Author: Admin

[Column] Bluehole Studio Doesn’t Have A Moral (or Legal) Leg To Stand On


Bluehole Studios this week decided to release a press release stating that it is considering “further action” against Epic Games over the Battle Royale mode recently added to Fortnite. According to the release, Bluehole is concerned over similarities between the two games, and how Epic uses Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds in conversations with the community and press in comparison to Fortnite.

“We’ve had an ongoing relationship with Epic Games throughout PUBG’s development as they are the creators of UE4, the engine we licensed for the game. After listening to the growing feedback from our community and reviewing the gameplay for ourselves, we are concerned that Fortnite may be replicating the experience for which PUBG is known.”

As someone who has been following actual cases for years, I’ll give this as simply as I know how: Bluehole Studio doesn’t have a leg to stand on, either legally in court or morally in the court of public opinion. And since PUBG is running on Epic’s Unreal Engine, any action taken by the former against the latter would accomplish little more than a self-inflicted gunshot to the leg, just ask Silicon Knights how that worked out.

So let’s take this piece by piece.

1. (Legal) Bluehole Studios Doesn’t Own The Mechanic

You can’t copyright game mechanics, it is not within the purview of United States and UK law, and the EU has not weighed in on the matter yet. It is, however, possible to protect your game mechanics through trademark, however the process is extremely time and resource intensive, and I can say by simply pulling up a list of patents owned by Bluehole (a list of one) that they do not own the patent for a Battle Royale game mechanic. In short, Bluehole Studios has no legal standing because they don’t own the concept. Neither does Brendan Greene.

For legal precedent, we can look at exactly the kind of company devious enough to patent a game mechanic, and of course I am talking about Namco Ltd. Back in the 90’s, Namco patented the concept of having a mini-game that can be played during a game’s loading screen. The patent didn’t actually have the chance to be legitimized in court, as Namco never used it to sue another developer, and it expired in 2015. There are heavy doubts as to whether or not Namco would have won such a lawsuit, but the threat was enough to keep some developers from taking the risk.

Namco’s patent very likely would have failed because patent law stipulates that your patented item can’t have existed, and there are verifiable records of games with mini-game loading screens existing before Namco patented the idea in Ridge Racer. Likewise, the existence of numerous Battle Royale style games ensures that, even if Bluehole decided to head over to the patent office and absorb that cost, that they would ultimately fail in their attempt at ownership.

2. (Moral) That Time Bluehole Tried to Steal Lineage III

Out of the two parties involved in this dispute, incidentally Bluehole is the one most acquainted with criminal theft, a matter that MMO Fallout covered heavily back in its infancy. Back in 2009, civil and criminal charges were brought against multiple Bluehole Studios employees alleging that they had stolen trade secrets and assets while employed at NCSoft and used those assets in creating the action MMO Tera. Six employees were found guilty, with jail sentences being handed out as part of the criminal proceedings, however Bluehole as a corporate entity was found to not be guilty. Those employees, as you might expect, haven’t been working at Bluehole since then.

But still, there is a certain level of hypocrisy for a company with an established record of employees going to jail for stealing from another developer, to start pointing figures and making threats, over a mechanic that it doesn’t own, against other developers. Bluehole didn’t start the genre, even if it does have the most popular game in it as of present, and it doesn’t own the genre. If Bluehole does take the threat further, they open themselves up to a world of hurt from Epic’s legal team. Let’s not forget what happened to the last developer that tried to take Epic down in a frivolous lawsuit.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

The Destiny 2 Review: Burning Down the House


Destiny 1 was a pretty earth shattering game, not in the sense that it broke new ground but in how many people it managed to snare in its repetitive yet addictive gameplay. While the title was a bust in many minds thanks to broken promises and features that seemed obviously slashed for time, Destiny carried a certain I don’t know what that kept people engaged for a long time after launch. Where other titles sell seven figures and watch their communities quickly die off, Destiny’s users were still logging in crazy hours two years after launch, hunting down all of the game’s exotic gear.

Destiny 2 feels like someone took an MMO and sheared off the leveling experience, leaving only the end-game gear grind and some bits and pieces left over. Those of you who played through Destiny will be familiar with most of the mechanics from this sequel, and as many will already know or quickly realize, the “true game” as some would call it doesn’t really start until you’re level 20 and beat the campaign.

Neither of which take a particularly long time to complete, but the story and world seem far more fleshed out an interesting than they did in the previous title, in which a great portion of the game’s lore was locked away off-game on the Bungie website. All you really need to know going into this game is that you are a Guardian, a special person who literally can’t die as you are gifted powers by the Traveler, a construct that came to Earth and then died, bequeathing humans with its powers of light. As a Guardian of the light, your job is to protect the light, all of those people who can die, and fight off the coming darkness.

Destiny 2 starts off with an invasion of the tower by the Red Legion, led by the big baddie of the campaign Dominus Ghaul. Seeking to claim the Traveler’s gift for himself, Ghaul destroys the last remaining human city, captures the Traveler, and nearly kills you (the player). The ensuing campaign is all about taking back what was once yours, and reclaiming the Tower and driving off Ghaul and his forces.

Thankfully, unlike its predecessor, Destiny 2 treats its characters as though they are real people and not simply cardboard cutouts to vendor weapons to players. I honestly couldn’t tell you if any of the characters from Destiny 2 were in Destiny 1, and for all intent and purpose they might as well be completely new people. But with Zavala, Cayde-6, and other side characters like Failsafe help build a world that is interesting to learn more about.

Once you finish the campaign, the game opens up and everything becomes available. You have four planets, each of which has its own set of public events, missions, patrols, faction currency, and more. You’ll be able to embark on missions that offer varying challenges in return for powerful, game changing exotic equipment. I managed to get my hands rather early on a Sunshot, a hand cannon that carries explosive rounds and causes everything I shoot to explode and damage those around them.

Strikes are Destiny’s answer to MMO dungeons, these are three player instances that have you completing various objectives in return for glimmer and gear. While the standard strikes are open for matchmaking, the more difficult version does require communication and thus you’ll need to form your own fireteam. Same goes for Raids, high tier dungeons with gear requirements that require you to know who is doing what and when, and thus is not available for public matchmaking. Crucible is once again the place to go for player vs player matches.

But you’ll find plenty to do in Destiny 2 on your own as well. Public events dot the landscape on each planet, and each event has a secret trigger that unlocks its heroic version, increasing the difficulty while also increasing the rewards. You might be annoyed to find yourself in a zone where nobody else is farming events, but that can be pretty quickly fixed and more often than not you’ll find yourself surrounded by players who seem to know exactly what they’re doing.

Thankfully Destiny 2 continues its series staple of having some of the tightest gunplay in the genre. Just about every weapon has a satisfying kick as you blow off a Fallen’s head, shatter a Vex’s shield, or take down some big bad guy who is just asking for a shotgun blast to the face.

Destiny 2_20170913002506

In a lot of ways, Destiny 2 feels like Destiny 1 and Destiny 1 more like Destiny .5. While the maps are wholly new, the enemies you’ll face in them are virtually identical to those from the previous game. Rather than building on to the currencies of Destiny 1, Destiny 2 streamlines or outright removes them. And while customizing your character is much more in-depth thanks to shaders being per-body part, it’s hard not to see through the cynical cash grab that was making them single use and placing them as part of the cash shop. You can get a ton of shaders through gameplay, but they come in packs of three, for your four pieces of armor.

I don’t have many gripes with Destiny 2, but considering how the original improved greatly during its first two years, it only seems logical that Destiny 2 will continue to be improved upon post-launch.

Valve Changes Score System To Block Review Bombing


Review bombing is an increasingly popular phenomena by which large scores of Steam users downvote a game for the purposes of protest, be it against the developer or against an idea that the developer supports/does not support. It is similar to metabombing, a similar tactic used to lower the Metacritic score of a piece of media, and is seen by some as an effective mob tactic.

While the actual effectiveness of review bombing has been held in serious debate, Valve has finally taken notice of it as a prevalent issue on Steam. On the official website, Valve talks about the numerous solutions that they debated implementing to stop said practice, including removing review scores, adding temporary locks on reviews, and changing the way that review scores are calculated.

Instead, reviews will now be shown on a graph, so that players can easily see if a title is suddenly hit with a lot of negative reviews.

"In the end, we decided not to change the ways that players can review games, and instead focused on how potential purchasers can explore the review data. Starting today, each game page now contains a histogram of the positive to negative ratio of reviews over the entire lifetime of the game, and by clicking on any part of the histogram you’re able to read a sample of the reviews from that time period. As a potential purchaser, it’s easy to spot temporary distortions in the reviews, to investigate why that distortion occurred, and decide for yourself whether it’s something you care about. This approach has the advantage of never preventing anyone from submitting a review, but does require slightly more effort on the part of potential purchasers."

As previously stated, the actual effect of review bombing on sales is in question, but Valve owns the store and believes that it is having a detrimental effect on the Steam storefront.

Guild Wars 2 Releases Path of Fire Launch Trailer


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.

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.