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Nosgoth is a free-to-play, competitive online multiplayer game set in the Legacy of Kain universe. Choose between the ranged-specialized Humans or the brutal up-close carnage of.
I love the Legacy of Kain series. I spent many a weekend playing these games – actually, exactly four weekends, since I never played the original Blood Omen and all the others could be cleared in a mere two days. Still, playing as a twisted, vampiric monster struggling with a world where there’s no hope, even in death, made me not regret that time. Quite a few people desperately want another game, even though Defiance ended the series and the original team went their separate ways.This was not quite what I was expecting.
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A player-versus-player deathmatch series, set in the 1000 years between Raziel being cast into a whirlpool of death, and his return in Soul Reaver, seems like a rather strange addition to the line, though it’s not made by Crystal Dynamics. This Square Enix-published, Psyonix-developed free-to-play endeavour won’t be the game LoK fans have dreamed of, but it might be an interesting PvPer.Let’s get the obvious out of the way – it’s not going to be the next Legacy of Kain chapter. It borrows the universe, drawing on an established part of the continuity that we only see the far end of when everything has degenerated into savagery and despair. It’s a smart idea to get attention, and if they play on the direction they seem to be going now, it might gather a strong following. It’s not so different gameplay-wise from the original games, relying on action and platforming, albeit to kill other players doing the same thing, and I can see plenty that would benefit a Kain fan.The game is still in closed beta, so only the basics are present; two teams of four, in two matches where they alternate between the human rebels and Kain’s vampire army. Your arenas consist of destroyed villages and towns, including a harbour, all of which seem plenty detailed. Buildings provide cover, and the vampire team can climb and leap from them while the humans use them to defend against aerial attack, or set choke-points.pullquote align=”right” class=”blue””The core premise of the game seems solid so far.”/pullquoteOnly four classes are available right now, and they’re pretty much what one can expect.
The most interesting to me are the Sentinels, mutated offspring of the lost vampire Raziel (main character of Soul Reaver). Their ability to fly is possibly the most unique mechanic in the game, allowing you to soar across the battlefield, scoop up enemies and drop them elsewhere, dive-bomb them, or throw explosives at them. This is my favourite class, which I admittedly decided on before the game, but it’s the most distinct to play.The core premise of the game seems solid so far. Vampires and Humans play quite differently, with humans favouring defensive, group tactics, while vampires are more aggressive and tend to favour surround tactics. Even their method of healing is different, with vampires relying on enemy corpses to heal and humans clustering around fixed health stations. The vampire’s goal is to divide and stymie the human defensive, while humans coordinate their moves to try and trap vampires out in the open, where they can be shot down by crossbows and pistols. Different characters synergize with other skills and this coordination is key to defeating your foes.
So far, the concept seems to work pretty well, with fights being mobile due to humanity’s reliance of herb racks. I found myself having fun swooping in, or firing grenades.youtube url=”width=”400″ height=”200″ responsive=”no”There are only four classes per faction in the game so far, with a starting loadout of three skills and a passive stat-booster per.
New skills are available in an online store, for in-game currency or the real-money medium free-to-play games thrive on. So far, everything that’s not just cosmetic seems to be available for earn-able in-game gold, but the costs are based around the ability to ‘lease’ a skill for three or seven days in order to try it out, for significantly less cost. I found that some of the starting skills were only marginally useful (the Alchemists blinding flash doesn’t ever seem to last long enough to disorient enemies or lead to death), and being able to try out new skills on a trial basis is nice.Is it going to be a good game? The potential is there; the match structure encourages trying multiple different play-styles and pursuing different skills/gear, the alternating matches means you always get a chance to play your favourite style, and the gameplay and level design seems to have a lot of potential.
Is it going to be a good Legacy of Kain game? Well, it’s not the same as Blood Omen or Soul Reaver – they were never multiplayer deathmatches, and were more driven by story. Nosgoth’s background doesn’t really matter to is gameplay, but what we get has the potential to be fun and engrossing.
Nosgoth was going to be what happened when you clicked the ‘play multiplayer’ button in a Legacy of Kain game that never got made. It’s the multiplayer hubcap that’s popped off its singleplayer wheel mid-skid and rolled safely down a hill while the rest of the car went around a sharp developmental bend, flipped over and exploded into a billion cancelled pieces. It’s Daffy Duck’s multiplayer beak, wrapped around the back of his singleplayer head after taking a shotgun blast to the face.It’s an asymmetrical, free to play, vampires versus humans, third-person fighting game.
Here are some words about it. Battles take place in famous Nosgothian locations such as “a town” and “sort of a fishing village” and “temple ruins, I think” between two warring races, the dominating vampires and the revolting humans. They’re different in many ways, these humans and vampires. The latter can suck blood from corpses to regenerate health while the former gets a nice bow and arrow. The latter can fly around the battlefield picking up humans and dropping them on their heads, the former can throw a light grenade to temporarily blind vampires. The latter can climb over buildings and rooftops and pounce huge distances to pin humans to the floor in a savage, brutal and entirely unpredictable attack, the former has a little altar they can stand in front of if they want more hitpoints.So you’ve got some asymmetry, to say the least.
Humans are armed with weapons that allow them to attack vampires from a distance, while vampires more or less have to get up close to their enemy before they can inflict any damage. That difference gives rise to a ranged versus melee dynamic that drives much of the combat in Nosgoth, and while you can choose to play as any class within the human or vampire ranks, at half time both sides must swap over and play as their counterpart. That is to say, you play as humans for one round and vampires for the other, which is a cheeky shortcut to balance in any asymmetric multiplayer game.In practice (with inexperienced players, it should be said) encounters tended to be won by whichever team outnumbered the other. Two vampires will beat one human. Two humans will beat one vampire. Skill and ability was often secondary to numbers and chance.
Playing as a human, attacks seemed to only ever have a whittling effect on enemy hitpoints, grinding down their health by keeping the crosshair over them until the finally ragdolled to the floor. There are no headshots or opportunities for a skillful shot to inflict a punchy amount of damange, unless such a system been entirely obfuscated, and so the weapons with which the humans are armed — a crossbow, a regular bow and a hand-cannon — feel feeble. Which is frustrating when vampires are scooting towards you.Some of that puny firepower can be mitigated by teaming up with other humans, but other than combined output there’s little reason to consort with other players. There are no interacting abilities in the current closed beta build, no medic class or buffs or debuffs or skills that complement anything that other players are doing. The grenadier class of human has a health grenade, but that’s where co-operation starts and finishes.
Soon to be introduced classes such as Nosgoth’s take on Team Fortress 2’s spy as well as a buff-doling blood mage human could go a long way to promoting interoperative use of skills and powers, but as it stands there’s little to shout at teammates beyond “I’ve just seen a vampire over there”, and that’s only because the maps are too big for four versus four.Playing as vampires, this sense of tactical isolation makes a little more sense. You’re more powerful, able to climb up walls by holding down the shift key and running towards them. The three classes of vampire are a little more diverse too, including a hulked out tank character, a nimble and pouncy hunter character and a winged sentinel character capable of flying above the map. The problem of feeble attacks is especially pronounced with the sentinel, the flying vampire, whose main attack while flying is his ability to pick a human off the ground, fly skywards and drop them.
This won’t kill a healthy human, but instead deplete a chunk of their hitpoints, which is useless to the vampire who’s since soared off in the opposite direction, unable to relocate and finish off his prey. Instead, landing and using lunge attacks becomes the best option. While flying, the best you’re capable of is pestering human players.
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You should be a god.That ability to climb walls and fly has been toxic to the level design too, resulting in boxy and ugly maps filled with invisible walls and pointless, thoughtlessly placed alleyways. The dynamic of vampire abilities versus human abilities, all of those strengths and weaknesses, just hasn’t filtered into the design process of the maps, leaving them feeling primitive and unrefined. Nosgoth is all rough edges and brown, bad animations and forgettable looks. There’s little compelling about this free to play title in its current form, but development continues and improvements are being made.Nosgoth is in closed beta, so there’s scope for it to shape up. Diving into an unexplored chunk of Legacy of Kain lore is an intriguing premise for fans at least. And the pitching of the rarely seen humans against the focal pointy tooted fannies is a clever idea that should lead to more interesting classes and abilities being introduced along the way.
Right now however, this feels like a disembodied multiplayer game with an dull as balls cast, one that would’ve been blithely dismissed as average had it actually been appended to a new Legacy of Kain title.That said, Fraser holds an entirely opposite opinion, and while nobody is suggesting he’s completely wrong you do have to question the motives of a man who shares his name with a television show. You can read his here.
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