The Xbox Game Pass doesn’t begin officially until June 1st, but Gold members can get their hands on the free 14 day trial right now. Boasting a Netflix-style subscription service, Xbox Game Pass costs $10 per month and grants access to a list of over 100 Xbox One and Xbox 360 (backwards compatible) titles. The service will operate similar to Netflix or Hulu, with games being added or taken away over time. While games are available on the service, you’ll be able to buy them at a discounted price and keep them once they are no longer part of the subscription.
When Xbox Game Pass launches, you can download and play a broad range of games in full fidelity on your Xbox One or Xbox One S console, including blockbusters like Halo 5: Guardians, NBA 2K16 and Payday 2; fun for the whole family in LEGO Batman, Banjo-Kazooie and Viva Pinata; retro and classic games like Mega Man Legacy Collection, Streets of Rage and Pac-Man Championship Edition; and of course, Xbox Game Pass has a number of great first-person and third-person shooter games, including all three titles in the amazing Bioshock franchise, Gears of War 1-3, Gears Ultimate, Perfect Dark Zero, Borderlands and more.
The list of games can be found here and includes big budget titles like Halo 5, Fable III, and everyone’s favorite: Farming Simulator ’15. Gold members should head on over to the store and choose the 14-day free trial option (it is a separate option from the 1-month subscription at the store page).
If you haven’t had a chance to check out the open world MMO Wild Terra, your chance to do so has arrived. From today until May 21, you can play the game for free. Check it out on Steam, and if you like what you see you can pick up the full game for just $12.74. Wild Terra is an open world MMORPG currently in early access on Steam. For a sneak peek at gameplay, take a gander at the trailer below.
Marvel Heroes launches into head start on Friday March 20 on Playstation 4, with Gazillion aiming for an 8am Pacific launch time. The launch time estimate was confirmed on the forums today by Gazillion staff and comes alongside the announcement that Marvel Heroes will be launching on Xbox One this June. The full open beta will be available to the public on May 23, but if you want to get in early you’ll need a founder’s pack.
For more information on head start, check out the link below.
Neverwinter’s next event starts up today, in fact by the time you read this it will already be live and running. Wonders of Gond tasks players with collecting Wondrous Grommets, mechanical components that are then combined into higher tiered items. As you continue to refine the Grommets into higher tiered goods, you’ll eventually create the Doohickey, a name that I did not make up for this news piece. The doohickey can be used in battle or traded in for a Creations of Wonder Pack which in turn can be opened for rewards.
Lucky players can obtain an Apparatus of Gond mount as well as a number of other goodies from the Creations of Wonder Pack. The event run this weekend until May 22, and also happens to coincide with a double experience weekend beginning and ending at the same time.
Jagex today announced that it has entered into a partnership with Improbable. Founded in 2012 by Herman Narula (photograph above), Improbable brings forward its SpatialOS technology which claims to allow developers to create more permanent online worlds with smaller teams. As an example, SpatialOS can manage the state of the world down to the individual item, allowing players to drop items on the floor and (theoretically) have them sit there for years without the need for the server to clean itself up.
Acting CEO Phil Mansell had the following to say about SpatialOS:
“As a studio, we have online gaming at heart and we’ve always looked for technology that can help to deliver the best possible experience for our players. We’re looking forward to working with Improbable and discovering the advancements the SpatialOS platform can bring to multiplayer gaming.”
The extent of SpatialOS’s implementation will have to be seen.
We’d like to picture that Funcom is having a huge money fight in their offices, with the announcement that the company has posted the highest profit in their history. Thanks to the runaway success of Conan Exiles, Funcom this quarter boasted a profit of $6.1 million USD, with total revenue nearing $11 million.
For upcoming Funcom games, players will have to wait until June 26 to get their hands on Secret World Legends, the free to play reboot of The Secret World, and July 31 in order to get said game on Steam. In their investor report, Funcom blames this on a competitive market in May/June with expansions for Final Fantasy XIV and The Elder Scrolls Online hitting Steam, as well as the Steam launch of Black Desert Online. Meanwhile, Dreamfall Chapters was released on May 5. Both Funcom Oslo and Funcom North Carolina are working on upcoming titles, one of which is based on the Conan IP.
Even if you’re not a fan of Final Fantasy, it’s hard to deny that the series has always had a beautiful soundtrack. With Stormblood coming very soon, Square Enix has released Revolutions, the theme song of the expansion. Check it out embedded above.
Those of you who use or follow Steam in any capacity are no doubt aware of the high volume of low effort shovelware being heaped onto the service, increasingly from developers out of Russia, that have popped up on Steam for one purpose: Farming trading cards. These games use unscrupulous methods, through bot voting or through key bribery, to get their games greenlit, after which the game is immediately besieged by thousands of bots who idle the game and then sell the trading cards for money or break the cards down into gems which are then sold for money. The bots make money, the developer gets a cut of the sales, and others have more incentive to throw their shovelware onto Steam for an easy, if ill-gotten, profit.
The practice has become so popular that there are entire Steam groups dedicated to buying up these low quality games for the purpose of farming cards in large quantities.
Today’s Steam update takes those bad actors out back and buries them next to the rose bushes. In order to be eligible for trading cards, a game must obtain a certain confidence level showing that people are actually playing. In the update notice, Valve attributes changing the trading card system as being to cut down on faux data.
As we mentioned in our last post, the algorithm’s primary job is to chew on a lot of data about games and players, and ultimately decide which games it should show you. These Trading Card farming games produce a lot of faux data, because there’s a lot of apparent player activity around them. As a result, the algorithm runs the risk of thinking that one of these games is actually a popular game that real players should see.
Thankfully this system is retroactive, meaning you’ll receive any cards you should have once they are made available.
Instead of starting to drop Trading Cards the moment they arrive on Steam, we’re going to move to a system where games don’t start to drop cards until the game has reached a confidence metric that makes it clear it’s actually being bought and played by genuine users. Once a game reaches that metric, cards will drop to all users, including all the users who’ve played the game prior to that point. So going forward, even if you play a game before it has Trading Cards, you’ll receive cards for your playtime when the developer adds cards and reaches the confidence metric.
Valve has confidence that this system will function better than Steam Greenlight, whose failure to curate allowed the games onto the marketplace to begin with, due to the extra variables and larger base compared to the relative few who use Greenlight. Most recently, Valve made major changes to gifting Steam games in order to combat bad hombres.
(Editor’s Note: You may notice that this article makes no use of screenshots from the game Voxelized and only utilizes third party Youtube videos. This is rare, but we do it to mitigate any potential frivolous take down requests being sent to our host over use of copyrighted material. Enjoy.)
Steam Developer Lord Kres is a con artist who by all means should already be barred from ever selling a video game on Steam again. When it comes to writing an Early Access or Crowfunding Fraudster column, I do so with a level of grace and caution. As I regularly reinforce, many of the subjects are people who are merely in over their heads, independent developers with a vision and neither the experience nor the finances to see it through to completion, enthusiastic gamers who think that they can crowdfund money to bribe a developer into creating a sequel, or seasoned veterans who start campaigns knowing that the funds are not enough to see the project through to completion.
In the case of Lord Kres, we are dealing with a shady name that has already been punished once by Valve for blatantly defrauding customers. Let’s talk about that.
The subject of our backstory is Journey of the Light, a title released in 2015 under the promise that the game would be incredibly difficult. The Dark Souls of puzzle games, if you will, but cranked up to a thousand because the puzzles turned out to be so difficult that nobody was able to finish the first level. Not a single person, aside from the developer himself. Now that’s hardcore gaming! Suspecting that something was up, a few intrepid sleuths took a look at the game’s code and came up with a fantastic reason why not a single person had been able to pass the first trial: The game was designed to be unbeatable.
Oh and the last six levels of this seven level game didn’t actually exist. At all. It was a real life Xantar from Wayne’s World.
In his defense, Lord Kres claimed that the levels did exist and were accidentally removed from the game due to a bug added in a then-recent patch, an excuse that sits just above blaming the two armed man in terms of believability, or Kres’ subsequent claims of being sick to avoid answering questions. In case you’re wondering whether Kres then turned around and immediately patched those levels back into the game, like he would if he had been telling the truth, he didn’t. Instead, Valve opened Journey of the Lightup for refunds regardless of time played and removed the game from the Steam store. Incidentally, the soundtrack is still shown on the store, but you can’t buy it.
One thing that can be said about Lord Kres is that the guy is crafty. According to numerous forum posts, users were told that hints to completing the first level were hidden within the game’s trading cards. Those cards are useless in completing the puzzles, and (according to user reports) conveniently don’t drop until after two hours of gameplay, the general limit for Steam’s refund policy. Clever girl.
What is still on sale on Steam from Lord Kres is Voxelized, a prototype with virtually zero content. Voxelized started out as a low quality Minecraft clone, as seen in the video below:
It later evolved into a not-as-low but still low quality Minecraft clone with a lot of bloom and using Unreal assets.
And most recently, the game has transformed into an Unreal engine asset flip with no gameplay.
Eagle eyed viewers might be under the impression that Lord Kres has no vision for this prototype game that he is selling on Steam in Early Access, and if you hold this opinion then you’re probably right. As laid out in the mission plan, Kres wants a fully fleshed out world with some animals maybe? I don’t know, some guns, whatever. Let him know what you want and he’ll probably put it in.
Maybe you would want to see some animals?
Maybe some Guns, Swords or Armors?
Let me know what you want.
I am also planning a Full Control Support
And Full HDM Support (Head Mounted Display)
Workshop is a planned feature
It’s important to note that Voxelized has been on the Steam store for two years, since March 19, 2015 to be precise, before being changed to the content-void Minecraft prototype into the content-void Unreal asset flip. Naturally this has left some of the buyers pretty annoyed, to which an alleged moderator showed up on one critic’s Steam page to tell him to kill himself. Unsurprisingly there have been numerous reports of people being banned off of the Steam forums for writing negative reviews or critiquing the title.
So here’s where we stand: Lord Kres is an established fraudster who had previously attempted to pull a con job by selling a game as finished while secretly making it unbeatable and then making up excuses as to why the levels weren’t in the game. Despite this, Valve is still allowing him to sell a prototype that has radically shifted in a different direction, two years after entering Early Access, and despite having no content describing itself as “fully playable.”
The game in it´s current state is fully playable and the features still in development do not affect to the gameplay. Main reason for adding Voxelized on Steam in Early Access:
Just as a side note, you have to appreciate that the game is still called Voxelized when there doesn’t seem to be anything voxel-related in the game.
With luck, either Valve will put this game to bed where it belongs (sleeping in a coffin six feet under) or the constant negative reviews will contribute to Steam’s algorithms burying this title into the nether regions where nobody will find it. Or hey, maybe MMO Fallout should open up a publishing wing, buy the assets, and make a game that isn’t completely muck. It’s always worth considering.
Alan Wake is being put to bed permanently, so if you want to get your hands on the 2012 title, now may be your last chance. Originally released in 2012, Alan Wake’s developer/publisher Remedy Entertainment has hit a snag; their license on some of the music in the game is expiring. As a result, the game is being removed from sale on May 15. To send the game off in style, Remedy Entertainment has announced a 90% sale that will begin March 13 and run for 48 hours.
You’ll be able to pick up Alan Wake as well as its DLC and American Nightmare for 90% off, but if you’re going to grab yourself a copy then do so fast. The title becomes unavailable on the 15th.
MMO Fallout 