Gadgetory

we just got back from PAX East 2016 where I saw one of the coolest games I've seen in quite a while and that was mages of mist rally uh it's a bit out in terms of release date but pretty darn cool and worth looking at this game as a unique art style but it is definitely very heavily inspired by Wind Waker in terms of mechanics it takes a little bit of the wizard major element where you mix and match different elements of the world fire ice water what-have-you and create spells but it's not like magicka where it's just total chaos there's actually somewhat of an intellectual object to this spell creation as well and we'll get to that in a moment all of this PAX East 2016 coverage is brought to you by a cyber powerpc who were awarded PC magazine's readers choice award for best gaming desktop so that stated majors of mr. alia has some pretty cool mechanics that I want to open with and the main one is the creation of spells spells consists of a few different components one is the element that would be the element of the world as I said fire ice water things like that and then the next one is behavior and these are controlled by runes so there's different behaviors that a spell can have and as an example those might be movement so you maybe create an orb of fire for instance and then you apply something to that Borba fire like moving forward very simple right so you've just created a fireball that's what you've done but here's the cool part these are used not just for combat but also for puzzle solving within the game and that is where some of the legends of Zelda influence comes in for the borealis team making the game as an example there were torches that you could lighten Zelda these were pretty key but basic puzzles to solve in mages of Australia they still have torch puzzles almost as a a callback to Zelda an homage but the way they light here is a bit more unique say there's a torch to open a gate you can't get to the torch physically there's a some kind of object blocking your physical path and you've got to get a spell over there to light the torch if it's not a straight shot one thing that's pretty cool that can be done is within the spell system the spellbook effectively you can apply runes where the fireball will go straight and then take a left turn or a right turn go around a corner go around the object maybe it's more complex and it has to turn back and go straight again but that can be done with the runes within the game so there are 30 different behaviors that can be applied to the spells and then a couple of core elements the behaviors offer things other than movements you can do all kinds of area of effect impact type stuffs send things flying homing runes are another one there are awed ments as well so instead of adding just a behavior like moving or homing you can modify an existing one and that would be where instead of moving forward you might append an argument to tell it to move faster or in an arc or randomize its movement for example if you wanted to create a lightning spell that arced from one enemy to the other you might do some kind of random movement to just create a massive chaotic area of effect type of spell in terms of story story is pretty critical here so the major element is explained that's the core heart of the game and they actually designed this spell crafting system before even starting with the story so they worked on it they created a system and then they said what type of games do we want to make to match this to and that's when the borealis team borealis games contacted Ed Greenwood whom some of you may know for his work on Forgotten Realms certainly a very well known book series and D&D series so Forgotten Realms was created by Ed Greenwood he has agreed to write the story from Australia and as I understand it he's even gone a bit above and beyond and has written the basis of sequels for them if this game happens to succeed but that's of course looking very far in the future so ed Greenwood is on board for the story he is writing the backstory for the characters for the world he's writing something quests so the dialogue all this stuff and within the game the story I we didn't learn a whole lot about but one thing I do know is there's the sort of standard fare of towns and villages you can visit and this was pretty important to me they don't have just normal quest givers so these hubs don't function like something where someone's got an exclamation point above their head you feel compelled to gather that quest and complete it even if you don't want to that doesn't exist here instead the NPC is just kind of talk casually with you and if they happen to have a quote unquote quest we'll call it just for ease they might drop a very obvious hint for example man I really wish I didn't leave my pitchfork in those woods over there and so that's a pretty obvious you know hey you can go grab this guy's pitchfork and read it back to him maybe he'll give you something but the idea that borealis had was to offer some sort of side quest without sort of making the player feel as if they have to completely sideline their gameplay and deviate from what they actually were doing originally before getting interrupted with a side quest that may actually be useless in the scheme of things so that's a pretty good design approach to a game I think I I'm not a big fan of these quest hubs and these things that MMOs have gone a bit crazy with these days so I do like hearing that the art style has a really nice sort of pastel finish to it it's not very strong it's not cartoony and cel-shaded and it's it's generally unoffensive we'll put it that way on mass but I certainly did like it myself so arts looking good the city and design looks good the story is sort of the one thing where I feel confident that it will actually come through pretty well almost no matter what because that Greenwood of course he can write bad things anyone can but it just it sounds like they're in good shape right now so mages in Australia they're looking at about 15 hours of gameplay they do internal speedruns by the developers the fastest anyone's completed is 5 hours in those side quests no dawdling about and this is after one year of developments they have one more year left of development no release dates because they're an indie game they don't really want to give a date and then get crushed by you know Dragon Age or something like that so games expected to launch in about a year quite a ways out look into borealis games they are the developers at Greenwood if you're interested in his writing and then mages in Australia is the game of course as this game here's some level of completion or beta or whatever we will post content on it so before I need pre-purchasing things like that do check archons out and see if you think you'd actually like it but I want to bring everyone's attention to this one because I do think it actually looks pretty darn fun so that is mages of Australia thank you for watching pay channels commercial video you want to help us out directly he can hit the links to the description below for more information and I'll see you all next time