war-rock posts

War Rock was one of the first games "free-to-play" first person shooters released in the US and this month the game reaches its fourth birthday. To celebrate publisher GamersFirst has announced some special events and updates to the game including a new map and gameplay mode.

Hero Mode is the name of the new gameplay mode which is played exclusively (for now anyway) on the BioLab map. The 4v4 gameplay mode has one of the four players on each team picked as the "hero". The hero gets some extra abilities such as faster movement, team health regeneration, temporary invulnerability and more. In addition there will be other in-game events where players can get new weapons (including pink ones for Valentine's Day) and more. Players can also put in the code "HappyBday" to receive an MP5K for 3 days.

[Via email press release]

Download the War Rock Install Client at Big Download

K2 Network, the parent company behind the GamersFirst lineup of free-to-play online PC game titles, is preparing for a major network overall as it prepares to launch a number of new games in 2011. These plans were first revealed in the official blog site for one of those new games, the relaunch of the first person shooter MMO APB.

According to the blog post the network revamp is akin to "... changing the engine oil while speeding down the highway at 100 miles per hour." Since first launching in 2005 GamersFirst has used a number of different network configurations and according to the blog, "This patchwork of services caused various issues over the years, though our IT team put up a valiant fight in each instance to keep things running as smoothly as possible in spite of a sometimes overly "complex" architecture." The new and revamped network started in August 2010. While it goes into pretty technical details, the upshot of all this is that GamersFirst will " ... become a global wholesale network provider (more or less). Yes - technically you could actually now buy bandwidth FROM us on three continents, though I don't think we really have a business model for that yet :)"

In addition to the relaunch of APB, GamersFirst also plans to launch four more games in 2011 although those titles have yet to be revealed.

[Via Blue's News]

The word got leaked last week but now GamersFirst has made it official. In a press released issued this morning the free-to-play gaming web site owned by K2 Network announced that it has acquired the publishing rights and the assets to All Points Bulletin (APB), the first person shooter MMO that was first developed and released by Realtime Worlds. As many of you already know, the game was released last June but poor reviews and a lack of players forced Realtime Worlds to shut down only a few months later.

GamersFirst acquired the APB rights from Realtime Worlds' bankruptcy administrator and it will be developed by its subsidiary Reloaded Productions for a relaunch as a free-to-play online only game with micro-transaction support of in-game content. It's scheduled to go live to the public sometime in the first half of 2011. It will also get a name change to APB: Reloaded. This is not the first time that GamersFirst has taken on a game that got shut down somewhere else. Earlier this year it took over the US publishing duties of 9Dragons, a fantasy RPG that was previously run by Acclaim before it was closed down.

Big Download chatted with GamersFirst Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer Bjorn Book-Larsson on Monday morning about the APB acquisition and you can check out what we learned from him after the jump:

It's pretty rare that there is a free-to-play crossover event but that's what's happening with several of the games in the GamersFirst line-up of titles. In fact the GamersFirst web site has gotten a temporary revamp, turning it into the "ZombiesFirst" web site.

The zombie infection began with the first person shoote War Rock where a new map is being added to the game (Blind Bullet Map) that works in in the Zombie gameplay mode. The game has also added six new guns. Other GamersFirst games with zombie themes this week include Knight Online where players have to fight off the zombie horde. More zombie action can be found in 9Dragons and Sword 2. More info on the ZombiesFirst event can be found at the publisher's press release.

Zombies continue to be the new black in first person shooter games. The latest such game to add the undead to its list of features is War Rock, the long running free-to-play shooter from GamersFirst. The back story is the usual stuff for this sort of thing; military experiment goes horribly wrong and, well, you have to shoot your way out of 20 waves of the zombie horde.

The Zombie Mode update includes a new map (Blind Bullet) and three new guns (the Glock17C, the PSG-1 20B, and the Barrett M82-N). More of War Rock's maps will support the new Zombie Mode in future updates to the game.

Download the War Rock client at Big Download (643 MB)

If you are like most of us, the economy's quick drop this fall may have left you with a lack of cash to pay for that new copy of Left 4 Dead or Far Cry 2. However if you want to play a first person shooter game for free and don't feel like paying for it there are actually quite a number of free-to-play titles out there that you can download and play right now.

Big Download has noticed a growing trend of first person shooter titles that are already out there, in beta testing or coming up in the near future that you can just download and play. Some of these games do have or will have premium fees or micro-transactions to get more content but all of them can be enjoyed for free without the need to pay a cent. We decided to do a quick round-up of just a few of the current and upcoming free-to-play FPS titles. And remember, the best things in life are free..or so we have been told.

Click on the image above to continue reading about Free-to-play FPS games