New Video Game 2015

                It has been an interesting week with PAX South taking place this weekend in San Antonio, for the first time in the southern area of USA. Usually developers save their big titles for bigger conventions like E3 or Gamescom, even so, some interesting titles have been announced this weekend.

                After the teasing at the end of the Season 2 Living Story, ArenaNet has revealed its first expansion for Guild Wars 2, called Heart of Thorns.

The expansion will take the players into a vertically progressing area in the Heart of Maguuma jungle. New exciting features have been listed for both PvE and PvP.

Probably the biggest thing that ArenaNet did with this expansion was to show that MMORPGs progression can be done without destroying the previous progression that the players worked for (the gear). The level cap will remain unchanged with the release of Heart of Thorns and a newer progression system has been added to the game called masteries, which will allow players to upgrade their character with various abilities, including a hang glinding which will help with the exploration of the new zones.

Classes will receive specializations which resembles the dual class system from the first Guild Wars. The specializations will allow a class to use new weapons and gain new abilities from that. An example has been given for Rangers which now can specialize in Druid and use the staff.

A new class has been announced as well, the Revenant, with the legendary charr Rytlock Brimstone returning from the Mists as the first Revenant. This class will draw from the power of ancient heroes and wield it at their advantage.

PvP will receive a great deal of attention with a new Borderland being added to the WvW, which is going to be much more objective focused, and the older areas being redesigned to work in a similar way. This will hopefully stop the zerg play in WvW and make this mode more strategic.

Structured PvP has received a new game mode named Stronghold which seems MOBA inspired, in this mode two teams will face each other and gather resources which can be spent on recruiting soldiers to help pushing towards the enemy stronghold. With this new mode the long awaited Guild vs Guild feature is making a return in Guild Wars 2 including a ranking system for it(finally!).

Guild Halls will be introduced into the game to serve as a sanctuary for the guild members and adding more to the guild progression system.

                Overall the expansion features sound absolutely great, the new areas look amazing and the idea of keeping the progress made so far is lovely. There weren’t any mentions about new dungeons or other PvE content, but ArenaNet said they will take events to the next level.

                Another big announcement from PAX South comes from Brian Fargo and his studio inXile Entertainment and is great news for RPG fans. They have been hinting a new RPG and everyone has been speculating but now it is clear which one, The Bard’s Tale 4 is the next big title from inXile and it will most likely come after the release of Torment: Tides of Numenera.

The game will be a sequel to 1988 The Bard’s Tale 3 and it will feature a turn-based combat system. A Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign will be launched later this year for this title and more details are expected then.

                I haven’t played much this week and the time I had for gaming I spent it playing The Secret World, making my way to Tokyo to see what really happened there.  I’m enjoying the game despite the fact that its “end game” is quite grindy, a thing I really hate in MMORPGs, but the experience up to that point is atmospheric and immersive.

Despite talking so much about Guild Wars 2 in this article, the screenshot of this week won’t be from this game or The Secret World, but from my short DayZ adventure.

                I couldn’t keep up with my schedule, again, I had troubles writing about some of the strategy games that are coming this year so I had to research a lot. But the new article is due for release tomorrow. I hope I can keep up with the other two articles I have planned (that clearly won’t happen) before this month ends, they aren’t that big, but there are enough upcoming titles to be presented in them.