The sun is out and summer is looming. This month for MMO Co-Opportunities, we have details for Cloudrest (the 12-person trial in ESO’s upcoming expansion), an overhaul to Guild Wars 2’s underwater combat system, and a release date schedule for Black Desert Mobile.
Upcoming ESO: Summerset Trial, Cloudrest, Detailed
For MMO players, new dungeons/instances/raids are always a huge draw for new expansions. Fortunately for content junkies, Summerset (the upcoming expansion for Elder Scrolls Online) will be introducing a new 12-person trial called Cloudrest.
Cloudrest is a literal city in the clouds and it comes with a mystery. The gryphons and gryphon rider knights (the Welkynar) that the city is famous for have gone missing without a trace and it’s up to the players to visit Cloudrest to find out what’s become of them. The trial features a main boss with three supporting bosses and in each battle, groups will have to split up to send some of their party into the shadow realm while those left behind will support them from the apparent realm.
No new dungeon would be complete without loot and Cloudrest will offer unique rewards. There will be four new items sets themed around the Welkynar, each tying into a particular cardinal direction and element. A unique Trophy and Bust is awarded for beating the trial’s final boss (either on Normal or Veteran difficulty) and completing the Veteran version of Cloudrest will reward “perfected” versions of the new items sets, which have an additional five-piece bonus. For the truly ambitious, completing the hardest difficulty mode will grant players a Shadow Skin unlock.
Elder Scrolls Online: Summerset releases on May 21 (PC and Mac) and June 5th (Xbox One and PS4), depending on which system you purchase it on.
Guild Wars 2 Revitalizes Underwater Combat
I’m not gonna lie: I’ve always hated underwater combat in video games. While Guild Wars 2 implemented and attempted some innovative stuff regarding their underwater combat system, it has still never been something I’ve been overly fond of. Well, it looks like I’m getting another opportunity to change my mind on all that, as Arenanet has implemented some major changes to that system in the latest game patch.
When revisiting the system, their design goals were the following: Underwater combat should not be any less effective than its on-land counterpart. Underwater movement can be significantly more effective. Underwater skills should have combat-flow parallels to on-land weapons.
I can certainly get behind all three of these sentiments, as they tackle my three main gripes with underwater combat in general. The way they tackled these goals was overhauled many individual weapon skills of the game’s various professions. For some skills this meant increasing damage or lowering cooldowns, but for others it meant a complete rework of the skill. For example, the guardian’s trident auto-attack is now a ranged three-part combo and the Mesmer’s trident skill Spinning Revenge has been replaced with a new skill (Imminent Voyage) that now grants surrounding allies chaos armor and creates a clone at the player’s position. In addition to all of that, many non-weapon skills that were previously unavailable underwater are now usable.
I haven’t yet had the chance to dive into these changes, but from the sounds of everything, they can only be improvements. I always love seeing developers going back and revitalizing systems they feel could be improved upon, so a big kudos to Arenanet for that.
Black Desert Mobile Release Date Windows Unveiled
Black Desert Mobile (the mobile sister to Black Desert Online) is already out in South Korea, but release plans for other regions have been unknown. Up until now. Developer Pearl Abyss revealed their regional launch plans in a quarterly financial report:
Taiwan version: Q3 2018 SEA version: the same time as Taiwan or shortly after NA / EU version: Q1 2019
The launch characters for the game are Warrior, Range, Giant, Witch, and Valkyrie, each with a mixture of skills similar to those classes in the PC version and skills the are more attuned to a mobile setup. Since Black Desert Online and Black Desert Mobile are two distinct games (despite having a wealth of similarities), there is no sort of cross-play between PC and mobile systems.
You can check out the trailer for the game’s launch characters below:
That wraps it up for this month. Are you looking forward to ESO: Summerset or your region’s release of Black Desert Mobile? Have you had an opportunity to check out the changes to underwater combat in Guild Wars 2? Let us know in the comments below!