This morning, NCSoft announced that the Blade & Soul closed beta testing will begin on October 30th! A total of five beta weekends will occur, typically running from Fridays through Mondays, giving players around 20 days to help test both gameplay and performance of the game. The 2015 beta weekend schedule is available here.
This past week has seen multiple reveals for Guild Wars 2 incuding the core game becoming free to play, the announcement of Raids and the release date announcement of Heart of Thorns.
Square Enix has announced that their upcoming RPG, Final Fantasy XV, will be released in 2016; a more exact timeframe is expected to be revealed next March. Make sure to catch the upcoming Active Time Report during September's Tokyo Game Show for more details on Luna and Regis, as well as information about the fishing minigame and chocobo-related features.
ZAM had a great time at PAX East, and now that we've wrapped up all our content, we got a full article recap for you. We went hands-on, snagged some interviews, took a lot of pictures and jotted down some big announcements.
Mike B and Lindsay Geektron hit the floor of PAX East last weekend to grab some interviews and footage of the show. They took a look at Alienware's Steam Machine, chatted about XSplit's latest version update, and snagged interviews for Gigantic, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Elite: Dangerous. Finally, they took a stroll through the Indie Megabooth to bring us an amazing megamix of 30 indie games in under 30 minutes.
Secrets of Ayanad—the name given to the final 1.2 Korean version of ArcheAge—was launched by Trion Worlds this past Tuesday. We spoke to the newest and very passionate producer on the team, Merv Lee Kwai, about the update what it brings to the players.
"You know, I think it was our best launch to-date for ArcheAge! It was smooth, servers have been stable the entire time and we're really proud of the content we pushed out." Merv explained that one reason the team thinks that the update was such a success is thanks to two weeks of live player data collected on the test realm.
Secrets of Ayanad increased the level cap by five, so players can now go from 50 to 55 on all ten possible classes. There are five new skill points (one for each new level) available—raising the cap to 28—giving better flexibility in your class builds, and each class gets a new skill at 55.
Diamond Shores is the new zone introduced in this update, found to the northwest on the continent of Auroria and is part of the war cycle. The zone has a new housing area, "about 200 houses, only on the west coast."
At PAX East we had the chance to speak to Sam Abbott, COO of Compulsion Games, the developer of Contrast. We Happy Few, still in pre-alpha, is best described as a dystopian story-driven survival game; if you enjoy games like Don't Starve, you'll really dig this title.
"With the game, we wanted to try and look at what we did really well with Contrast, and what we could have done better. For We Happy Few, what we felt we did really well with Contrast was atmosphere and story, so we wanted to make sure that we did well with that again.
"And we wanted to do a couple of things that were a bit more different this time around in terms of developing the game. We wanted to involve community early on, which is why we're showing this way earlier than we did with Contrast."
We Happy Few is a systemic game that follows a linear storyline. Sam likens the art style to that of BioShock. The game is played in first-person view inside a procedurally generated world. It has an estimated 2-3 hours of gameplay, but with good replayability.
Lindsay "geektr0n" Ferguson hosts ZAM's latest installment of Friday Update Arcade! Topics discussed include Uncharted 4's delay, ZAM's PAX East coverage, the launch of Cities Skylines and more.
If you're a demon hunter, it doesn't pay to be mean.
We caught up with Danny Garfield of Puuba to chat about The Weaponographist during PAX East. This hack-and-slash dungeon crawler is full of action, with a plethora of unique and amusing weapons, a wide variety of enemies and an interesting story.
In The Weaponographist, you play as Doug McGrave, a world-famous demon hunter who is, as Danny succinctly put it, "super-powerful and kind of an unrepentant jerk." When a town needed some saving due to an infestation of demons, he chose to not help and was immediately struck by a curse.
This curse isn't your ordinary run-of-the-mill curse, but instead inflicts Doug such that he cannot carry any power-ups or money. To make things worse, the weapons that he finds in the town's dungeon constantly degrade and fall apart thanks to his curse. Everything that you kill drops a weapon, though, and "you'll need almost all of them!"
We had a great weekend at PAX East! There's still more articles and videos to come from our weekend there, but today we wanted to share over 60 pictures we took in and around the convention. Check out a handful of images below and click here to see all the pics!
