So I still hate the new Dynasty Warriors combat where you're hack-n-slashing 1v10 all the time, it's fucking ridiculous. Still hate that you're a "mercenary" and can hire any type of unit of any race, and join any faction, so that the people and units of all three factions will be exactly the same, all three factions mixed together and it'll kill immersion for the sake of the MMO and the laziness of not creating classes that can be different races instead of these shoehorned gender and race-locked classes which drive the lack of immersion.....but whatever, old complaints.

So I got several things from the interview. He said "if you're a good player you won't need to pay real money to advance," and by "good player" they always mean super hardcore really good player (it's the same terminology CCP uses to say that if you're a "good player" you can play EVE for free), meaning the rest of us normal players WILL have to pay for items if we want to advance in the game, it's not even optional. Ughh, I would like it much better if instead of F2P, this was a Buy-to-Play game like Guild Wars 2 (you pay full price for the initial game, but there is no subscription fee), which allows the developer to implement much fairer, non-pay-to-win microtransactions. We've heard in the past there ARE items in the store to improve your character's abilities, so that contributes to my conclusion here that they won't have fair, non-pay-to-win microtansanctions.

He said that because you need to get your character to a certain level to do the story missions, it can take 300 hours. This basically means that like in every Asian MMO, they'll be heavy, boring and tedious grinding forced on you to advance. I'll likely never get to max level if it really takes 300 hours of grinding with some story in it to do it.

Then finally some good news, by the time it releases here early next year, we'll have two more classes. One of them will be a paladin-like class similar to Kendal. Why do I think this? Because they revealed that in the PS4 you can play exclusively as Kendal, but I don't think they would make a whole class only for the PS4, seems like a waste of work and dev time to do that, it'll likely be a skin of Kendal over the paladin class. I'm hoping the 5th class is a Leinhart-like vampire class, in some of the footage you can see a vampire dude commanding some troops. *Crosses-fingers* Also, there'll be a beta (I think that's what they meant by focus groups anyway) on September or October of this year, that's great.

Overall, really disappointed with this game, but I might get into it anyway just to play with AngryJoe's army.

So apparently AngryJoe is going full hardcore in this game with his AngryArmy guild, I might just get into this again just because of that. Anyway, AngryJoe interview and E3 2014 trailer below. I have some commentary on them, but I'll post that tomorrow, no time right now, late for something.

Interview

Trailer

The videos were pretty good, more exciting than I would have thought and more strategy was shown off than in previous videos. I see that the customization seems to have improved dramatically...even if the devs like making the same character over and over again for their footage...there are more videos here with lots of gameplay, and even the intro to the game:

https://www.youtube.com/user/FreeMMOStation/search?query=kingdom+under+fire

I am pleased to see at least some of that stupid, MMO UI they decided to switch to can be turned off. You can see in one of the videos above how the dumb circles above NPCs that tell you whether someone is an enemy or friend can be turned off.

That said, the story still seems both completely uninteresting and lacking. You're a mercenary that's not really part of the army of any of the main armies...yay...you're also a nobody (kind of as a side effect of being just a merc and not part of any army, also kind of a side effect of the story's protagonist heroes being no longer playable and now being NPCs you probably talk to for quests...sure they haven't specifically said this last thing, but we haven't heard anything of the heroes in years and there's now no information on them in their site, just of these gender and race locked "classes," of which there are only three, of course). I still see dark elf ("albino" dark elves) and Encablossa exile player characters leading human, high elf, and dwarf troops in the Human Alliance they are supposed to be enemies with, as well as all of them in the same towns together. All this will be explained away with "well you're a mercenary, so you can be a dark elf or enca merc working for the human alliance," but really the reason they're going that route is because instead of making real races and classes in the game, they decided to copy/paste the three heroes they had made (forget the name of elf chick and the other guy, it's been forever since they were even mentioned) and turn them into "classes" which are gender and race locked, so since there only three class options (they say there will make more after the game releases though, so that's good I guess) and they are race locked, you can't really have the factions be divided by race, if you did then each faction would be completely made up of players of the same class (lol). Overall, the story and lore has gone completely out the window to make room for MMO convenience; this is the same thing that happened to the Warcraft story once it stopped being a single player RTS and switched to MMO. They butchered the story and lore in order to make it work in an MMO setting.

Edit: also, forgot to mention, the graphics, they looked really fantastic a couple of years ago, now they look just fair on the best case scenario and even sub-par on the worst case scenario when compared to graphics on other PC games, and the textures are just horrible up close...it just shows how much time they've burned away turning the game into an MMO that the graphics which originally looked amazing even with all those people on screen, now look just fair at their best due to the fact that they were made for much older hardware

If I play, it'll be on PC, I recently built an awesome rig that could probably handle KUF II on ultra settings, but there's no guarantee I'll actually play....this looks very little like KUF, reminds of every generic Korean MMO much more.

If I remember correctly, the last time they talked about the amount of "heroes" in the game was in an article quite a while ago (years after the article saying there would be 18 heroes), that said there would be 3 classes (aka heroes) when the game released, and they would add more over time. Speculatively, they'll keep adding heroes after the game releases until they reach all 18. On launch the game will only have the ones they already showed though.

The beta is.

An actual developer of blueside? *suspicious face*

Hmm...so 2014 for western version of the game? lol great, ps4 will be out by then and this will be both old news and old graphics,  not that I care anymore

This reminds me of when I got flamed in here for saying the release date would be as late as 2012 or later...turns out I was right

It looks more promising than the other stuff we've seen, but still hate the ***ing hud which they changed into one looking like any other generic MMO HUD from the more KUF-like HUD that they showed in the first videos, hate the introduction of generic MMO cooldowns on abilities (you can see the cooldowns on this video), hate the replacement of SP by mana, the intruduction of health and mana potions, and hate like 90% of the rest of the footage released. It's like they said "right, this an MMO, so that means it's mandatory to introduce all these generic and dated MMO things, otherwise it won't be an MMO, right?" And that includes all those stupid solo missions with no army that we've seen before. They're not even doing the MMO thing right though, because they're going with Korean style character customization, which means little to no character customization at all and everyone looks the same. :evil:

Meh...I don't care anymore. It turned into some Dynasty Warriors clone crap. *shrugs*