Menaphos was meant to be the first RuneScape expansion, big content packages dropped on players every three months introducing new mechanics, new areas, and new quest lines. By estimations, the second expansion should be on its way for a September release, however recent news has revealed that Jagex is scrapping the development style after one go. While there will be larger content packs released in the future, there won’t be a release structure similar to the planned 3 month release window.
In a post on the official RuneScape website, Jagex revealed that while the idea was sound, the development of expansions had taken an unexpectedly high amount of focus away from other aspects of the game, which suffered as a result.
For the foreseeable future, content plans include bringing back polling to gauge player feedback for updates. Additionally, the content teams will be working on updates that have been in the works for quite some time, such as the bank rework, mining and smithing updates, and invention batch 2. The team is also taking a look at other community issues such as reducing the “dailyscape” daily task grind.
Finally, the big RuneScape 2018 poll is available for players. Jagex polls the community every year and uses that information to plan the next year’s content. Check it out at the link below.
Subscribing to Secret World Legends is a subscription that automatically renews like a subscription. This statement may be obvious to anyone who has subscribed to a game, a newspaper, or television service, but for some reason it needs to be reiterated when talking about Secret World Legends. The community has been in a bit of a tizzy this week, which may have origins in trolling, over some misconceptions regarding the game’s subscription.
First, let’s discuss the claim that Secret World Legends signs you up for a recurring payment without explaining this. It isn’t true. The button to subscribe says “subscribe,” and when signing up with your payment details it explicitly states that you are signing up for a recurring payment. This is standard for virtually every video game with a subscription on the market and is made clear when checking out.
Second, there are statements floating around that the game sets you up for a one year subscription through Paypal when signing up. This is another falsehood. When you sign up with Paypal, you authorize Funcom to charge you the subscription fee every month as long as you’re still subscribed. The authorization lasts for a year, a limitation imposed by Paypal, but does not constitute a year-long subscription. It basically means that you won’t have to log into paypal and authorize Funcom every month. In a way, this subscription system is more restrictive as other games won’t stop after a year and will keep billing as long as the card is good.
In short, a subscriptions constitute subscribing to a service, and setting up a recurring payment means a payment that occurs more than once. It does not, incidentally, allow Funcom to take money whenever they feel like, for whatever sum they feel like.
Crash Force is a great looking game with a lot of problems, which is fine since the game is in early access and that is exactly what it is good for. I’ve been playing the game for the better part of the last two weeks, and while the foundation is strong and the premise is fun, the game definitely needs more time in the oven before it can be considered fresh baked.
The premise of Crash Force is simple: It is an arena shooter where you play as hovering ships. As a modern shooter, Crash Force introduces MOBA elements in that each ship is in a way its own class, utilizing various weapons and perks to play the game in different ways. You have lighter, faster moving ships, ships with drones, ships with mines. Some can teleport, some can stun, others can even reverse time and regain health. Throw in a metric ton of decals to customize your ship with and you’ve got an arena shooter worthy of your $10.
Crash Force is your everyday arena shooter. You pick a bot, enter into a match, and shoot at your opponents until they are destroyed with the optimal goal of killing more of them and being killed the least. Your ships are tightly controlled and responsive to button inputs, and all of this takes place on an array of diverse maps with blooming colors, open fields, and tight corridors. You can play the game online, Crash Force automatically substitutes bots when there aren’t enough players who hold their own well enough.
While the game is rather fast paced, Crash Force hits some hitches with the number of stuns that can be played out at any given time. Instead of a simple indicator, the game spells out “stunned” and “confused” with a to-the-millisecond timer for how long the effect is in place. A one second stun seems like forever in a game where ships are whipping around and darting in and out of sight, while stuns and confusions can be useful in a strategic term, in the sense of gameplay they tend to be obnoxious and too common, jolting the gameplay to a halt while you watch your ship blow up.
And here is where Crash Force’s biggest problem lies: The fast paced nature of the game does not gel well with the kind of information that the game pumps into you. You have ammo/health/energy indicators in one corner, powerup cooldowns in another, the map in a third, and rankings in the fourth, with the center displaying your hits and relative combat information. There is far too much spread out too wide for this game, and it makes combat unnecessarily confusing and frustrating. Crash Force’s interface would have worked twelve years ago when most screens were still on 800×600, but you can see in the screenshots that it is far too spaced apart with too much screen space dedicated to large kill text/icons.
I’d like to see Crash Force’s UI get overhauled, and to further that point, I found a stock photo of a minimalist UI (source) to use as comparison. Rather than throwing them to the side of the screens, you could allow the player to keep their attention at the center of the screen by making the health/energy/ammo counts meld with the crosshair, with the cooldowns only on screen when activated and somewhere near the center crosshair. In this game nobody has time to count ammunition.
As a snazzy little arena shooter, Crash Force is turning out to be a solid indie title. It just needs a few simple tweaks to the interface and stun/confuse mechanics to balance it out. I’d like to take an extra look at it once it fully launches and some of the issues are ironed out. Interested parties can check the game out on Steam for $10.
The next Humble Bundle is here, offering cheap games, most you’ll want to play. Running now and continuing through the next two weeks, the latest Humble Bundle offers items by developer/publisher Capcom. In short, the list is mostly populated by Resident Evil games, including the recent remake of Resident Evil 0 and Resident Evil. You’ll also receive Umbrella Corps, which can be immediately deleted from your profile via Steam customer support.
At most, you’ll need to pay $12 to unlock all ten games.
Riot Games is currently suing Moonton over alleged copyright infringement in regards to their game Mobile Legends. I’m going to reiterate that last statement because Moonton apparently doesn’t want me to tell you this: Moonton is currently being sued in court over alleged copyright infringement regarding Mobile Legends allegedly ripping off League of Legends. Those of you who are interested in reading up on the lawsuit, filed in California, can do so here. If you don’t feel like sifting through 44 pages of legal documents, I’ll be running an In Plain English article summarizing the charges. There are plenty of photos comparing the two games to gawk at, so I recommend taking a look.
The part of this lawsuit that caught my eye is that Moonton needs to read up on the free press and the definition of slander, because the company has posted a threat to the media reporting on this lawsuit: Stop, or potentially face intimidation through legal threats. Moonton posted the below statement on their Facebook page calling the stories “unreal,” and “rumors,” albeit refusing to go into detail on either aspect. For their part, Moonton has explicitly denied all claims of infringement, which can also be read in the statement below. The lawsuit is real, for a case that will occur in a real court in the real state of California.
The lawsuit notes that Riot Games had initially gone through Google and Apple to remove the app from both stores, alleging that Moonton simply changed its name, made minor changes, and put the game back on the store.
Most notably, after Riot discovered Mobile Legends: 5v5 MOBA and notified Google that the game was infringing, Moonton purported to remove the game from the Google Play store. But that was simply a subterfuge. Immediately after removing Mobile Legends: 5v5 MOBA, Moonton (without notifying Riot or Google) released a “new” game, Mobile Legends: Bang bang. However, Mobile Legends: Bang bang was not a new game at all, but in fact was the exact same game as Mobile Legends: 5v5 MOBA, with some modest changes. This ploy of “hide the ball” was part of Moonton’s deliberate business strategy, designed to hamper Riot’s ability to protect its intellectual property.
Winning a defamation lawsuit in the United States would be incredibly difficult. It requires that the plaintiff prove that the allegations are false (a nonstarter in this case, as the lawsuit is very real) and that the author knew that the statements were false and can prove material damage related to said statements. In cases of lawsuits, the press can’t be sued for writing about a lawsuit, provided the author isn’t making their own conclusions, and represents the allegations as just that (charges, not convictions). Moonton can’t sue the press for reporting on the allegations made by Riot Games and win, not in the states anyway.
It may not surprise you to learn that Valve bans thousands of Steam accounts every day for cheating, between two to four thousand VAC bans and just as many game bans on a daily basis. A website that tracks and estimates inventory value determined that a total of $7,387 in items were taken out of the market along with the banned accounts. This makes for the highest ban day in Steam history, by a long shot.
In case you were wondering about timing, the bans were laid down right after the end of the latest Steam summer sale. VAC bans will extend to all accounts that share the same phone number and will ban that phone number from being reused for three months. In addition, players will be unable to move items from VAC banned accounts, meaning those expensive weapon skins are now permanently stuck to a tainted account.
For this week’s Community article, I’d like to bring up as subject that has been discussed to death over the past few years yet still remains a pervasive issue in not just the gaming community, but virtually every aspect of human life especially when the internet is concerned: Mob mentality and the internet’s ever populous septic tank of human refuse that plagues every community.
If you haven’t been paying attention, Friday the 13th developer Illfonic got caught in some hot water this weekend after a player got banned for allegedly sexually harassing a group of players including a 12 year old girl. The topic has been covered by a number of Youtubers, which you can find and catch up on if you want to know the story, but instead of talking about semantics, I’m going to summarize MMO Fallout’s response to this controversy in one paragraph:
I didn’t write about it, and looking at all of the misinformation that has come out and been repeated by various Youtubers, I am doubling down that not writing about it was the right thing to do. I throw around the term game journalist like it’s a joke sometimes, but this website does strive to follow the SPJ code of ethics, and rules one and two are seek the truth and minimize harm respectively. That didn’t happen in this case.
Among the big book of rules written for MMO Fallout, discussing reports of game bans is virtually off the table except in rare circumstances where the developer is blatantly crossing an ethical line by handing out bans for poor reviews or doing something shady and banning people in the hopes to silence that information. At the end of the day, bans are subjective, and as incredible as it sounds, people who are punished tend to lie about the circumstances surrounding their ban. I say this as someone who has a long history that includes GM’ing an MMO and owning/moderating servers for games like Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty, and more. You’ll be a lot more skeptical after the tenth person you’ve banned in a month (after repeated warnings) for using racist slurs in chat shows up on the forums and says he has “no idea why he was banned for just playing the game better than everyone else.”
But more importantly, these topics tend to be eighty sixed because the internet can’t behave itself, and such coverage is only guaranteed to result in the mob mentality’s three D’s: Death threats, doxxing, and DDOS attacks. Not only has the harassment campaign by online sociopaths begun against Friday the 13th’s developers, but the servers have been hit more than once by attackers trying to either punish the developers or simply ruin the experience.
And make no bones about it, I don’t blame either the guy who got banned for airing his grief or the Youtubers for popularizing the controversy for this response, as I have written numerous times in the past, it doesn’t take much incitement for death threats to start rolling in. It’s also important that we don’t just accept this sort of action and continue to weed out and remove such bad actors.
The player in question has even apologized for what the developers have endured following his review, an act that should be commended in spite of genuinely being unnecessary. It also shows how disturbing parts of the net have become:
I know what its like to be doxxed. I know what it’s like to have your family called and have horrible things been said to them. That’s why I can no longer continue to support this. I have been approached by people on steam, asking me to??????the 12 year old I was in the game with, and to give out the people in the matches information so they could doxx them and kill them. The things people have said to me have really scared me these past couple of days and in no way shape or form did I want this to happen.
While I will never blame content creators for the actions of their community (unless said action is directly or implicitly instructed by said creator), you absolutely have an obligation to verify the facts before making statements.
Mathilde can’t keep up. For every street urchin she sends to the Bastard’s Bath or Millstone to desperately scrape together some cash, my gang will find them and beat them back into hiding. Any thugs she uses to block the streets or gangs to route out my urchin children will be murdered and left for the rats. I’ve bribed politicians, assassinated those who couldn’t be bought, pulled strings with the church for the purpose of blackmail, and if I have to I’ll hire a Truant Officer to evict those urchins.
But that’s not necessary, because I can throw in another bribe and win the match.
Antihero is a turn based strategy game of wits set in Victorian London where you take the role of a master thief and utilize the city’s underside to expand your empire and drive others out. You do this by playing dirty, hiring street urchins to infiltrate places for the purpose of extortion, bribery, and blackmail, killing your enemies, and generally being a lethal pain in the rear. Antihero was developed by Tim Conkling and at the time this is published, will be available on Steam.
Artistically speaking, Antihero showcases a pleasant style with characters whose heads are disproportionately larger than the rest of their bodies. Animations are quick and exaggerated, and overall the aesthetic of the game feels like it’s been directly pulled from a children’s book. Characters are well stylized caricatures of what you’d expect from a Victorian London game, and while the campaign mode’s bosses are effectively one-dimensional stereotypes, they go as far as needed to convey what they are and how they will generally act.
Each turn your master thief has a limited number of moves which can be used to infiltrate buildings, burgle them, assassinate opponents, and generally thieve around. As you progress through each turn, you’ll gradually accumulate more of the game’s two currencies: Gold and lanterns, which in turn can be used to buy minions and upgrades which make it easier to obtain gold and lanterns. Your thief him/herself is also reliant on upgrades to provide more actions and better damage, and over the course of the match becomes more useful and powerful.
What makes Antihero a thinking man’s game is that it really requires you to have a plan and be willing to act on it with the limited resources at your disposal. Using your gang to clear a building of urchins means not using him to strike your opponent’s gang, or take out an assassination target, but it does starve your opponent of much needed coins/lanterns to inhibit his next turn. Likewise, thugs can be placed around the map to block passages and force your opponent to waste a turn killing them, but they can’t be moved once placed and only last a few rounds. Your thief, while able to do more per turn, is still reliant on the law of opportunity cost. Should you scout the map early, revealing buildings held by enemy urchins, scout your own buildings to allow your urchins to infiltrate and start generating money, or burgle buildings to generate short term cash, or all of the above at the cost of efficient short term growth?
While it can be easy to get ahead in Antihero, staying ahead is a delicate balance of resources that can just as easily be knocked over at the drop of a hat. Your gang gets more powerful as you beat up urchins and murder, but they never become so powerful that a master thief and their own gang can’t take him down in a turn, if they’re willing to dedicate the resources to it. Urchins can be evicted, meaning you can lose that church bribe at any given moment, and assassin targets regularly walk the streets allowing for some late game changing victory points if you can get to them fast enough.
One aspect that I really like about Antihero is the return of the long forgotten casual online mode. Back in the days of crappy dial-up connections, playing a game like Antihero wasn’t viable if you had to be connected at all times, and developers understood that, for what is essentially a board game, people want a more casual style. Antihero lets you have your cake and eat it too, with an online mode with both players present, as well as a casual mode where you can make your move and shut the game off, and take your turn when you get around to it.
Ultimately, Antihero is a pretty great game that is easy to learn and difficult to master. Check out the launch trailer below for gameplay footage.
ZULA is described as an MMO FPS developed out of Istanbul by Lokum Games and available on Steam (your mileage may vary). The game has a lot of positive reviews, and if you look closely you’ll see players posting their usernames in the reviews for all to see. This is important, as the reason for posting such information is that Lokum is promising rewards in return for positive reviews.
The notice as posted on the main website (roughly translated into English by Google) promises a 3-day AWP sniper rifle as well as an entry for an even better gift in return for positively reviewing the game and marking said review as useful.
Here’s what you need to do to participate in the event. We ask you to write a nice review article on your game in the store section on Steam, and to recommend the game and mark it as useful. Also, do not neglect to write your in-game character name when writing a comment, because we have a wonderful surprise to support our players!
We present a 3 day AWP Samba to each participating actor . In addition, we will give a 30 day Cheytac Y?ld?r?m gift to our 3 players with the draw to be made at the end of 1 month . Event participation prizes will be sent every 3 days.
As an aside, if you don’t live in Turkey or have a way of falsifying your location, don’t bother clicking that Steam link, the URL will present as invalid and you’ll receive an error saying that the store page isn’t available in your region.
Offering rewards in return for positive reviews is against Steam’s Code of Conduct for sellers. It can and has resulted in games being pulled from the Steam store. Whether or not Valve will take action in this case will have to be seen.
This may come as little surprise to gamers, but Funcom today is celebrating the initial success for Secret World Legends, boasting that the game is at the highest player activity in years.
“We are very encouraged by the initial success of Secret World Legends; it has been years since we last saw a surge in player activity like this in the Secret World universe and it is a very good start leading up to Steam launch on July 31st,” says Funcom CEO Rui Casais
For players more interested in seeing what content Funcom has in store, you’re in luck. Along with the news of the population surge, Funcom released its roadmap for the months to come. This week marks the launch of elite dungeons with scaling difficulty.
Later this month will see the release of the Transylvania story missions with the special event to unlock Tokyo either in July or August and related world content. You can check out the roadmap at the link below, which goes through to next year.
MMO Fallout 