll pay it the highest compliment by saying that it simply doesn't look like an MMO.

Sooooo... Michael is Tommy Vercetti, Franklin is CJ, and Trevor is... a redneck Brucie Kibbutz? I already knew they were recycling the setting, now they're recycling characters too?

Well, when this started out I thought the funding would succeed if they managed to reach 30% within the first week. They did just that, albeit barely, therefore I think they will reach their funding goal.

Awesome! I want my "Stronghold" to be a Winnebago my character cruises around The Bloom and parks outside of areas of interest.

That's it Boo, you are kicked off the Mars Exploratory Expedition. It could have been shades of orange and red at least. Why bother going to another planet if its not going to be colorful? Might as well stay in our ****ty brown and gunmetal gray homes. There are areas that are more reddish. To me, when I play the game, it does "feel" like Mars. Of course I've never actually been on Mars so...

I wonder if this was done more as an earnest plea to pirates or more as a publicity stunt? Honestly, I approve either scenario, and in either case, I thought this was cleverly done. Bravo to the developers, I hope this game earns them a tidy profit.

The game uses the Rage color palette. It's Mars, you're going to have to look pretty hard (and take some hallucinogens) to find a lush jungle.

Mars: War Logs In the P.O.W. Camp wearing starting armor: In Shadowlair wearing fully Technomancered out Leather Outfit and wielding copper tube crafted into bone axe: Character screen (note the Michael Jackson style single Technomancer glove ):

Ok, that killed my interest in the game. Argh. Here's what a typical area looks like in Mars: War Logs: It's not a straight line, but rather branching and intersecting corridors. Occasionally you'll get into a somewhat more open area, but still fairly limited in scope. There is some room to explore, but it's FAR from open world. Think Dragon Age 2 maps. Anyway, I'm over 8 hours deep in the game now and definitely still enjoying it. It definitely borrows heavily from The Witcher 2, which to me is not a bad thing. The combat, the skill trees, the use of melee, ranged weapons, magic, traps, and bombs, the way Roy climbs ladders, climbs up and down ledges, it all seems torn straight from The Witcher 2. I mainly focused on combat skills in Act 1, now I'm focusing on Technomancy (you don't get access to that skill tree until the end of Act 1), aka technological magic, so I can go Emperor Palpatine on people and zap them with lightning. I can definitely see myself doing at least one more playthrough of this game doing a sneaky sneaky focused build. Here's a screenshot of where I'm currently at in the game:

For those wanting to prettify Mars: War Logs a bit, you can use FXAA Injector to add and/or tweak some effects. It won't turn the game into Crysis 3, but it does make a difference. I've messed around with the FXAA Injector settings a bit and gotten everything to look sharper and crisper and gotten the colors and lighting more vibrant. I suppose FXAA Injector can be used with any number of games, with varying degrees of success.

That's extra bad if you don't find out until the morning.

I must be one of few to consider the combat being compared to Witcher 2 to be a bad thing. How bad depends on whether you mean fighting before or after they patched Witcher 2... After they patched it. I'd say it's a little better than fully patched The Witcher 2 combat, but that's the best comparison I can make because the style of combat is very similar. Attack, parry, roll around, use ranged attacks, plant traps, etc. The skill tree progression is also somewhat similar. You have 3 skill trees that you can advance in to make a "specialist" or a jack of all trades. There's a physical combat focused tree, a rogue-ish tree, and a mage-ish tree. Similar to The Witcher 2, you can focus on the fighting elements you use or enjoy the most, but you'll never profoundly change the nature of the combat. Geralt is who he is, similarly, Roy is who he is. It's a budget title through and through. The lypsincing is out of whack, there are some minor misspellings and mistranslations, the game is chock full of cliches, levels are relatively linear with only a small bit of room to explore, yet beneath all that is a pretty enjoyable game with some real campy charm. Some people have written that it's like playing a game from 2006 with all the bad and the good that comes with it. That's a relatively accurate assessment. Edit: The DRM is Steamworks. The engine is solid as a rock. I have had a grand total of zero issues downloading, installing, and playing the game.

Swen had been practically begging people for that during the campaign. I'm going to do my best to mod Kirill into the game, if he's not already in there as an easter egg or something. Kirill is way too awesome a guy to not be in the game. Second order of business will be modding the game so I can play as an orc, on account of orcs being awesome. As with practically any game, I can almost guarantee that a nude mod will be one of the first to pop up. The modding community has it's priorities in order.