This one completely slipped under the radar, for me and apparently for the rest of Bay12.
Nosgoth is an arena shooter in "closed beta," meaning you can buy your way in with a few nice bonuses or get a hold of a beta key from one of several sources. It features 4v4 asymmetrical team combat between between humans and vampires. Humans focus on ranged attacks while vampires are mostly melee. In a lot of ways it resembles an arena-based Left 4 Dead.
The Hunter is one of the human starting classes. He has a rapid-fire crossbow and a bola that can disable vampires for an easy kill. Pretty straightforward class.
The Alchemist is the other human starting class. With a naptha grenade launcher and potions she can damage and heal in an aoe. My favorite class, maybe a little OP when stacked.
The Scout is a long-ranged damage dealer with a choice of supporty abilities like turrets or lone wolf sniper abilities which will just get him killed. You can't lone wolf against vampires.
The Prophet has dual pistols and strong support abilities. Used to be very OP apparently. I haven't seen many, don't know much about them. They can heal teammates or disable enemies.
The Reaver is the hunter from Left 4 Dead, basically. He also has a smoke grenade. Aside from that, it's mostly holding W while pressing mouse1.
The Tyrant is the tank and initiator, with big aoe disables and a lot of health. I'm of the opinion that you can't beat a half decent team without a Tyrant.
The Sentinel can fly. He picks people up and drops them. That sounds silly but carrying the right player out of a fight can be brutal.
The Deceiver is psychic. He can either disguise himself as a human and backstab unwary enemies or mind control humans into running away from the group.
As it currently stands the game feels reasonably balanced, though it doesn't always feel that way. It's a very teamwork-centric game. At low levels the vampires usually win and games come down to which team is best at humans (games follow a two-round format where each team plays both sides. Whoever scores the most kills over both rounds wins). This is mainly because humans require a lot of coordination to succeed; one on one any vampire will usually beat any human, so if both teams are disorganized the vampires will always win. At higher levels where players are experienced and coordinated vampires begin to struggle. A lot. A coordinated human team has answers for just about everything the vampires do, and most of the balance patches released so far have been about toning down the humans, despite what you might read in reviews and the like on Steam.
Despite that it's pretty fun. The F2P aspects aren't too onerous, there's just the issue of item rentals. You have gold and "runestones," and all gameplay-related items can be bought with gold except new classes, which can be bought with a token you get every five experience levels. Items like weapons and abilities can be "rented" for seven days or they can be bought permanently for significantly more gold or runestones. This has caused quite a stir but I don't really see the issue. Most items can be rented in three or four games (games are maybe 20 minutes long) and last a week which is quite a while. So far I'm not feeling any pressure to use runestones equipment even with the rental issue.
Oh, another apparently big issue. If the name didn't tip you off this game is set in the
Legacy of Kain universe. There's been a sizable stir over this, diehard Legacy of Kain fans are pretty angry that their long-awaited sequel is an arena shooter. PErsonally I didn't realize there was such a thing as diehard Legacy of Kain fans, but alright.
It's good casual fun I think, I love the Alchemist and Deceiver classes but Tyrant is a lot of fun as well. Tyrant carries bad vampire teams on his back. They're apparently planning on making Nosgoth a serious competitive esport but I don't really see it happening with the amount of content they've currently got. They've got their work cut out for them if they want that.
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Topic: Nosgoth - Dead-ass game (Read 3126 times)