Is it Pay to Win? Raid: Shadow Legends

Raid: Shadow Legends Sacred Shard

Welcome to ‘Is it Pay to Win’ – a column where we examine a game and decide if that game is has aspects of pay to win and to what extent. Check out Is it Pay to Win?: Defined to see how we break down the components of pay to win (p2w), such as pay for advantage, pay for convenience, and pay for cosmetics.

Raid: Shadow Legends describes itself as a “mythical RPG with hundreds of champions and 14 factions”. While it’s originally a mobile game, it is also available on PC. It features champion collection (with level and gearing of those champions), dungeon bosses, a campaign (with a story, sort of) clans, tournaments, events and more. It has a cash shop that allows you to buy most things you could acquire in game.

Scoring:

  • Pay for Power: 4/5
  • Pay for Advantage: 4/5
  • Pay for Convenience: 4/5
  • Pay for Cosmetics: 3/5
  • Pay to Win: 3.86

See below for a brief game play description and a detailed breakdown of how we come up with those scores.

(more…)

Gamer Art: May 2021

Check out May’s Featured Gamer Art, a monthly column of art that I’ve found found in the past few weeks. Art can include paintings, drawings, digital art, physical crafts, cosplay and more.

This month features (above) one of the coolest World of Warcraft art pieces I’ve shown here on Gamer Art and maybe one of the coolest I’ve seen anywhere. There’s also Spawn, Akuma from Street Fighter, HZD (seems to have great art often), another Triss Merigold Cosplay (See last months), a WoW piece and a Tim Burton inspired pokemon drawing. As always, click the picture to see it larger and click the text link to go to the source where I found the image.

(more…)

How Much Time Played is Enough to get an Impression?

Recently I made a post regarding Amazon’s New World preview event and my experiences there. I got a lot of push back because having only played five and a half hours is apparently not enough time to give a first impression. I didn’t hit max level and do every single piece of content, so how can I have any opinions about the game? Part of me thought that it might be fanboy rage because I dared to say anything critical (despite saying overall that the game looks good), but it still seems worth while to examine the criticism.

In this post, I’m going to discuss the differences between a review and a first impression as well as what is a fair amount of time to experience a game before making some sort of judgement about the game or it’s systems.

(more…)

Shadowlands: Release Date Announced (and We Were Right)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8q5gHTCFlbg

So, at Gamescom today Shadowlands was confirmed to be releasing on the 27th of October. Based on my previous prediction that ended up being confirmed today, I’m assuming the prepatch will be either September 15th or September 22nd. Nice to see we are finally moving forward with the game, however, given how limited beta access has been, I still worry that it will be truly ready. After the break I’m including Blizzards full post about the release schedule (which has a special date for North American servers).

(more…)

Shadowlands: Thoughts on the Future of Mythic+

The Mythic Dungeon Invitational

Aside from my abundant issues with the mythic + weekly cache (now the Great Vault), I’d like to share some thoughts on what running keys might be like in the upcoming expansion. Keep in mind, this is coming from someone who hasn’t gotten beta access, so I’m basing my thoughts off the announced changes. Areas of consideration are the dungeons themselves, covenants, new affixes, the aoe cap, and…

(more…)