BMunchausen

This week, top-down co-op shooter Trident's Wake hit Steam Early Access hoping to capture the imaginations of sci-fi action game fans everywhere. Created by Argentinian development company Bacus Studios, the game lets players jump into advanced combat mechs and join the fight to defend humanity's last hope of survival. We had some hands-on time with the game earlier this month and from what we've seen so far, Trident's Wake is shaping up to be the kind of action game shooter fans live for.

This week Wargaming, the makers of World of Tanks, revealed they're ready to take their mega-popular free-to-play game to a whole 'nother level with a single-player/co-op experience they're calling War Stories. With the big news ready to break at this month's GamesCom, they invited us to try the new mode ourselves. The new casual-friendly mode is set to do right by its thus-far-overlooked PvE fans and bring an interesting new dimension to World of Tanks.

August twenty-first marks the dawn of a new day for World of Tanks console players as Wargaming embarks on a new single-player/co-op venture called War Stories. Last week at Wargaming's Chicago offices, we spoke to Lead Game Designer Jeff Greg and Lead Environment Artist Andrew Hura about the challenges the team faced in creating this new mode.

Tabletop iconoclasts had reason to rejoice this month when Owlcat Games announced they were making a single-player PC version of fantasy role-playing game, Pathfinder. Called Pathfinder: Kingmaker, the game promises the kind of rich role-playing experience tabletop gamers have come to expect. We met with Narrative Designer Chris Avellone (of Planescape: Torment and Fallout 2) and Creative Director, Alexander Mishulin, and they were happy to explain.

Four years ago Path of Exile launched hoping to do justice to its spiritual ancestor Diablo II, and hoping to enjoy a similar kind of success. Today, with numbers rising (a million players signed on in December alone) the Indie RPG is on track to achieve that ambition. Building on last year's momentum, this summer Path of Exile launches for Xbox One and releases its biggest expansion yet—The Fall of Oriath.

MMOs have spent the last decade heading down the ever-more-accessible theme park road, hoping perhaps, to “solve” the intimidatingly competitive aspects of old school games in the genre. Undoubtedly, that's been the developer's path to a healthy bottom line. Still, many a venerable RPG-er (and plenty of MMO newbies) hanker for a more dangerous role-play experience, and Snail Games' upcoming survival MMO Dark and Light plans to give it to them.

Last week, Ubisoft set up shop in the Microsoft Loft in downtown San Francisco and allowed a select group of journalists to preview the newest features of Ubisoft Montreal's upcoming strategic brawler, For Honor. With three chunky new features to share, the team was visibly excited. And after a three hour test drive, we think we know why.

Eighteen months ago, we got to know a new entry in the MOBA genre—a sweet little touch screen game called Vainglory. Made exclusively for mobile by small Bay Area development team Super Evil Megacorp, Vainglory dreamed its unique approach to competitive play would one day amount to something big. This weekend in Hollywood, California, that dream became reality as Super Evil Megacorp pulled off the first ever Vainglory World Championship.

Producer Yong-Hyun Park is as experienced as they come when it comes to MMOs on PC. After years working on Lineage II and TERA, the veteran developer is hard at work (with his team at NAT Games) on his first mobile game—a fantasy action role-player called Heroes of Incredible Tales.

With boots on the ground during the recent World of Tanks Grand Finals 2016, we had the chance to talk with Mo Fadl, Head of Global Competitive Gaming to learn about the current eSports scene and what the future holds.

This year, the Star Ocean series celebrates its twentieth anniversary with the release of its fifth game, Star Ocean: Integrity and Faithlessness. This week, publisher Square Enix invited members of the press to preview the game's less cutscene-heavy approach to storytelling and combat, an approach that thus far, appears to be working.

With eSports steadily gaining ground as live entertainment, World of Tanks' player-centric strategy seems to be working. The Wargaming League Grand Finals—the third of its kind—took place last weekend in Warsaw, Poland, and was far and away the biggest one yet.

Over the weekend, Irvine-based HEX Entertainment held its inaugural eSports event for its popular new trading card/MMO HEX: Shards of Fate. The fledgling event proved a success, drawing HEX fans from around the world to the Santa Ana eSports Arena to watch the best HEX players battle it out for their share of the $100,000 prize pool. During the action packed event, we grabbed HEX Entertainment CCO Corey Jones and wrung a few answers from him regarding the new tourney.

Sunday morning in sleepy Santa Ana, California saw HEX fanatics lined up outside a modest red brick building, chattering excitedly and no wonder. Day two of the HEX Invitational was about to begin and at the end of it, one player would walk away not only with HEX Master bragging rights, but $40,000 in deck-expanding cash.

Last week, HEX Entertainment invited a handful of journalists to its Irvine office to try out the pre-release single player PvE campaign Chronicles of Entrath, from its trading card game/MMO, HEX. After roughly an hour and a half with the new mode I can say without hesitation that it's turned me, a jaded MMO veteran, into a TCG enthusiast.