Blog

When you play a game with a title like Dragons and Titans, you seek fire, brimstone, and battles of epic proportions that rattle the very foundations of the Earth. The reality of the latest addition to the ever-expanding MOBA genre, however, is a bland and clumsy game that relies on its theme as a crutch to make up for its gameplay having no longevity of its own. Dragons and Titans may feature the juggernauts of fantasy lore, but the game itself is too frail to make so much as a whimper.

Dragons and Titans is yet another free-to-play game following in the footsteps of the likes of Dota 2 and League of Legends. You select a dragon and a legendary weapon, and then join a team with the focus of annihilating the equally voracious opposing team. As has become a staple of the genre, you may do so in any of three game variants, the central of which has you focusing on freeing your team’s titan by destroying the enemy’s titan cage in the center of the base. The titan cage is shielded, however, and destroying the various structures surrounding the enemy base serves to take a chunk out of the enemy’s shield or speed up the shield’s natural decay. The other options are a domination variant, which requires your team to destroy the enemy titan cage, and the familiar all-random, all-mid offering for a more relaxed experience. Matches are much shorter than in most similar games, clocking in at around 20 minutes for a long game, compared to the daunting hour-long matches that often appear in League of Legends.

The dragons in Dragons and Titans rely on special cone-based skills focused in the direction the dragon is facing. Such skills pertain to the element the dragon represents, whether it be poison, fire, light, sand, mist, or so forth. That the basic attack is tied to the direction you face is the cause of untold frustration. Once you use up your other spells and abilities or run out of mana, you and your opponents have nothing but basic attacks left, and battles play out in one of three equally exasperating ways: you chasing down someone who’s too low to stay and fight and just flies in a zigzag pattern to reduce your damage; you chasing an enemy fighter who is waiting on cooldowns and simply flies backward; or you and an enemy dragon rider attempting to fly directly at one another, only to end up chasing each other’s tail in a circle. The resulting chaos is never fun.

Basic attack complaints aside, dragons are inherently equipped with one other ability to give them their unique identities. The paper dragon has a bonus health shield to bolster its literally paper-thin defenses, the bone dragon gains some close-range combat ability, and the magma dragon sends chunks of flaming rock flying at foes. These abilities, and a dragon’s appearance and base stats, are the only aspects of the game lending identity to the different selectable characters, apart from the game’s legendary weapon system.

While teams are limited to one of each type of dragon per team, they are also limited to one of each type of legendary weapon. Legendary weapons grant you two additional abilities, and any weapon can be attached to any dragon, so you can customize half of a dragon’s skill set on a game-to-game basis. This offers some interesting customization options, such as the ability to turn a back-line poker into an equally devastating threat in melee range, or to simply increase your firepower from afar, but it also drains the identity of each class of dragon and makes them all bleed into one.

That the basic attack is tied to the direction you face is the cause of untold frustration.

The game offers a single-player campaign for those who aren’t interested in, or who want a break from, playing against other players. The campaign consists of three acts, two of which you must pay for to unlock, and is merely a gauntlet of “kill this, kill those, collect these, and kill that,” with forgettable bits of dialogue to link each bit together. There are three difficulty levels, and the game offers an additional “star” for beating the level with additional parameters, such as within a certain time or with a certain dragon.

Much like League of Legends, Dragons and Titans features a rune system for customizing your stats for a battle by collecting and purchasing runes to power up your dragon. Unlike in League of Legends, the runes can be purchased with real money, leading to a red flag for those opposed to “pay for power” mechanics in games. Further in this insidious vein is the ability to forge your legendary weapons to reduce mana costs or cooldowns or to increase their damage. To forge, you expend forge materials and wait four hours, or use an ingot to finish the forging instantly. Once again, ingots can be purchased with real money, so players who pay can power up their characters more quickly than those who simply attempt to acquire them by grinding. You can make pretty substantial progress on a weapon’s forging for as little as $4, with those 1 percent boosts all adding up to a noticeable decrease in mana consumption. And again, I stress that mana goes away fast in this game. You want mana. You want things to not cost a lot of mana. You want to forge that weapon you’re using.

One of the few areas where Dragons and Titans succeeds and others have failed is in its method of mitigating champion select arguments over who gets to play which champion, because prior to queuing, you can preselect your dragon or legendary weapon. It comes with a warning that it will increase queue times, since running into anyone else preselecting your dragon or titan prevents you from being matched, but in my experience, the queue time didn’t noticeably increase. I was guaranteed to get the weapon I wanted every game, which meant more to me than what dragon I selected. The mechanic is a brave one, especially given the meager player base, but it succeeds in its purpose.

It’s a shame that a game featuring colossal lizards would look and sound so drab. Dragon fire-breath sounds are nigh indistinguishable from the sound of static when your TV’s cable has gone out. The only graphics options available to adjust are resolution, full-screen mode, vertical sync, and a single slider allowing you to choose between fast or pretty graphics; the best I could reckon the slider did was adjust the brightness from “morning-drive road glare” to “moderate corneal incineration.” You may wish to wear sunglasses when playing the game, or turn down your monitor’s brightness and contrast settings to comfortable levels.

Dragons and Titans is a mere shadow of other, richer MOBAs, and while its significantly shorter average game time may give it some initial appeal, that appeal comes at the cost of almost any enjoyment of the time invested. Dragons and Titans could have been a gateway game to the genre, but weighed against the game’s counterparts, neither dragon nor titan can tip the scales in its favor.

Powered by WPeMatico

The key to understanding Hearthstone lies in its very name. Not only does it refer to the white-and-turquoise rock that has sent the World of Warcraft faithful back to inns since 2004; it also suggests friendly competition far removed from the battles and weighty stratagems of other collectible card games. Its cozy syllables evoke not laborious campaigns lasting hours, but quick matches that take no longer than it takes to gulp down a mug of ale. If World of Warcraft is the everyman’s massively multiplayer online game, this is the everyman’s collectible card game, and for the most part, Blizzard has justified the fanfare that erupted when it first appeared last March.

Few other card games rival its personality, which reveals itself in the little things, such as the way you can tap iron gongs and fiddle with water mills on the board in the 90 seconds when you’re awaiting a challenger’s next move, or in the way a chorus of rough-and-tumble dwarves and orcs erupts in cheers when you’ve made a good move. You find it in the flashier details as well, such as the way the mage’s arcane missiles pelt enemy heroes with sound files yanked from World of Warcraft, or in the way some of Warcraft’s most exaggerated figures guide through a tutorial that’s as helpful as it is fun. The emo night elf Illidan from Warcraft III and WOW’s Burning Crusade expansion wraps up the swift campaign, still spouting his convictions that we’re unprepared.

That may well be true for card gaming tenderfeet, but it rarely matters. One of the great strengths of Hearthstone is that it embraces players who shied from the know-it-alls at Magic: The Gathering events in comic shops or missed the heydays of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh. What’s more, it caters to players burned by the caustic personalities in multiplayer games like League of Legends and Dota 2 by limiting communication with random players to preset responses. (Friends can chat with and battle each other, but to prevent exploits, these matches offer no form of reward or advancement.) In true Blizzard form, Hearthstone shatters barriers to entry while supplying the means to access greater challenges if you seek them.

Indeed, card gaming veterans will find much to love beyond the cheesy puns and happy aesthetic. Hearthstone adopts the familiar model of whittling down the opposing player’s hit points with attack points from cards, but it simplifies the often cumbersome resource mechanics of other games for a mana bar that automatically expands with the passing of each turn. It’s a system geared toward speed, and hero abilities that don’t depend on cards–like the mage’s fireball–act as wild cards that can keep you in the fight even when surrounded by minions. It’s a lunch breaker’s game, and indeed, the toughest matches rarely last more than 15 minutes.

Blizzard manages to bless Hearthstone with significant depth in spite of such nods to speed. There’s a wide assortment of cards with specific abilities in play here, some of which are part of the nine unlockable decks modeled on familiar World of Warcraft classes, and others of which come with the massive bundle of cards that you can use with all the decks. Using the hunter deck, you might spring a trap by unleashing three weak snake cards after an enemy attacks his or her minions; your opponent might fend off the attacks by tossing down a tanky card with “taunt,” thereby forcing the snakes to attack the taunting card instead of the main hero. But still further strategies await: your mage could incapacitate the taunting card with a frost nova, thereby letting you have a go at your opponent’s hero.

All this worked well when beta invites shot out a year ago, but Hearthstone now enjoys a commendable degree of balance in the wake of months of tweaks and player suggestions. It’s more apparent in the early levels, when most challengers you meet haven’t built powerful decks through their winnings from daily quests and simple leveling, but flashes of it remain at higher levels when players start slapping down legendary cards with alarming frequency. Hearthstone’s class decks perform a little of the same service as alts in an online role-playing game; once you get tired of one class, you can jump on another and start leveling it from scratch for a varied experience.

Over time, perhaps inevitably, the process of leveling and building killer decks devolves into a grind. Blizzard gives you the option to craft your own cards to counter it, although it’s here that the veterans enjoy a significant advantage over card-gaming rookies. Hearthstone simplifies many of the necessary actions, such as destroying excess cards and neatly arranging the available cards in a flipbook of sorts, but the uninitiated get few clues as to what to focus on. In the worst cases, you might waste your material on a worthless card or (the horror) accidentally disintegrate one of the best in your deck. Nevertheless, card crafting is a good way to fill in the gaps for the unlucky. If you can’t get a card to appear from the packs you buy through your winnings (or indeed, real-world money), you can usually make it if you have the materials.

The best way to break this tedium is to break into the Arena mode. Arenas come with an entry fee, although it’s usually negligible if you manage to complete the daily quests, which have you doing things like winning matches with a specific deck or dealing 100 damage to enemy heroes. The allure of Arena lies in the leveling of the playing field. Rather than bringing your own decks into the battle, you’re only allowed to choose from one of three classes, and then you need to build your deck by choosing one of the random cards Hearthstone throws at you until you complete a full deck of 30 cards. The outcome can still be outrageously imbalanced. Some schmuck might swim in legendary cards, while the one you have never gets drawn from the deck. Of course, it works both ways. The next Arena match could shower you with legendaries like Ragnaros instead.

As is the case with any collectible card game, a degree of randomness affects each action in Hearthstone. It’s possible you’ll end up with nothing but sorry cards beyond the capable starter decks–I suffered the same fate after I lost my godly deck in a planned wipe halfway through the beta–but there’s always the chance of scoring big as well. Still, that randomness might drive players to toss some cash at Blizzard for new card packs (priced at $1.50 each), but the beauty of Hearthstone is that you never feel much if any need to fork out cash. It’s a free-to-play game in the best sense of the word, and even the interface for unloading your cash is more stylish than it normally is in such ventures.

Hearthstone features no built-in spectator mode, nor does it offer a replay mode, which could have been helpful in learning from your mistakes. Features such as team battles that make Magic’s digital duel games so fun make no appearances here, and the daily quests take long enough to complete that you’ll sometimes want to spend cash if you want to play in the Arena. But such objections are minor in light of the breezy but brainy experience Blizzard delivers here, particularly for the massive segment of the populace that’s never played a collectible card game. If it’s dumbed down, then it’s in good hands. If any developer’s good at weeding out the chaff of more robust games in a particular genre, surely it’s Blizzard.

Powered by WPeMatico

Richard Garriott created the beloved Ultima role-playing game series. He traveled to the International Space Station and dove to the depths of the ocean to see the Titanic wreckage first-hand. He owns a stately castle-style home in Texas called Britannia Manor. Now he can add another accomplishment to his resume.

Garriott’s crowdfunding campaign for his “ultimate RPG” Shroud of the Avatar has now reached $3.5 million from more than 30,000 total backers.

The Shroud of the Avatar Kickstarter campaign went live in March 2013 and ended in April that year with $1.9 million, well above its $1 million target. Since then, Garriott and developer Portalarium have kept donations open at the game’s website, where more than $1.58 million has come through so far.

“Thank you!!! We will deliver the best game we can!!!,” Garriott said on Twitter about the funding accomplishment.

Episode One of Shroud of the Avatar, called Forsaken Virtues, is expected to launch later this year for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Powered by WPeMatico