On the eve of the Call of Duty Championships, we speak to Call of Duty captains from Australia's Team Immunity, Mindfreak eSports and Avant Garde about their style of play, the Australian eSports scene and more!
Posted Apr 4, 2013 | 7:34 | 1,368 Views
I'm Vilesyder from Avant Garde in the interview. I know we get a lot of stick from the general public for playing CoD, but ill happily take srs questions etc.
We're all pretty regular people with jobs/school/uni and this is our hobby. Most of us play console CoD because its EXTREMELY hard to find enough people to populate a game, let alone a consistent competitive FPS environment in Australia(I'd still be playing Gears of War or Far Cry or Quake if any of those were still supported). + There is actually developer support, if somethings OP, theres clear contact with devs and it'll get a nerf, if theres a glitch in a map we usually dont find out about it until its patched. ++ Nobody else other than LoL or SC2 is giving players the opportunity to play for a share of 1 million dollars.
@The_Beanster I'm sure everyone here has played and loved CoD4 and will S its D until the end of time. -Not much has changed since then, and I'm talking about the core movement and gunplay. Its smooth, fluid and the reason the majority of people play. It just works with very few hiccups.
The genre of game known as "roguelike" has traditionally been something of a tough sell to the mass market. Typical elements of these games, such as procedurally generated areas and the loss of valuable items and experience upon (often quite common) death, tend to turn off players who view them as too punishing. The Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series has been an anomaly in the genre: it retains a few key genre features, does away with a lot of the usual stress and penalties, and is all dressed up in a cute and cuddly Pokemon theme. However, as demonstrated by the newest installment, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity, toning down what makes a genre distinct can rob it of its appeal.
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity begins with you, the player, having awoken from a nightmare. That's not the only shock: you've been mysteriously transformed into a Pokemon and sent to a world where humans don't exist. When you meet another Pokemon companion (you select both your own Pokemon type and your companion's from five different options), you make fast friends and agree to help them achieve their goal of building a paradise for Pokemon. But that lofty goal is even tougher than it seems: the peaceful Pokemon societies have become corrupted by greed and violence. You and your pal can help restore order, however, by acting as freelance do-gooders: exploring strange mystery dungeons and completing requests to earn respect and rewards from your fellow Pokemon.
It's quite charming to see the Pokemon interact and speak directly with each other, which doesn't happen in the main games. But for such a simplistic premise and story, it is exceptionally wordy, and because there's no way to skip dialogue or increase the text speed, the story sequences transform from cute diversions to annoying barriers keeping you away from the rest of the game.
Not that the rest of the game is particularly great. When you aren't listening to various Pokemon woes, you're exploring randomly generated mystery dungeons to accomplish various missions, both mandatory and optional. By completing these dungeons, you're rewarded with items and the loot you collected. Some of these items can be used as material to clear land and build new facilities for your Pokemon paradise. The upgrading and expansion of your commune is the high point of the game: it's satisfying to watch your town grow from a wasteland to a bustling hub of Pokemon activity. The problem is that this is a small portion of the game compared to the story scenes and dungeon exploration.
In fact, it's the dungeon exploration that drags the game down more than anything else. While the dungeons are rooted in genre traditions of the roguelike--multi-floor structures of mostly randomly generated layouts, enemies, and loot--they strip away much of the danger, challenge, and thrill that make that sort of game compelling, leaving Gates to Infinity feeling like a dreadfully dull husk of a much better title. Dungeons are pretty but samey-looking, with nondescript backgrounds and floors often devoid of treasures that compel you to explore and put yourself at risk, but with plenty of generally easy enemies to impede your progress. Traps and hazards are also sparse, taking away the thrill of exploration and the strategy of using them against your foes. A hallmark of the roguelike is the danger and risk inherent in every step and action you take, as is using limited resources cleverly for survival. Pokemon Mystery Dungeon doesn't entirely remove these elements, but deemphasizes them to the point where the game becomes simplistic and boring. Some dungeons try to spice things up by implementing incredibly basic puzzles, but these do little to break up the monotony.
Combat, at least, is a bit more involved. As in the core Pokemon games, each creature has four different commands to use when fighting foes. Skills have limited usage, so you can't expect to repeatedly use effective techniques without eventually running short and needing to use restoration items. Each skill levels up independently, meaning that more frequently used techniques grow more powerful over time. Levels of Pokemon and skills carry over between dungeons, instead of resetting as they often do in other roguelikes.
After defeating them, you can also recruit new Pokemon to join your party, and take up to three CPU-controlled helpers with you in each dungeon. This makes the already diluted gameplay even simpler, because you can use a companion as an easy shield if you wind up in even the slightest bit of danger. This mechanic introduces its own set of annoyances, however: CPU companions set to attack tend to spam the most limited techniques like they're going out of style, wasting valuable uses on otherwise easy foes. You can also give basic generalized commands to your CPU companions that enable them to split up and explore on their own, which they also occasionally manage to do independently. If any one of them gets defeated (and they often do, typically by otherwise ridiculously weak, unseen foes), it counts as a defeat for everyone; it's either give up or set a StreetPass signal and hope somebody you walk by rescues you. If you give up, you lose some, but not all, of the items and funds you're carrying. It's frustrating to have an otherwise easy dungeon trek ruined by a Pokemon pal who wanders off and gets into trouble.
One of the better features of the game isn't even in the main game itself. The extraneous Magnagate AR feature lets you randomly generate a completely original dungeon using a picture of a circular object snapped with the 3DS's built-in camera. These dungeons tend to be more complex and challenging than those in the main game, featuring better (and more frequent) loot, tougher enemies, and more interesting Pokemon companions (along with the elimination of the "one falls and everyone fails" rule). These dungeons give high-quality items that can be transferred to the main game or stored for later re-exploration. But despite their relative improvement in quality, these dungeons are still pretty dull overall.
Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity sits firmly in mediocrity: it's not poorly made and designed, but it fails to deliver much excitement or fun. It's also not clear just who this game's target audience is: the controls and mechanics are a bit too complex and confusing for younger players, but they're far too stripped and simplistic for older genre fans. What results is a game that ultimately isn't quite right for anyone.
The Wii-exclusive RPG will hit North American shelves this month for $39.99.
North American JRPG fans can finally experience the next Nintendo Wii RPG, when Pandora's Tower hits gaming store shelves later this month.
Publisher XSeed Games has confirmed that the game will be out on April 16 for $39.99. To coincide with the announcement, a North American website has been revealed.
Pandora's Tower originally launched in Japan in 2011, with an English version going on sale in Europe and Australia in April 2012. GameSpot praised its combat and time-management mechanics in its review, but criticised fixed camera angles and a lack of enemy variety. For more information, check out GameSpot's full review here.
Born and raised from a jungle-laden village in Sarawak, Malaysia, Jonathan Toyad has been playing games since the early 90s. He favors fighting games, RPGs, and rhythm titles above every other genre, and occasionally spaces out like Pavlov's dog to video game music on his iPod.
Actually there is a lot of misleading points in the video. The game is based on a 'Dream Story' which means it does not follow the anime or manga of One Piece. The English version is going to be released in North America and Europe in August. There is a total of 36 playable characters. Each character gets two musou and 4 musou bars. And when the enemy goes into Haki mode, you just have to go into haki mode in order to hit him or use your musou.
Blizzard cofounder Mike Morhaime says StarCraft II growth outside Korea has been a "big surprise."
Blizzard cofounder Mike Morhaime believes that the time is right to level-up StarCraft II as an eSport. In a new interview with GameSpot, the industry veteran detailed the new system for the World Championship Series, how StarCraft II's growth outside of Korea has been surprising, and more.
Check out the full interview below.
What is the goal in creating this new system for the World Championship Series?
I think we just look at the whole ecosystem and recognize that it could be a whole lot easier to understand. There are scheduling conflicts that make players have to make difficult decisions where sometimes you don't get people playing in the tournaments they think they should be playing in. It's very hard to follow, to really know what the relative importance of winning various things are. I think it really falls to us, to Blizzard, we're really the only company in position to work with everybody, to help create a single storyline in the ecosystem. We think the time is right to level-up StarCraft II as an eSport.
When you guys were deciding to make a change, what were your considerations going into this? What were the first problems you were looking to solve?
Well number one, we wanted to leverage all the great stuff our eSports partners were already doing. I think we took a first attempt at this last year with the World Championship Series which was awesome, but it didn't really do what we had hoped, which is to be the single storyline around StarCraft eSports. It actually turned to a parallel storyline that just added a whole other set of events to follow. Even though we worked with our existing partners, it didn't really leverage the cool stuff that they were already doing. So I think this approach is actually much better because now we're having partners actually running the league.
Why set up this system of events now instead of before?
We didn't know how big StarCraft II was going to be in the West. We've always viewed South Korea as the epicenter of eSports. We did actually setup a global StarCraft League in Korea called by the same name: GSL. The big surprise with StarCraft II is how big SC2 eSports has grown outside of Korea.
Ideally we would have loved to be able to announce this before Heart of The Swarm launched, but setting something up something like this with so many different partners is actually quite complicated. We're a little bit later in the year than we would have hoped, but everybody is really excited now and it's going to be a really awesome story for the year.
Why decide to use both GomTV and OnGameNet as partners in Korea instead of choosing one?
GomTV has been an excellent partner to us in StarCraft 2. We've been talking to OnGameNet now for years. We're really excited to finally have everybody in Korea working together in harmony. We have some excellent partners that have contributed a lot to esports throughout the years and we really wanted them to take part in the league.
In North America and Europe the partners are Major League Gaming and the Electronic Sports League, respectively. Notable names left out are DreamHack and the North American Star League. Why were these regions not done the same way as Korea with both participating?
We talked to everyone and we tried to do the things that were best for each region according to the various existing capabilities of the partners. We think that the stuff that NASL and DreamHack have been doing has been really awesome for StarCraft II, and we would love to see that continue. We think that seeing a single operator in those regions for North America and Europe made more sense for the World Championship Series events.
We're hoping that by giving the North American and European players their own league, it will make it so they don't have to travel as much and can focus more on practice. We think that the level of play will also increase within the regions this way.
The Korean region will have only studio matches in the form of GSL and OSL. Will this format also happen in the North American and European regions?
Most of the matches will be played in a studio. The Online portion for North American and Europe is mainly looked at for logistical reasons for this year, to ease the travel burden. We do recognize the challenges with online play and that's something we're working on to address in future iterations of the WCS. All the critical matches will be played in a studio, and we're taking different steps to ensure the online play is fair.
For North America and Europe, the Round of 32 will probably be played Online. We're still zeroing in how exactly that will look like. Anything from the Round of 16 and beyond will definitely be in studio.
How will events like DreamHack and NASL now exist in the new World Championship Series system?
The way that we envision that is there will be the opportunity for non-WCS events if they meet certain criteria to give out WCS points so that there is some incentive and reward for pro players to compete in those events. But the majority of the points that we expect pro players to get will probably be through doing really well in the league.
Korean media reported that GomTV and OnGameNet would be paid $1.8 Million dollars in financial support. Is this true?
The numbers they reported are not accurate.
Are those numbers close at all? Can you say how much you're paying the leagues? Is this support being given also to MLG and ESL?
Our business terms with the leagues are not public information, so I'm not able to talk about those. Blizzard is making financial investments and we have been making financial investments to support StarCraft II eSports for a while now.
There were some initial reports saying that the Korea eSports Association weren't involved in talks initially. How much of a role do they play in all of this?
It's critical, and KeSPA was with us every step of the way. Not all the information that gets to press in South Korea is accurate. I don't really know why that is, but it's true. Anyone that reported KeSPA wasn't involved just wasn't true.
There will be three Season finals this year. Will they be located in the same region or spread out? Have you thought about how you want to present them?
I think it'll be different based on each region. There will be one in North America, one in Europe, and one in Asia in 2013. In 2014 there will be four events. Two of them will be in Asia, one in North America, and one in Europe. I think that they'll be similar to a major event that you see today. The North American event may look a lot like how you see a current Major League Gaming major event stop.
Why hold the finals at BlizzCon instead of doing another standalone championship event like last year's World Championship Series finals in China?
We think that eSports has been a pretty important part of BlizzCon for many years now. In terms of celebrating the Blizzard franchises I think there's no better way to celebrate it than crowning a World Champion. At BlizzCon 2011 we had the GSL Code S Championships between Jung "Mvp" Jong Hyun and Mun "MMA" Seong Won, which some consider one of the best events of all time. The weird thing about 2011 was we crowd 2 champions that weekend, one for BlizzCon and one of the GSL finals. That…is strange. We sort of want to get away from that and actually crown THE champion, and have a single storyline that's understandable.
Is there any worry for events that aren't a part of the WCS not getting as much attention as they used to?
Not really, because I don't think it'll be any worse than what we have today, where they don't get any points for anything.
What about regions that aren't listed, such as China and South East Asia?
I think that there's opportunity to expand this in future years based on how successful it is, but I think initially players outside of the set regions will basically have to choose a region to compete in. There are StarCraft leagues in China that still run, but if they'd like to play in WCS at this time they'll have to choose one of these three leagues. I'd love to see that change in the future, but at this point China isn't at that point of maturity in StarCraft 2 eSports that it made sense to do it in 2013.
How much of this is in the response to Riot's League Championship Series?
I don't think it has anything to do with them. We've been working with these guys a lot longer than Riot has.
Has there been thought to running the World Championship Series without the use of partners?
I would say not really. We're not trying to replace all of these great companies. I think there's a lot of great expertise and really good effort that has been built up over the last several years. We want to leverage that. We want Blizzard's focus to be on making awesome games, and not running tournaments and leagues, which in itself is a huge project. There are entire companies based on doing just that. This allows us to focus on what we do best.
Who will handle the broadcasting?
For all of us in the West, it will be available via TwitchTV. We can watch this stuff. There will be a regular schedule. One of the really awesome things about all of this is we have all the entities in Korea working together now. The Korean leagues will be available to watch both through OGN and GomTV. ProLeague will still be going on and the GSTL will still be going on. We'll have StarCraft 2 on television 5 nights a week.
The broadcasts will be streamed in 720p for free through all services. We're still working out what to do beyond that with qualities beyond 720p, and VOD packages.
What type of potential hub could we see for all of the World Championship Series?
That's a great question. We still have some work to do here. We don't have that hub Online yet but it's something we know we need, and we have plans to create that and put it Online this year.
Today at a press conference in South Korea, Blizzard Entertainment announced a revamp to its StarCraft II World Championship Series which debuted last year, working with partners to create three equal and parallel leagues in North America, Europe, and South Korea. More than $1.6 million in prize money will be up for grabs for players in 2013, and fans at home can expect to watch for free in 720p.
Blizzard announced that it will use both GomTV and OnGameNet in South Korea, Major League Gaming in North America, and Turtle Entertainment's Electronic Sports League in Europe. Each will operate their region's WCS league for the year. There will be three separate seasons in 2013 each with regional finals and a season finals event. A unified global player ranking system will be established with points given to players at each event, culminating with the top 16 players in points vying for a spot to be called World Champion at the BlizzCon Global Finals. Next year there will be four seasons.
"I think we just look at the whole ecosystem and recognize that it could be a whole lot easier to understand", Blizzard Entertainment CEO Mike Morhaime told GameSpot. "There are scheduling conflicts that make players have to make difficult decisions where sometimes you don't get people playing in the tournaments they think they should be playing in. It's very hard to follow, to really know what the relative importance of winning various things are. I think it really falls to us, to Blizzard, we're really the only company in position to work with everybody, to help create a single storyline in the ecosystem."
This will mark the first time that OnGameNet and GomTV will be working together. GomTV will run the first WCS league in Korea, beginning with the upcoming GSL Code S season starting in less than two days. OGN will broadcast the event on TV in with their own casters. Both OGN and GSL will broadcast each other's leagues with their own casters and streams. After this season of Code S, OGN will begin their next OnGameNet StarLeague which has been on hold for a while, and act as the main operator of WCS Korea Season 2. Another season of GSL Code S will not take place until OSL is over, and act as the third and final WCS Korea season before the Global Finals.
The Korean eSports Association has been involved every step of the way, Blizzard said.
"One of the really awesome things about all of this is we have all the entities in Korea working together now," Morhaime said. "The Korean leagues will be available to watch both through OGN and GomTV. ProLeague will still be going on and the GSTL will still be going on. We'll have StarCraft II on television five nights a week."
"Blizzard really worked hard for all partners, so we can truly work together in not only Korea but also the world."
"Blizzard really worked hard for all partners, so we can truly work together in not only Korea but also the world," GomTV StarCraft 2 Manager Chae Jung Won told GameSpot. "For GomTV's perspective, we were working hard to increase our media platform from 2012."
Players must commit to one WCS league at the beginning of the year and cannot change region after, but can compete in any non-WCS events in any region. Each regional league season will run for 8-10 weeks, with all games played on weekdays in a consistent schedule. This will allow players to travel internationally to non-WCS events on weekends. Non-WCS events cannot run events on the same weekend as WCS events. Non-WCS events will be given as of yet undetermined amount of points.
All matches in Korea will be played in studio through GomTV's StarLeague or OnGameNet's StarLeague, while North America and Europe will play Online until the top 16 players. Those top 16 players will compete in a studio environment to determine the best five players in each region. Five players from each region will then compete in the Season 1 finals event, with one additional player to come from the host continent for 16 players total. They will compete for an undermined amount of points. Each continent will get one finals event this year in the size of an event similar to one at GSL, MLG, or ESL.
"We're hoping that by giving the North American and European players their own league, it will make it so they don't have to travel as much and can focus more on practice," Morhaime said. "We think that the level of play will also increase within the regions this way."
The tournament structure has been modeled off of GSL's Code S, Code A, and Code B system and is called Premier, Challenger, and Qualifier. This structure will run for all partners including MLG and ESL. The Challenger events will run slightly different in North America and Europe due to logistics in travel. Players will be able to move up and down within their own region as players do in GSL. Only the OSL will have differences, where there will be an additional Round of 32 added on played in a best of one format.
Players in North America and Europe will be invited to kickoff Season 1 based upon their performances in 2012 across all leagues. Open qualifiers will also be held to determine the final player list. Additionally, the top 200 Grand Masters players on the StarCraft II Ladder will be invited to join the initial qualifiers.
Blizzard says that they have partnered with TwitchTV to broadcast the entire year for free in 720p. There will also be a central hub created for fans to watch the games, follow the storylines, and get all information related to the World Championship Series.
"For all of us in the West, it will be available via TwitchTV" Morhaime said. "We can watch this stuff now. There will be a regular schedule to follow along."
With everything announced, Blizzard feels this will be the best year yet for competitive StarCraft II. With several developers giving support to the competitive side of their game as of late, Morhaime is thrilled to be able to do as much with their own franchise.
"We think the time is right to level-up StarCraft II as an eSport."
For more, check out GameSpot's extended interview with Morhaime.
Late last year, Need for Speed: Most Wanted served up a welcome second helping of Burnout Paradise-style open-world wreckin' and racin' shenanigans, though it replaced that game's imaginary automobiles with the real cars that are a constant of the Need for Speed series. Now, the game has come to the Wii U, complete with a U pointlessly stuck to the end of the title. The features designed exclusively for Most Wanted U contribute little to the game, but Most Wanted is still an attractive and frequently exhilarating racer.
Need for Speed: Most Wanted U takes its name and some of its concept from the 2005 game Need for Speed Most Wanted. Both games take place in open-world cities and involve plenty of police chases, but the earlier game contextualized its action with a hilariously over-the-top story about taking down a crew of illegal street racers. In the new Most Wanted, you still have the goal of defeating a number of street racers, but there's no narrative to back it up. The racers on your list are identified only by their cars--they don't have names or faces or personalities--and without a personal investment in defeating them, doing so isn't nearly as satisfying here as it was in the 2005 game. It is merely a structural hoop to jump through; you do it simply because the game tells you that this is what you are supposed to do.
Well, that and the fact that driving, racing, and eluding the police are really enjoyable, for the most part. Despite the stable of real-world cars, the driving isn't realistic. Cars have a great sense of weight and momentum to them, while still being extremely responsive, and as you'd expect from a racer by developer Criterion, judicious use of the brakes and a bit of practice will have you blissfully drifting through corners at high speed. As in most Criterion racing games, boosting is a big part of racing in Most Wanted. You build up your nitrous bar by doing things like drifting, taking down cops and rivals, and driving in oncoming traffic, and you press a button to spend that nitrous. It's a tried-and-true arcade racing game mechanic, and Most Wanted's terrific sense of speed makes it as reliably exciting as ever.
Each vehicle has five events associated with it. Victory in each of a vehicle's events nets you speed points, which you need to earn a set number of before you can challenge each of the most wanted racers. Winning events also gives you access to modifications for that vehicle, including chassis that make you more resistant to impacts, gears that increase your acceleration or top speed, and tires that reinflate if popped by spike strips.
In earlier versions of the game, building up your car collection was a simple, unrewarding matter of driving up to cars parked all over the city of Fairhaven. In this release, with the exception of the cars driven by the most wanted racers, you have access to every car in the game from the start. (This includes the five cars that were released as downloadable content called the Ultimate Speed Pack on other platforms.)
Although they can be accessed from anywhere in Fairhaven almost immediately, cars are still scattered across the city in set locations, called jack spots, in Most Wanted U. The upside of this is that if you get the cops on your tail as you're roaming about the city, you can pull up on a car's jack spot and, provided that you've got a bit of distance between you and your police pursuers, hop into the other car, reducing your heat level a bit. Your heat level determines just how much effort the police are putting into bringing you down. At the lowest level, you might have a few cop cruisers on your tail. As it increases, the police start setting up roadblocks in your path, and more and better law enforcement vehicles join the fray. Heavy SUVs might try to ram you head-on, and Corvette Interceptors speed along in front of you, deploying spike strips that, if hit, can seriously diminish your car's handling.
All is not lost, however; repair shops are all over the city, and driving through one instantly fixes up your car and gives you a fresh coat of paint to boot. Like using jack spots, speeding through these repair shops reduces your heat level. Your heat level increases automatically as a pursuit goes on, and taking down police cars with a satisfying shunt into oncoming traffic, a swift T-bone collision, or whatever aggressive, effective option presents itself makes it go up significantly faster. If you get enough distance between you and your pursuers, you enter cooldown, during which your heat level declines. Stay in cooldown long enough, and the police call off the pursuit.
You earn speed points during police pursuits, but you get to keep them only if you eventually escape; if you get busted, you earn nothing, so the stakes can get quite high. Escape from the cops, and you feel great; see the speed points you earned over the course of several risky minutes disappear as you get busted, and you may be crestfallen. It's a good risk-vs.-reward system that leads to some extremely tense moments. Unfortunately, shaking off your pursuers can often feel as much a matter of luck as of skill. Police are tenacious in their pursuit of you--maybe a little too tenacious, because it sometimes seems as if no amount of changing direction, catching big air, going off-road, or anything else is enough to lose the cops. In the game's faster cars, speed can often be your savior, but in the more everyday models, it often feels like you don't have a fighting chance.
Additionally, some parts of the city don't have many areas that are off the beaten path; you might enter cooldown but find yourself with nowhere to hide from patrolling police who soon spot you and reinitiate the pursuit. The balance between making it very possible for you to be spotted again during cooldown and giving you good options for eluding the police was better handled in 2005's Most Wanted, which provided you with more spots that cops on the hunt for you might or might not investigate. That earlier game also did a better job with police chatter; here, the police are irritatingly repetitive. Several times during the same pursuit, you might hear cops, awed by your driving prowess, come to the realization that they're "not dealing with joyriders."
I like this guy's idea of aiming for games being playable anytime on the latest hardware and that is the direction I'd like to see gaming go. It makes preserving classics much easier to do. Although it is an unrealistic goal, particularly if they're going to roll with Windows OS, which is a more closed software platform than Linux. Nintendo has been ardently stubborn in keeping their games exclusive to their platforms as well. Also the price point of the Piston is a killer. It doesn't appeal to console gamers because it's too expensive, and it won't appeal to PC enthusiasts who would rather build their own PCs at that price point. It will be surprising if this system succeeds in the current economy.
About CBS Interactive | Jobs | Advertise
© 2013 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. | Privacy Policy (UPDATED) | Ad Choice | Terms of Use
