Arenanet has released the launch trailer for Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire. Check it out embedded above. Are you prepared to confront a god? Path of Fire launches September 22.
Author: Admin
Get In-Game Rewards For Picking Up Wild Terra
Wild Terra developer Juvty Worlds wants to thank its early adopters, and what says appreciation better than a boar clad in scale armor? Probably not much. Those who have bought, or will buy, Wild Terra before it goes into launch will receive a Fierce Boar mount and Scale Cloak as a thank you for their early patronage.
All players who have already bought, or will purchase the game in Early Access – will receive unique rewards! Can be obtained only with an Early Access purchase. To receive rewards, you need login to the game before it’s release.
Wild Terra releases Q4 2017. More information on the game can be found at its official website.
Battleborn Ceasing Development Support After Fall Update
As they say, all good things must come to an end, and they also say that development costs money and money doesn’t grow on trees. Gearbox Software has announced that this fall’s update to Battleborn will be the last. The fall update was announced at PAX and includes new skins, map and balance tweaks, as well as new boosts and taunts.
But never fear, those of you who actually bought this game and intend on continuing to play it. The servers for Battleborn will not be going anywhere for the foreseeable future.
Never fear! Battleborn is here to stay. Nothing is changing with Battleborn, and the servers will be up and active for the foreseeable future. We announced the Fall Update for the game at PAX including some new skins, themed around some of your favorite Borderlands characters! That update will also include some updated title art (more full bar titles!) for the more significant challenges in the game, as well as some additional Finisher Boosts and Taunts. Also, there are minor balance changes in that patch.
Creative director Randy Varnell has moved on to new projects, likely including Borderlands 3, which 90% of the Gearbox staff is currently working on. Battleborn launched in May 2016 and got lost in the midst of Overwatch’s massive overtaking of first person shooters. On Saturday night, the game peaked at 106 players on PC.
(Source: Battleborn)
Beta Perspective: Wild West Online Is Hot Trash A La Mode (Hold the Ice Cream)
An empty wilderness, terrible sound quality, cheap animations, and unfinished assets everywhere with nothing to do but die and see your character irreversibly bricked. It may be in alpha, but Wild West Online is easily a fast contender for worst game of 2017, what is looking to be a shoddy title with questionable connections to one of the most incompetent developers in the gaming industry. Read this preview and stay far, far away.
One thing I’d like to ask about developer 612 Games: Who are they? Do they have a website? No. Does WWO Partners have a website? No. According to the Wild West Online website, the name is trademarked under the US Trademark system by WWO Partners and others. So I decided to do some digging and found exactly what I was looking for:
DJ2 Entertainment Inc. DBA WWO Partners
DJ2 Entertainment doing business as WWO Partners, or in layman’s terms WWO Partners isn’t a real company. Imagine DJ2 Entertainment is Adam Sandler in the Jack & Jill movie and WWO Partners is when he puts on a wig and pretends to be his own sister.
The announcement that Wild West Online is following the model of The War Z, another low effort shovelware title pushed out in connection with Sergey Titov, immediately red flagged this game in my book. Impressively, War Z also had such a refund. It wasn’t until after the refund period that OP Productions (or Hammerhead or whatever they’ve changed their name to these days) stopped pretending that it would live up to certain promises and started coming down hard on the invasive microtransactions. Let me also remind you that War Z was one of the first games to be involuntarily pulled from Steam over fraudulent advertising.
But this game has nothing to do with The War Z or Free Reign Entertainment, the company just by coincidence uses the same engine, had similar website/forum structure, utilizes the same payment processor, and creative director Stephan Bugaj happens to be friends with Sergey Titov on Facebook. DJ2 Entertainment just happened to have worked on Romero’s Aftermath, the equally low quality War Z clone pushed out after the original was abandoned, and was similarly abandoned in short time. Wild West Online’s PR is being handled by Vim Global who, you guessed it, also worked on Shattered Skies. And finally Wild West Online’s trademark was filed by Steven A. Bercu of Lime LLC, also responsible for filing trademarks for all of Titov’s other shell corporations under a slightly different forming of his name.
In case all of the companies I’m listing is confusing you, don’t worry. Sergey Titov and his Free Reign Entertainment crew go through LLCs like they’re candy, each new reboot of War Z was created by a completely new developer with absolutely no online corporate presence, that seems to exist in name only just like WWO Partners.
This weekend’s alpha test is supposed to sell you on Wild West Online, this much is obvious to everyone but the community manager and its tiny cabal of fans. It’s one of two alpha tests before the refund policy ends and you’re up poop creek without a paddle (unless you know how to dispute a transaction via Paypal or issue a chargeback), so rather than treat this like a stress test with minimal features, I’m going to preview Wild West Online like it’s already trying to show off for my money. Which it is.
Everything I need to know about Wild West Online, I learned in the first half hour. A wild west shooter, the game starts you out with a six shooter and no money in a safe zone town somewhere on the open world map. I went to the shop to find that I couldn’t buy anything, watched players run around town, and ran off toward adventure. About three minutes out of town, another player ran up and started a shootout. I lost. Upon respawning, I found that my gun, my medicine, and my ammunition were gone. My character was effectively dead and couldn’t even be deleted it seemed.
And that’s pretty much it. The graphics are nowhere near what we saw in earlier videos, the towns are barren of bystanders, and the world doesn’t have any NPCs roaming around. Your character doesn’t make any footstep sounds when running around, there are hundreds and hundreds of unfinished assets lying around, and the developers don’t seem to understand how skin tone works.
This is what black people looked like in the wild west.
I am hoping that Wild West Online isn’t being developed by the guys who made The War Z, and I say this only because it would mean that the team has become even less competent. While War Z’s alpha may have been a two-bit hack job, it at least masqueraded as what could potentially become a competent product. Wild West Online shows up to work with yesterday’s clothes and a half-empty bottle of whiskey, still drunk because it never stopped from the night before.
Wild West Online is an embarrassment, both in the idea that it is a paid alpha and that WWO Partners expects players to use this to judge whether or not they want to refund their purchase. And they can complain to unhappy customers all they want that this weekend was clearly a “technical test” and was deliberately gutted of content, it doesn’t change the fact that players have two weekends to decide whether or not the game is worth keeping their money in, and WWO has clearly squandered its first of two impressions.
Column How Reddit Once Again Bamboozled the Media
I have a distinct advantage over traditional media with MMO Fallout; I don’t run ads, I don’t have sponsors, and I have given minimal thought to opening a Patreon. As an entity, I am completely unaccountable for boosting views to their maximum potential, and as a result I enjoy the unique trait of not being beholden to being the first to publish a breaking story. I do try to keep the news relevant, but at least I have the time to do some fact checking.
Which leads me to this week’s failure to communicate: A number of news websites are running retractions and corrections after it was revealed that stories on Reddit are not entirely trustworthy. A user in the Star Citizen community claimed that he had managed to obtain a refund in excess of $45,000, in the form of three $15,000 refunds for his clan, and that the process had been a "nightmare." This got picked up by a number of websites, I won’t be calling them out because that’s not the point of this article.
So let’s go through the piece and I’ll offer my thought process that came to ignoring this news piece:
"It was a nightmare getting the refund, we are a commercial org and pooled the money to buy the completionist packages, and used a corporate card to buy them, so we had major issues with getting refunded to the same card, paypal and then providing ID. Total it took about 5 weeks to get sorted. A lot of time was spent trying to explain the situation to some woman called "Schala" and just getting the same answers copied and pasted backwards and forwards, they definitely try to delay you as much as possible in the hope you’ll forget or give up."
First let’s get out of the way that this is a first party Reddit story and therefore automatically less credible than your average "Zombie Elvis Lives in Reno" story on the Enquirer (he still performs in Vegas as a member of the Blue Man Group, as anyone knows). On policy, I don’t trust anything that is posted as a story on Reddit, even if the person has "evidence" in the form of easily doctored screenshots and gifs, and doubly so if said poster claims it’s "impossible" to fake navigating a website in a video. It is possible, and it’s very easy.
I also had trouble believing the part of the story that they were trying to delay as much as possible in the hopes that the issue would be forgotten or that he would give up. I don’t think any company thinks that a customer is just going to give up on nearly fifty grand.
Now I don’t claim to be a licensed journalist with a fancy journalism degree, but I know enough from experience and from watching all three seasons of The Newsroom to know that stories must be verified before they are printed. In the thread, another moderator independently verified the refund claims, a factor that isn’t worth the paper it isn’t printed on. You’re verifying an anonymous source with another anonymous source.
So the proper thing to do would be to contact Cloud Imperium Games for confirmation which evidently nobody did before rushing this story to print. CIG has come out since then and stated that the refund was more along the lines of $330 and that the refund was handled smoothly and without issues, also noting that most of the story regarding delays was completely fabricated.
And in case you had any remaining doubts, the user subsequently deleted his account. Case closed. I’m hesitant to attribute the story to "haters" as some in the Star Citizen community have, if anything this is a case of an attention-grabbing headline driving the news on the backs of "well we did say it was just an allegation." And judging by the number of comments on individual articles, it was a success.
Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.
Marvel Heroes: Venom Available On Console…For Limited Time
Gazillion Entertainment has announced that Venom is now available on PS4 and Xbox One, but only for a limited time and only with real money. The pack with Venom will be available until September 27, although the announcement does not state what will happen afterward. The Omega pack costs $20 on PSN.
For a Limited Time, Venom Unleashes the Power of the Symbiote in Marvel Heroes Omega on Consoles! Available now through Wednesday, Sept. 27, the Lethal Protector brings his own brand of anti-heroism to consoles as the game’s 42nd playable character. He’s available through the “Marvel Heroes Omega – Venom Pack,” which can be purchased in the PlayStation Storeand Xbox Marketplace, as well as through a bundle in-game. The pack includes Venom, two XP boosts, two Marvelous Loot Boxes, and an alternate suit representing another popular symbiote persona for Eddie Brock: Anti-Venom!
(Source: Marvel Heroes)
Bungie Removes “Alt-Right Symbol” in Destiny 2
Bungie has announced that a piece of equipment after it came to their attention that said armor bears the mark of a “hate symbol.” The company announced the alteration via Twitter, noting that the armor bears a striking resemblance to the Kekistani flag, a meme that has become synonymous with the alt-right, a collection of Trump supporters, along with the frog Pepe and other such memes.
“It’s come to our attention that a gauntlet in Destiny 2 shares elements with a hate symbol. It is not intentional. We are removing it. Our deepest apologies. This does NOT represent our values, and we are working quickly to correct this. We renounce hate in all forms.”
Bungie CEO Pete Parsons posted the following on Twitter in response to the announcement:
“At Bungie, our company values place the highest emphasis on inclusion of all people and respect for all who work with us or play our games.”
The announcement has been met with both positive and negative reactions across the net. The term “kek” was popularized in part due to World of Warcraft, where cross-faction language changes “lol” to “kek,” with the latter slowly replacing the former in online chatter. While the Kekistani flag has been labeled a hate symbol by some outfits due to its resemblance to the swastika, supporters claim that the flag is a mockery of ethnic nationalism, not a symbol of support for it.
Regardless, it appears that Bungie is having nothing of it.
Exclusive: Middle Earth Shadow of War Preview
Middle Earth: Shadow of War is the long awaited sequel to Shadow of Mordor, a highly rated open world fighter that takes place in everyone’s favorite land of Mordor. Players once again control of Talion as he forges a new ring of power and attempts to keep control of it for use in the war against Sauron and his forces of darkness. The game doesn’t officially launch until October 10, but it just so happens that I was in the store and they miraculously had a copy on the shelf already. I couldn’t pass up this opportunity for an exclusive review, so I took it.
The more I play this, the more I’m pretty sure that this is an unreleased prototype spinoff, possibly taking place in between the first two games. My local store had a copy called the Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition, and frankly within ten minutes I could tell that this would revolutionize gaming as a medium. To start, the special edition was clearly mislabeled and thus rang up for about $4 at the counter. The cashier didn’t seem to care that I was getting this product more than a month early.
And I know what you nerds are going to say: Why focus on Pepperoni as a character when she was such a minuscule factor in the books and never made it into the movies? Look, I love Lord of the Rings just as much as any of you do, likely a lot more. I’ve read the books literally three thousand times each, and I’ve been waiting what feels like decades for the Tolkein Estate to finally release the rights to Pepperoni for her own game. In fact, just the idea that pervasive sexists are fighting so hard against her appearance as a lead character should be all the evidence the Warner Bros needs to put her front and center.
The most surprising thing of Shadow of War’s Pepperoni spinoff is that it not only isn’t compatible with any of the current gen systems. Instead, Pepperoni Edition is compatible with most microwaves and convection ovens. It does contain a code for 100 coins in the main game, however. The cashier told me that this game doesn’t play as well on the microwave, so for the ultimate experience I went with my trusty convection oven. After a quick 10 minute installation process at 400 degrees, I was ready to go.
Let’s get into Pepperoni as a character in Shadow of War. It’s nice to see Warner Bros. finally giving us a gritty female character, one with a tough, crispy outer shell that actually hides a rather saucy personality underneath. We see a character that is both sweet and a bit tart, always ready to help when called. The dialogue can get a little cheesy in parts and it lacked a really meaty ending, but overall the presentation is one that you can really sink your teeth into.
While her motivations aren’t as in your face as, say, Talion wanting to survive and destroy Sauron in the main game, it’s pretty clear from the get go that Pepperoni is all about sustaining the survivors still hiding within Mordor. She wants to enrich life back into the lands via copious amounts of iron and protein. The game really goes far to show the gritty, greasy reality of life in Mordor and while I wouldn’t exactly call this game “profane,” it is dirty enough that you will literally need some napkins in order to walk out with your hands clean. Perhaps some wet naps.
The delivery method of Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition is going to irk some customers. The idea of games slowly becoming more of a service than a product has become more popular over time, but this is the first game made entirely out of consumables. The box came with 40 consumables that must be individually installed, of which I used a baker’s dozen for this review. Now I can see why this cost $4 at the store, most will beat it in less than a week while hardcore games can probably get through it in a day. I did severely burn my mouth on the first three consumables, but that’s the cost of games journalism.
There is little doubt in my mind that this review is going to get slammed on social media because “oh it’s not a real game,” and “oh Connor you don’t know what a real game is, you’re not a real games journalist.” Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition doesn’t cater to the ‘hardcore gamer,’ the unemployed basement dweller who has all the time in the world to memorize button combinations. You don’t need quick reflexes to play this game well, nor do you need to memorize insane codes or find secret areas. Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition can be played both solo or co-op/competitive, but there is no online option.
MMO Fallout Verdict: 4.5/5 – Shadow of War: Pepperoni Edition is a welcome spinoff of presumably a great game. It’s simple to install, engaging to play, and features a filled out protagonist with clear cut motivations. Will it win the hearts and minds of hardcore gamers? No, but the general public will find something to love in Pepperoni’s cheesiness.
Fossil Island Comes To Old School RuneScape
Old School RuneScape this week saw the launch of Fossil Island, a new batch of content for the retro RuneScape. Fossil Island opens up a ton of new content, including the much awaited launch of skeletal wyverns. You can collect fossils, take part in one of several new skilling locations, and uncover new artifacts to fill the expanded Varrok museum.
“Fossil Island has been something of a myth in RuneScape and the community for a long time,” said Mathew Kemp, senior product manager, Old School RuneScape. “The first design documents were drafted more than a decade ago, so we were really pleased the Old School RuneScape community voted so overwhelmingly and backed its development and release into the game.”
More on the update can be found at the link below.
(Source: RuneScape)
Malaysian Government Blocks Steam Store Over God Fighting Game
Malaysian gamers looking to spend their hard earned ringgits on fresh picked video games are being met with a disappointing notice that the service has been blocked by the government due to allegedly offensive content. Users attempting to access the store are being notified that access has been blocked by the government.
The game in question, Fight of Gods, is a side scrolling fighter that allows players to take control of various real deities including, but not limited to, Jesus and Buddha. The Malaysian government had apparently issued a 24 hour warning on Thursday to Valve to remove the game or face restrictions. The blockage of Steam appears to be part of that warning.
“This is a very sensitive issue, and it is totally not acceptable. We can never agree to such games. The government must take immediate action to ban the game’s sale here,”
Fight of Gods publisher, Taiwanese developer Digital Crafter, has issued a statement that they are contacting Valve to rectify the matter.
"We are disappointed that such freedom of choice is not given to everyone and in particular that the game has been forcibly removed from sale in Malaysia, although no direct communication has been received by us as to the reasons for this. Nevertheless we respect any rules and censorship imposed in any given territory."
Users in Malaysia can still access Steam, just not its store.
(Source: NDTV)
MMO Fallout 